by
Odds Bodkin

Did you know that right now, as you read this, your eyeballs are vibrating very fast? No kidding. They're jiggling back and forth. It's a scientific fact. If they weren't vibrating, you wouldn't be able to see a thing.

Now hold on, you say. I'm staring at my browser. It's not shaking back and forth at all. If my eyes were vibrating, wouldn't these words I'm reading be bouncing around, too?

Well, not really. The vibrations are very tiny, and they have a name. Scientists call them saccadic motion. And believe it or not, knowing about saccadic motion can make you a better imaginer. And, of course, a better storyteller.

Scientists experimented with saccadic motion in the 1970's. Weird as it sounds, they took tiny clamps and clamped them around people's eyeballs! (Yes, the people were volunteers, and no, it didn't hurt them at all.)

The tiny eyeball clamps prevented the people's eyeballs from doing what they always do--jiggling.

Instead, the clamps held them perfectly still.

And do you know what happened? What would happen to you, too, if some wacky scientist clamped your eyeballs?

The people went blind.

After about three seconds.

The wacky scientists disappeared. The nice white laboratory walls disappeared. The young assistants with notepads vanished.

There lay the people with their eyes wide open, but they couldn't see a thing! Everything looked gray.

Can you imagine how scary that must have been? If it had been me, I would have hollered, "Uh, excuse me, but I don't like this! Unclamp my eyeballs!"

They must have been braver than me, those volunteers, because the scientists learned that as long as those clamps stayed on, the volunteers couldn't see a thing. But as soon as the scientists removed the clamps, wham!

The wacky scientists were back! And the lab walls! And the assistants! The blindness went away.

Everybody was amazed.

They discovered that eyeball jiggling keeps light sweeping across the clusters of little cells at the back of your eyeball. These light sensitive cells are called the retina. If light stops sweeping across those little cells, they get all confused and start firing away randomly, dissolving what you see into chaos, otherwise known as gray.

That's just how eyeballs work. Another miracle most people don't know about.

Anyway, your imagination--the light of your mind-- works alot like your eyeballs. Here's a quick experiment you can do to prove it:

Get a watch with a second hand.

Now, make a mental picture of a snowy mountain peak.

Hold it in your mind's eye until it dissolves into other thoughts.

Okay, how many seconds were you able to hold that mental picture of a mountain peak in your imagination? Two seconds? Five? Ten? Fifteen? Write that number down.

Now, try the experiment again, only this time, imagine you're in a helicopter and you're flying around the mountain peak. Up close to it. Backing away from it. Zooming over the top.

How many seconds did you hold the mental picture this time? If you're like most people, it was a lot longer.

If you can sweep your imagination across a mental image so that it moves, you can see it better. And longer. Just like our eyeballs.

Pretty cool, yes?

A good storyteller can hold mental images and make them move for quite a long time. It's a skill you can learn with practice. I did it. You can do it, too.

More on Imagination Power next time.