Maybe it’s my synaesthesia, but I find the way our brains use sensory information to be fascinating.

You don’t experience the world. You’re a blob of neurons, drinking in electrical signals and reconstructing them into senses.

Light, sound, touch – none of these reach the brain directly. They all travel through the filters of your nervous system.

But there’s more to it than that. Hearing is fundamentally different from vision.

Yeah, yeah, I know – one uses sound, the other uses light.

Remember, though, that the brain isn’t getting sound or light – it’s getting electricity and chemicals.

And the nature of those signals is different, depending on the source.

Your brain reconstructs nerve signals into vision.

Your brain reconstructs nerve signals into hearing.

And those two processes aren’t the same. In fact, they’re wildly different.

Consider:

I’m sure you’ve been in a crowded environment before – the cocktail party being the classic example, but busy train stations and some nightmare offices also count.

All the overlapping sounds turn into mush – a babble.

It feels like a wave of noise washing over you, without meaning. If you hear something of interest – like your name – then your mind narrows in on that.

But unless you’ve trained to do it, it’s difficult to follow two overlapping conversations at once. If most people tried that, they’d focus entirely on one conversation, then switch back to the other, a couple of times a second. That’s task switching, as opposed to listening to both at once.

Try to track five overlapping conversations and your brain melts.

What about your sense of touch? Right now, no matter what you’re doing, you’re receiving dozens of bits of information from your environment. The temperature of the air, the surface beneath you, the fullness of your stomach, the touch of the clothing on your skin, tingles, pains, pressures, blood flowing…

You probably notice none of it most of the time. Again, you can train yourself to track a lot of this stuff. And some people can’t disengage from their tactile awareness. But, for most of you, your sense of touch is in the background, only bringing your awareness to one or two things at a time - if that.

Then there’s vision.

Yes, you can narrow your focus onto something right in front of you.

But if you relax your vision, then it expands. You can notice everything in front of you simultaneously. As I’m writing this, I’m watching the screen and seeing the words appear. I can also see my hands typing, the four people in the room with me, the colours of the walls and desk, a black computer case in the corner of my vision, the blue sky in the other corner…

I could go on.

And that’s without any training. Vision works by tracking huge amounts of information simultaneously. It’s not like you notice the colours one moment and movement the next - it’s all there, available to your conscious mind.

So if you’re a GM who struggles to keep track of everything that’s going on – the party, the NPCs, the terrain, the weather, the traps and hazards, the timed effects, the reinforcements massing just off screen…

… I bet your mental imagery of the state of play is pretty shonky.

You’ve probably heard that your brain (or your unconscious) can’t distinguish imagination from reality. That’s obviously false – you can distinguish those two, so if it’s not your brain that’s doing it, what is? Your liver?

But what they’re getting at when they say that is imagining something and seeing it work on the same rules. Visualising a ballerina engages your visual cortex, as much as seeing one does.

You can imagine snuggling up in front of a flickering fireplace and have that warm you up.

That alone is a handy way to use your brain, but hardly an original one. The power of visualisation - you’ve heard that one before.

So let’s talk more about running your games.

If you forget details or get overwhelmed by them, you’re probably not using the part of your mind that handles vision as much. You might be playing the game by feel (so, kinaesthetically) or by narrating the details to yourself (auditorially).

Try this instead:

Visualise the map. Picture all the details, as if you were staring at a game board or map. See the characters, the foes, the terrain and the weather.

Make it as clear as you can. This might take practice – it’s a skill like any other. It’ll pay off – and in other parts of your life too.

Now, I can hear some of you objecting from here. “I can’t make pictures in my mind! I have aphantasia!”

Want to know something freaky?

That doesn’t matter. Pretend as if you can make pictures in your mind and try this at your next game. It’ll work just as well, with a bit of practice.

Brains are weird. They really need a manual.

This is one of them.

Now, vision isn’t the only useful sense for your tabletopping. We’ll talk about another one next time.