Mental Imagery: How It Supports Your Use of Memory Techniques

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Mental imagery describes something your mind does all the time:

It recreates experiences without the original people, objects or sensations being present. For example, you might:

• “See” a familiar room.
• Hear part of a song in your mind.
• Remember how something feels, mentally rehearse a speech or imagine where an object belongs in space.
• But there’s an important catch.

Not everybody experiences mental imagery in the same way.

Some people report extremely vivid mental pictures. Others have aphantasia and report little or no voluntary visual imagery at all.

Yet people across this spectrum can still learn and remember.

That’s important because you do not need a movie theatre in your mind to improve your memory.

What matters is learning how to create useful associations and connect them with information you want to remember.

On this page, you’ll discover what scientists mean by mental imagery, how it relates to memory and how to put it to work using memory techniques.

Ready?

Let’s dive in!

What Is Mental Imagery?

Mental imagery is usually described as a perception-like experience that occurs without the corresponding external stimulus.

As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains, visualizing an apple is one obvious example.

But mental imagery is much broader than seeing pictures in your mind.

It can involve:

• Visual experiences
• Sounds
• Touch and bodily movement
• Smells
• Tastes
• Spatial relationships

That’s why I think the word “imagery” can sometimes cause unnecessary confusion.

People hear it and immediately assume we’re talking about pictures.

We’re not.

For example, I often pre-visualize myself giving a speech.

When I was touring with my band, The Outside, I also rehearsed concerts in my mind before going on stage.

Those experiences weren’t necessarily made up of crystal-clear pictures. They included:

• Timing
• Sound
• Spatial sensations
• The feeling of moving through a sequence

These are all useful ways to think about mental imagery, especially when you’re using it to remember information.

A Practical Definition of Mental Imagery For Memory Training

For our purposes in the world of memory training, here’s a definition I’ve found useful after years of working with students:

Mental imagery is an experience in the mind that resembles how you could potentially interact with real people, places, objects, sounds, sensations and ideas.

I deliberately make that definition broader than visualization.

That’s because memory training can work with far more than mental pictures.

In the Magnetic Memory Method community, I use the term KAVE COGS as a practical way to remind students of these different possibilities:

• Kinesthetic
• Auditory
• Visual
• Emotional
• Conceptual
• Olfactory
• Gustatory
• Spatial

KAVE COGS isn’t meant as a scientific taxonomy of mental imagery.

It’s a memory-training framework.

Its purpose is to stop you from getting trapped in the idea that your mnemonic associations have to look like perfect pictures.

They don’t.

Why Mental Imagery Is Harder To Define Than It Looks

Scientists and philosophers have debated mental imagery for a long time.

Part of the problem is that subjective experience is difficult to describe.

If I tell you to imagine an apple, I can’t directly inspect what happens in your mind.

Maybe you experience something vividly visual, get a faint impression or merely think about the concept of an apple without experiencing anything you would call a picture.

For memory improvement, however, we don’t have to solve every philosophical problem before getting useful results.

We can focus on what you can actually do.

• Can you bring familiar information to mind?
• Can you associate one thing with another?
• Can you mentally navigate familiar locations?
• Can you recall sounds, movements, concepts or spatial relationships?

If so, you’ve already got plenty to work with.

Aphantasia, Hyperphantasia And The Mental Imagery Spectrum

One reason mental imagery has attracted so much attention is that people report dramatically different levels of imagery vividness.

At one extreme is greatly reduced or absent voluntary visual imagery.

At the other is hyperphantasia.

Adam Zeman’s review of aphantasia and hyperphantasia describes hyperphantasia as imagery vivid enough to rival perceptual experience.

In between are many different experiences.

This is one reason I’m cautious about telling anyone what they “should” experience when using memory techniques.

Do You Need Hyperphantasia To Have A Good Memory?

No.

Extremely vivid visualization is not a prerequisite for using mnemonics.

And having vivid imagery doesn’t automatically give someone a trained memory.

Memory techniques involve deliberately creating associations and then retrieving them.

That process can involve pictures, but it can also involve:

• Words and sounds
• Movement
• Spatial relationships
• Conceptual associations
• Emotion
• Familiar people and places

This is why I encourage people to focus less on whether their mental imagery is “good enough” and more on whether the association successfully brings the target information back.

That’s the real test.

What If You Don’t See Pictures In Your Mind?

People who don’t report a visual “mind’s eye” can still think spatially, recognize familiar locations, work with concepts and build associations.

The details vary from person to person.

The important point is:

Don’t judge your ability to use mnemonics according to how vividly you see things.

Judge it according to what you can remember.

How Mental Imagery Helps Memory

Mental imagery becomes particularly useful for learning when you deliberately connect new information with something you already know.

This is one of the foundations of mnemonic devices.

Suppose you need to remember an unfamiliar name.

Instead of repeating it over and over, you can transform part of the sound into a familiar association.

Then you connect that association with something else you already know.

You’ve created a retrieval path.

That’s very different from relying entirely on rote learning.

Mnemonic Images Are More Than Pictures

This is why I use the phrase mnemonic images broadly.

A useful mnemonic image might involve something you see in your mind.

But it could also involve:

• Sound
• Movement
• Thoughts about people
• Conceptual associations
• Combinations of the above

The important part is that the association gives you a useful cue.

As you practice, you can become faster at generating these associations instead of searching around for the “perfect” image.

The Memory Palace Gives Mental Imagery A Place To Go

Mental imagery becomes much more powerful for practical memory training when it is organized.

That’s where the Memory Palace technique comes in.

Instead of creating isolated associations and hoping you remember them later, you connect them with familiar locations.

These locations are traditionally called loci.

For example, you might mentally move through:

• Your front entrance
• A hallway
• Your kitchen
• Your living room
• Your bedroom

At each location, you place an association representing information you want to recall.

Notice what makes this technique interesting:

Even if you don’t experience your home as a vivid mental photograph, you probably know where the rooms are.

You know approximately where your door is relative to your kitchen.

You know how you move from one location to another.

That spatial knowledge itself can provide a powerful structure for remembering.

It’s one of the reasons I don’t like reducing mnemonic imagery to visualization alone.

Mental Imagery And Long-Term Memory

There’s also experimental evidence that mental-imagery-based mnemonic training can improve certain kinds of memory performance.

For example, a study of mental-imagery-based mnemonic training in children found improvements on long-term-memory-related tasks, with effects remaining at later follow-ups.

Importantly, the researchers did not find significant improvements in working memory, arithmetic or spatial ability, or fluid-intelligence-related tasks.

That’s an important distinction.

Mnemonics are powerful because they help you encode and retrieve information.

That doesn’t mean practicing them automatically improves every cognitive ability.

And frankly, they don’t need to.

Being able to remember names, vocabulary, facts, presentations, textbook material and other information is valuable enough.

Mental Imagery, Association And Imagination

Imagination shows us how readily the mind can combine familiar elements in unfamiliar ways.

That’s particularly useful for mnemonics.

You don’t need to invent something from absolutely nothing.

In fact, I find it much more useful to work with associations that are already familiar. For example:

• People.
• Characters.
• Objects.
• Sounds.
• Places.
• Words.
• Symbols.
• Things that happened to you.

These give you material you can recombine when you need to memorize something new.

As Lynne Kelly has discussed in relation to traditional knowledge systems and memory, association and location can work together in remarkably powerful ways. I discuss her work further in my examination of The Knowledge Gene.

The more reference points you have available, the easier it becomes to generate useful associations.

That’s one reason reading, learning languages, studying music and exposing yourself to a wide variety of ideas can indirectly enrich your mnemonic practice.

Mental Imagery And Dual Coding

One influential approach to learning and memory is Allan Paivio’s dual-coding theory.

Broadly speaking, the theory proposes that verbal and non-verbal representations can provide different routes for processing and remembering information.

For practical learning, the useful takeaway is straightforward:

If you can represent information in more than one useful way, you may create more opportunities to retrieve it later.

For example, suppose you’re remembering a foreign-language word.

You might work with:

• How the word sounds
• Its written form
• An association that reminds you of its meaning
• A familiar location

You don’t have to settle every theoretical debate about mental representation to benefit from this principle.

Give yourself useful retrieval cues.

Then practice using those cues to retrieve the information.

How Does Mental Imagery Compare With Perception?

Perception begins with information coming from your environment.

Conversely, mental imagery does not require the corresponding object or sensation to be present.

For example, you can look at an orange.

That’s perception.

Later, you might remember its shape, think about its taste, hear the word “orange” internally or remember where it was sitting.

Those future experiences involve memory and mental representation and not the orange currently stimulating your senses.

In the context of memory training, here’s the point:

Whereas perception gives you raw material, memory allows you to bring aspects of that experience back.

And imagination lets you recombine what you know.

Mnemonics turn those processes into deliberate tools for remembering.

That’s why something as ordinary as knowing your own home and a bunch of pop culture figures can become the basis of a sophisticated memory system.

Does Mental Imagery Have To Be Realistic?

Not at all.

In fact, mnemonic associations are often more useful when they are unusual.

You can exaggerate size.

Change a sound.

Make an object move in an impossible way.

Combine two unrelated ideas.

Put a famous person in your kitchen.

The goal is not to create accurate internal cinema.

The goal is to create an association that helps you retrieve information.

That’s a very different standard.

How To Practice Mental Imagery For Memory

If your goal is memory improvement, I wouldn’t spend hours trying to force yourself to see increasingly vivid pictures.

I’d practice using the mental abilities you already have.

Here’s a simple way to start.

1. Choose Something Familiar

Bring a familiar object to mind.

It could be your coffee mug, your phone or the front door of your home.

Don’t worry about whether you can “see” it.

Ask yourself what you know about it.

• What’s its shape?
• Where is it usually located?
• How does it feel?
• Does it make a sound?
• What associations come to mind?

2. Change Something

Now mentally exaggerate one characteristic. For example:

• Make the mug enormous.
• Imagine your phone shouting your name.
• Make your front door tiny.

Again, don’t worry about producing a perfect internal picture. You’re simply practicing the art of association.

3. Connect Target Information With Something You Want To Remember

Take a word, name, fact or idea you need to remember.

Create a connection between the familiar object and the new information.

The goal is to make the association useful enough to cue recall later.

4. Give The Association A Location

Once you’ve created an association, give it a location.

Using familiar places provides order, which becomes increasingly important when you’re memorizing more than one or two pieces of information.

5. Retrieve Instead Of Just Reimagining

Finally, test yourself.

Can the location and association bring the information back?

That’s what matters.

If the answer is no, adjust the association and test it again.

This process is much more useful than endlessly judging how vivid your imagination feels.

If you’d like structured practice across several sensory modes, try these sensory memory exercises.

Mental Imagery FAQs

Still got questions?

Here are some direct answers.

What is mental imagery?

Mental imagery generally refers to perception-like mental experiences that occur without the corresponding external stimulus being present.

It can involve visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, gustatory and other forms of experience.

For memory training, I also find it useful to deliberately work with emotional, conceptual and spatial associations.

Is mental imagery the same as visualization?

Not necessarily.

Visualization usually emphasizes seeing something in the mind.

Mental imagery is broader and can include sounds, movement, touch and other perception-like experiences.

That’s one reason visual vividness isn’t a useful measure of your overall ability to use memory techniques.

What is hyperphantasia?

Hyperphantasia refers to unusually vivid mental imagery.

Researchers generally use the term for imagery vivid enough to approach the experience of actual perception.

It’s often described as the opposite extreme from aphantasia.

But neither hyperphantasia nor vivid visualization is required for successful mnemonic training.

Can mental imagery be improved?

You can certainly practice generating, manipulating and using associations.

You can also become more skilled at using spatial, auditory, conceptual and other cues during memory training.

What we should not assume is that practice will necessarily turn everyone’s subjective imagery into increasingly photorealistic visualization.

Fortunately, you don’t need that outcome to improve your use of mnemonics.

Can you use a Memory Palace without seeing pictures in your mind?

Yes.

The technique depends heavily on your knowledge of familiar locations and their relationships.

Many people can know where a kitchen, hallway or staircase is without experiencing a vivid internal picture of it.

That’s why I encourage students to work with whatever combination of spatial, conceptual, auditory, kinesthetic and visual experience comes naturally.

Can mental imagery help you study?

It can when you use it deliberately as part of an encoding and retrieval strategy.

For example, you can use mnemonic associations and familiar locations to help remember textbook information.

I’ve put together a complete guide on how to memorize textbook material if that’s one of your goals.

Will Using AI Weaken Your Mental Imagery?

Artificial intelligence can certainly make it easier to offload certain cognitive tasks.

But whether that becomes a problem depends partly on how you use the technology. In case you’re interested, I discussed this issue with Andrew Mayne on the Magnetic Memory Method Podcast.

My preference is to use tools while continuing to practice the underlying skills.

If AI helps you save time, use some of that time to read, learn languages, study music, solve problems and practice remembering information yourself.

The broader issue is deskilling: when a tool takes over a task completely, we may practice the underlying skill less often.

The answer isn’t necessarily to reject the tool.

It’s to keep using your memory.

How To Put Mental Imagery To Work With Memory Techniques

If you want to stop thinking about mental imagery as an abstract psychological concept and actually use it, structured mnemonic systems give you something concrete to practice.

Once you understand how familiar locations and associations work together, you can explore:

• The Journey Method
• The Major System
• The PAO System
• Number Rhymes
• The Pegword Method

Keep in mind that you don’t have to learn them all at once.

Start by learning how to organize familiar locations and create associations that actually bring information back. Then build from there.

If you’d like me to walk you through the initial steps in the process, grab my free memory improvement course here:

You’ll get four clear and direct video lessons along with worksheets that help you put these ideas into practice.

Rather than asking you to sit around trying to visualize more vividly, I’ll show you how to use familiar locations and meaningful associations to remember information.

You’ll also see how principles such as chunking can help you break difficult information into units that are easier to encode and retrieve.

That’s where mental imagery becomes more than an interesting feature of the mind.

It becomes a practical memory tool.

Final Thoughts: Mental Imagery Is A Tool, Not A Test

Mental imagery is about much more than seeing pictures in your mind.

It can involve sound, movement, space, sensation and other forms of mental experience.

And people vary tremendously in how vividly they experience these things.

That’s why I don’t think you should waste time wondering whether your imagination measures up to someone else’s.

Instead, ask a more useful question:

Can I use what happens in my mind to create an association that helps me remember?

That’s what matters for memory improvement.

The Magnetic Memory Method combines familiar locations with associations so you can encode information and retrieve it deliberately.

For some people, those associations might be highly visual.

For others, they might be more verbal, spatial, conceptual or auditory.

I’ve seen enough variation over the years to know that chasing perfect visualization is a distraction.

Learn the techniques.

Use the mental abilities you already have.

Test your recall.

From there, improve your associations based on your analysis of the results.

This is how mental imagery becomes useful instead of merely interesting.