A gentle two-minute check to find whether you imagine more by seeing, more by feeling, or a bit of both — so the guided practices can word themselves to suit you.
People imagine in different ways. Ask two people to imagine walking through a doorway, and one might see a clear picture of it, while the other mostly feels the movement in their body — with no picture at all. Both are completely normal, and neither is better.
This short check just helps the practices speak to you in your own way. If you imagine by seeing, they can lean on picturing; if you imagine by feeling, they can lean on sensing. It measures nothing about your Parkinson's, and nothing about how well you're doing. There are no right answers, and it changes nothing except the wording of the scripts.
If you form no mental images at all, that's fine too. Some people simply don't picture things in their mind — it even has a name, aphantasia — and the practices work perfectly well without any pictures. This check will notice that and point you to the gentlest wording. You're not doing anything wrong.
Take a slow breath, and for a few seconds, imagine reaching out, taking hold of a warm cup, and lifting it toward your lips. Don't perform it — just imagine it.
Now notice two separate things. First, did you see a picture of it — the cup, your hand — and how clear was that picture? Second, did you feel the movement — the weight of the cup, your arm bending — and how strong was that feeling? They can be very different from each other, and that difference is exactly what the check below is listening for.
For each movement, imagine it gently for a few seconds — sitting still, not actually doing it — then rate how clearly you saw it and how strongly you felt it. Use 1 if there was nothing at all, up to 5 if it was as vivid as the real thing.
The idea of rating movement imagery in two separate ways — how vividly you see it, and how strongly you feel it — comes from research by Malouin and colleagues, who developed a clinical questionnaire (the Kinesthetic and Visual Imagery Questionnaire) that separates these two kinds of imagery (Malouin et al., 2007).
This page is inspired by that principle but is not that questionnaire: the movements, the wording, and the scale here are our own plain-language version, chosen to be relevant to living with Parkinson's and to tailor the practices — not to assess or diagnose anything. For any clinical assessment of imagery ability, that's a conversation for a physiotherapist or occupational therapist.