I spent about two years dedicating my free time to experiments of this type. The most profoundly affecting exercise was training the left side of my body (I'm right-handed). I learned to write in left-handed mirrored script (Da Vinci style) and performed all sorts of everyday actions with my left hand. Amazingly, the more I trained my left hand the more my right-handed writing and drawing skills improved. Within a few months I found that I was able to switch back and forth between two very different modes of thought. My brain seemed wired differently. For a few months I could hardly put sentences together in speech, it was an odd sensation. Eventually though, I developed the ability to intentionally control which half of my brain was switched on. Science is all over the place when it comes to the left/right brain theory, but there is undoubtedly a level of truth to it. If you can learn to control it, it becomes a powerful problem-solving technique.

>I'm curious if anyone has tried anything like this before? I'd love some guidance or thoughts.

This is proving quite hard to articulate as I try to find a way to visualize it.

To me...

Thoughts are like threads to follow and your wall is faceted shell. Each of these facets carries a kind of gravity which pulls on your thread.

Facets you have accepted without understanding appear solid, a barrier. When you run into one you have hit the wall.

Facets where you have no concept are wide open and you're free to follow your thread, but you risk finding yourself adrift with no reference asking for your thread to become tangled.

Facets where you have greater understanding are revealed to be a lattice, full of gaps to thread through and continue exploring.

You don't "leave" the shell, there's always another layer that might be completely new or something you've passed through many times before.

Imagination/discovery is the act of continually finding the gaps.

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Personally, I've always done a lot of visualizing. As an adult I've come to recognize close similarities to what I do in the visualization techniques of Stoicism and general thought experiments.

One exercise I find quite useful is to avoid resorting to references for things I don't understand, to turn first toward visualizing how to create whatever it is that's puzzling me - to "search for the gaps" and see where I end up.

I've had the same experience as Tesla, though not so extreme as to cause problems. For as long as I can remember I have enjoyed extremely detailed "daydreams" where I explore worlds and meet people inspired by the books I read. I suspect this is fairly common in children, but I did it right through high school, university, and several years in the workplace.

The real question is: how much benefit does having a strong and well exercised imagination have for a technical career? (I assume it's very useful for artists).

I've found that software development gets a large boost. The more of the design you can hold in your head on once, the better the coder is able to anticipate the consequences of their decisions. When debugging, the programmer is able to see the entire state of the application that must have predicated it, experiment with a range of fixes, all before writing any code.

I love this quote from The Tao of Programming[1]: "Sometimes there are difficult problems. I see them coming, I slow down, I watch silently. Then I change a single line of code and the difficulties vanish like puffs of idle smoke."

[1] http://www.canonical.org/~kragen/tao-of-programming.html

Try starting with some random nonsense phrase you repeat in you mind for a period with your eyes closed. This clears your immediate references. After a period, you'll drift into an alpha brain wave state where you can willfully enter into a state of lucid dreaming. I got into this via an interest in trancendal meditation (sp?) and continued into other meditation styles. These days, I find that I can use this to visualize scenarios in my software projects at a depth that is difficult to explain with words.

Hey, I really want to keep reading your blog, you seem just like the kind of person I'm aspiring to become. But there's one thing stopping me, your design seems really messed up. Sometimes lines of text only show top-half or bottom-half, and links can only be clicked on in the top-half. And yes, I'm using the latest chrome.