Hi, this is Ray.

When I was a kid, I had a recurring problem. I'd be sitting in math class, the teacher would be explaining how to factor polynomials, and somewhere around the third "x squared" my brain would just… leave. Without my permission. It would float quietly out the window, hop on a dragon, fly to a Mordor-adjacent landscape, and start workshopping a story about a mathematician who saves a kingdom by solving a curse-based equation. Meanwhile my body was still in the classroom, blinking, holding a pencil, looking attentive but in fact registering precisely zero polynomial-related information.

For years I thought this was a flaw. "Stop daydreaming, Ray. Focus." Adults said it. Report cards said it. My own internal monologue said it, in increasingly disappointed tones.

Plot twist: that wandering, world-building, dragon-summoning brain was actually doing something incredibly important. It was running my imagination engine. And it turns out that engine (the one that lets you visualize, simulate, mentally rehearse, and experience things that aren't physically in front of you) is one of the most powerful learning tools your brain has. We've been told to suppress it in classrooms. We've been told it's the opposite of "real" thinking. We have, collectively, gotten this very wrong.

Today I want to make the case that imagination isn't just for novelists and 8-year-olds with too much screen time. It's a measurable cognitive skill, it's deeply tied to how memory actually works, and (best part) you can train it. So let's get into it.

Here's the foundational thing most people don't realize. When you "picture" something in your head (say, the face of a friend, or the layout of your bedroom, or what your dog looks like when she's about to do something stupid) you're not just metaphorically seeing it. Your brain is actually firing many of the same neurons it would fire if you were looking at the real thing.

This is called mental imagery, and as a comprehensive review put it, mental imagery is a powerful cognitive ability that allows one to mentally simulate sensory experiences without external stimuli, involving generating, manipulating, and experiencing sensory perceptions in the absence of direct sensory input… including sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell. It's not just visual either. You can mentally hear your favorite song. Mentally taste a lemon and feel your face pucker. Mentally rehearse swinging a tennis racket. Each of these activates the corresponding sensory or motor brain regions, even though nothing real is happening.

Your imagination, in other words, is a fully immersive simulator that runs on neurons. It is the closest thing your brain has to its own holodeck. And here's where it gets relevant for learners: that simulator turns out to be deeply, mechanically useful for memory.

Yeah. That Arnold Schwarzenegger.

So do Codie Sanchez, Scott Galloway, Colin & Samir, Shaan Puri, and Jay Shetty. And none of them are doing it for fun. They're doing it because a list you own compounds in ways that social media never will.

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There's a theory in cognitive psychology called dual coding, developed by Allan Paivio in the 1970s, that goes like this: when you encode information using BOTH verbal and visual representations, you create two memory traces instead of one. So when you go to recall it later, you have two roads back to the information instead of one. More roads = more reliable retrieval. Simple, elegant, hard to argue with.

The research bears this out. A study comparing memory strategies concluded that visual imagery enhances memory similarly to viewing actual images by producing both visual and verbal cues, and pictorial mental representations formed by visual imagery are as strongly encoded and effective as physical pictorial cues. Translation: imagining a vivid picture of something is roughly as effective for memory as actually seeing the picture. Your brain doesn't care that you made it up. The memory trace is real either way.

This connects to something you may have heard called the picture superiority effect, where pictures are remembered better than words. People process visual information remarkably fast (various estimates of perceptual processing show images can be identified in just tens of milliseconds), and visual encoding tends to be especially durable. According to one summary of the visualization research, the human brain is excellent at handling images, with studies showing that up to 90% of information sent to our brains is visual, and combining words with images through dual coding improves the chances that information will be stored in long-term memory. When you're studying something abstract (a concept, a definition, a process) and you take the extra second to construct a vivid mental image of it, you're doubling the encoding pathways. That's free retention. That's a cheat code.

It gets even better when you go beyond just visual. A 2021 study compared four memory strategies (plain rehearsal, visual imagery, third-person motor imagery, and first-person motor imagery) and found a clear gradient. According to the researchers, results revealed a memory efficiency gradient running from low-embodiment strategies (involving poor perceptual and/or motor simulation) to high-embodiment strategies, suggesting that word memorization is improved when the individual actively simulates not just visual but also sensory and motor aspects from a first-person perspective. The more sensory channels you light up in your imagination… seeing it, feeling it, doing it from your own perspective… the better you remember. Imagination isn't just a movie playing in your head. The more you make it a full-body, multi-sensory experience, the stickier it gets.

Before we go further, an important note. Some people genuinely cannot picture things in their head. The condition is called aphantasia, and if you've ever read articles about it and gone "wait, other people can ACTUALLY see things in their mind?", welcome, you might be one of us. (I have low-vividness imagery myself. I've made peace with it.)

Here's the encouraging finding: even if your imagery is faint or absent, the cognitive benefits of using imagery-based learning strategies still seem to apply. A study on interactive imagery and memory found that aphantasic participants who self-identified little to no mental imagery benefited from interactive-imagery instructions as much as controls, suggesting that the subjective experience of vivid imagery is not required for the memory benefits to occur. Translation: even if you can't "see" the imagined image clearly, the act of TRYING to construct one (the cognitive process of building associations, relationships, and structure) still pays off in memory. So nobody gets out of this exercise. Sorry. We're all training imagination today, vivid or not.

Okay, here's the practical part. Imagination is a skill. Like any skill, it gets better with deliberate practice. Here are the techniques I've found most useful, ranked roughly by how immediately you can deploy them.

When you encounter a fact you want to remember, don't just read it. Construct the most absurd, exaggerated, multi-sensory mental image you can imagine to go with it. The capital of Australia is Canberra? Picture a giant kangaroo wearing a powdered wig sitting on a throne in Canberra, eating a meat pie. Will this stay in your head? Forever. Sorry. You can't unsee it now.

This works because weird, vivid, emotionally-charged imagery encodes much more strongly than bland imagery. Your brain has a built-in "huh, that's weird" detection system that flags unusual patterns for extra attention. Hijack it. Use it. Be ridiculous on purpose.

This is an ancient technique… Cicero wrote about it. Take a place you know extremely well (your childhood bedroom, your apartment, your daily commute) and "place" the things you want to remember in specific spots along a route through it. Want to remember a grocery list? Imagine the eggs balanced on your front doorknob, the milk pouring out of your bathroom sink, the bread sitting in your bed. When you mentally walk through your house, the items reappear in order. It feels like sorcery. It is, in fact, just a really good use of your spatial memory and imagination working together. Sherlock Holmes uses this. So do most of the world memory champions. Welcome to the club.

For procedures, processes, or anything involving movement or sequence, don't just read it. MENTALLY DO IT. From a first-person perspective. Learning a chemistry reaction? Imagine yourself shrunk down to molecule-size, watching the atoms collide and re-bond. Learning a dance step or a martial arts form? Mentally rehearse the movement, in your body, from inside your own perspective. As that motor imagery study showed, first-person embodied simulation outperforms passive visualization. You're not watching a movie of yourself doing the thing. You're DOING the thing, in your imagination, from inside your own skin.

This pairs beautifully with the Feynman technique I mentioned before. When you're trying to understand a concept, force yourself to come up with a concrete analogy. Electrons orbiting a nucleus aren't really like planets orbiting a sun, but the imagery helps. The immune system isn't really like a medieval army defending a castle, but visualizing it that way unlocks understanding. Build the analogy in your head. Inhabit it. Then poke at it to find where it breaks… because the breaks are exactly where you need to refine your understanding. This is how scientists actually think, by the way. They imagine first, formalize second.

This one will sound counterintuitive, but: schedule unstructured imagination time. Sit somewhere quiet and let yourself construct stories, scenarios, what-ifs. Imagine yourself successfully doing the thing you're learning. Imagine yourself explaining it to someone. Imagine the concept as a character. Visualize the test you'll take, the conversation you'll have, the project you'll finish. This isn't woo. There's a substantial body of research showing that mental imagery rehearsal improves performance in athletes, musicians, surgeons, and public speakers. Your brain doesn't fully distinguish between "I did this" and "I vividly imagined doing this." Both lay down related neural patterns. Use that to your advantage.

Here's the meta-point I want to leave you with. We live in a culture that's deeply suspicious of imagination. We treat it as childish, as the opposite of rigor, as something you outgrow. Daydreaming gets shamed. "Living in your head" is an insult. "Realistic" is a compliment.

But the research is clear: imagination is not the opposite of learning. It's one of the engines of it. The same neural machinery that lets a kid build a Lego spaceship in their head is the machinery that lets a chemistry student visualize molecular geometry, a programmer trace through code execution, or a language learner mentally rehearse a conversation in Spanish before having it. Imagination isn't decoration. It's infrastructure.

So if you've spent years suppressing your daydreaming brain because some teacher told you it was a problem, I'd gently suggest: stop suppressing. Start training. Get weird with your mental images. Build memory palaces. Walk through chemistry reactions from the inside. Let your brain do what it's been trying to do this whole time.

The mathematician who saves the kingdom by solving the curse equation? My 9-year-old self was actually onto something. He just didn't have the vocabulary yet to know that imagination is not a distraction from learning. Imagination IS learning, with the lights turned on inside your head.

Keep learning,

Ray