New exercise to try

[bluremi]

I discovered this by accident one day while listening to an album of music. First a bit of background:

If you're familiar with Winamp, it's music software that contains a very nice visualizer called Milkdrop. Itunes has something similar. Anyway, I used milkdrop for this because it uses "presets," which are individual visualizations. As you play music, milkdrop loads a preset randomly, plays it for around 30 seconds, and then loads another random preset and blends the two together. You can switch to the next preset by hitting H on your keyboard and you can lock the current preset so it doesn't change by hitting "scroll lock" button on your keyboard.

The exercise:

1)Play an album you know very well and enjoy, preferably high-fidelity and with vocals, and turn on the milkdrop visualiser so it is in Full-Screen mode. I used headphones, but speakers will do if you don't have any.
2)Hit H until you hit a visualization that is fairly uniform but still colorful and pretty. When you find one you like hit Scroll Lock to prevent it from changing over time. Avoid presets that have individual elements moving around the screen as they will make this exercise too difficult.
3) Sit in front of your monitor so the visualization is taking up most of your visual field. Relax your eyes so they naturally fall on a point in the center of the monitor.
4) Now, keeping your eyes open, imagine the band, on stage, playing the music you are hearing. See the instruments, the singers, try to get a stable image going.


You will find your attention is constantly being pulled back to the monitor. You will be able to see the band playing in your mind's eye for just a split second at a time before your attention is torn away by the pretty visuals in front of you. As you practice you will be able to hold the image of the band for long and longer. If you can do it for 3 seconds you are extremely advanced and I recommend you stop immediately and go phasing.

The point of this exercise is to develop the skill of being able to switch your attention from your physical eyes to your mental ones. After a while you should become familiar with the action of switching your attention: it will feel like flexing a muscle you use all the time. I guarantee you will feel some weird sensations after a while, but don't expect to phase, and don't do this for more than half an hour as your eyes will dry out from not blinking.


If anyone decides to try this please let me know about any sensations, successes, or failures you experience.

[Xanth]

That's called Phasing. 

Eventually, you should actually BE THERE standing in front of your chosen band in your imagination... which is a Focus 2 oC environment. 
Great idea!

[blis]

Nice exercise. It rare I listen to music without doing anything else but whenever I do I'll give it a go.

The only similar kind of exercise I do is when I'm walking sometimes. I visualise a different street to the one I'm walking on. You need to switch back and forth so you dont trip over things.