The Remarkably Difficult Psychology of Creative Visualisation

One hundred years ago this week the war poet David Jones was wounded on the Somme. Unlike other war poets it took over 20 years for the horrors he had witnessed to work their way out into his writing. This workshop examines the cognitive processes involved (a) when poets re-render past visual experience as words, and (b) when readers of those words reconstruct the original emotions for themselves. The workshop tasks will thoroughly explore the mind's "semantic interlingua", that is to say, the as-yet-unbroken deep-mind code into which all incoming, and out of which all outgoing, communications have to be translated. The tasks therefore promise practical benefits to participants wishing to ground their visualisation practicum more effectively in the sciences of mind. Factsheets and suggestions for follow-up reading will be provided.