See Much Better By Thinking Differently

Believe it or not your mindset has a big impact on how well your eyes work. The assumption that you should be able to see something or that you have excellent eye sight translates into improved visual performance scores. This fact was dramatically illustrated in a new research study, Vision Gets Better with the Right Mindset, reported in Science News.

“Eyesight markedly improved when people were experimentally induced to believe that they could see especially well, Langer and her colleagues report in the April Psychological Science. Such expectations actually enhanced visual clarity, rather than simply making volunteers more alert or motivated to focus on objects, they assert.”

I have seen similar studies concerning memory. If you really believe you have a great memory (or a very poor one) you do better (worse) on recall and recognition tests.

So how do you get the right mindset to achieve high-performance vision? One way may be to do some visual training and score well.  You may want to check out, How Good are Your Visual Skills? There are a number of straight forward exercises and tests covering perception, tracking, focusing and eye teaming.  For example, one of the perception test (figure ground) is shown in the picture above. Do you see the owl?

I am interested to hear from readers that have used specific techniques to develop affirming assumptions about their ability to see.

Source: Image of Pig