Elizabeth Ottesen

For me, it goes back to an incident in elementary school where a teacher was trying to teach us to use mental imagery as a memory trick to help memorize things. She told us to ‘picture a flower riding a bicycle’ and hook that mental image to whatever it was we were supposed to remember. It made so little sense to me, how was adding this whole other string of random concepts to the list of things to remember supposed to help at all? And that moment really stuck with me, as I began to suspect that ‘picture it in your mind’ meant something to most people that it didn’t to me. It’s nice to have better language for it these days, after years of trying to explain to people that I thought in ‘words, not pictures’.