By Blogger Shreya Wadhwa

Who are you? Or who do you think you are? Do you think you are attractive? Funny? Weird? If so, are you a good kind of weird or a bad kind? Most importantly, what does the word weird even mean?

Supposedly, the word holds the meaning that you assign it. As Johnny Depp once said, “I don’t pretend to be captain weird. I just do what I do.”

In the end, you are who you tell yourself you are.

Perception and mental imagery accounts for how and where you see yourself. In psychological terminology, this is known as a quasi-perceptual experience. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Psychology defines this term “to resemble perceptual experience but occurs in the absence of the appropriate external stimuli.” This means that we have the ability to see what we can do before we do it. Coming from different backgrounds, it makes sense that we all have different experiences. If we tilt our heads, we can see ourselves a little differently.

Try this:

Hold out an object in front of you and tilt it. It looks crooked, right? Now, tilt your head at the same angle and in the same direction as the object. The object should look straight, and everything else should be crooked. This is the same way our mind works. To us, everything is how we perceive it. So, if we tilt our heads to see ourselves a little differently, we can be a little different in turn.

“Imagery has often been believed to play a very large, even pivotal, role in both memory (Yates, 1966; Paivio, 1986) and motivation (McMahon, 1973),” according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Psychology. Take a moment to consider how you usually see yourself and its impact on how you act around others. Are you shy? Outgoing? Goofy? Classy?

Just now, the choice you made to evaluate or not evaluate yourself was also based on perception. How you read the information and saw yourself relative to the information determined your actions. Strange, right? It’s something done unknowingly. “According to a long dominant philosophical tradition, it [perception] plays a crucial role in all thought processes and provides the semantic grounding for language,” states The Stanford Encyclopedia of Psychology. You decide how you see what you want to see. With this knowledge, it only makes sense to apply such visualizations consciously. It can be immensely helpful to get an idea of what you want to do before doing it.

You are probably wondering how to implement this concept. To be honest, it is really not too difficult. A Vanderbilt study titled “The Effects of Mental Imagery on Athletic Performance” by Annie Plessinger suggests that the best implementation of conscious mental imagery can be done in two ways. The first is immediately before the performance of an action. If you play a sport, for example, while you are in the game, envision your next move. The second is visualization in a quiet place sometime before the enactment of the planned action. Going back to our athletic example, if you have a game the next day, attempt to foresee your future performance the night before. Whether you realize it or not, this is guaranteed to impact your performance in some way or another.

It may also be helpful to try this if you want to change a few of your small quirks. You may want to sit down for a few minutes and simply picture how you see yourself acting differently tomorrow or the day after. Then, as you are going about your day tomorrow or whatever day you envisioned, notice how you react to actions of others, go about your assignments, or enjoy your food (Well, maybe this is not your vision. Tailor this description to fit whatever is in your picture frame). Think about how you will react to create the portrait you envisioned.

Who will you be?