Slots Help us Channel Our Most Creative Selves

In our previous article of tips for slots players, we spoke about how slots enable us to let our imagination wander.  Slots can help us live a very wide range of lifestyles and experiences vicariously.  We suspect that you never thought of an online casino as a conduit for expanding your mental horizons but it’s true.  Here we’ll expand on the idea of the benefits of letting your mind wander.

Let Your Mind Wander to Trigger Creativity

A study was performed in 2017 on patients undergoing an MRI exam in which they were instructed to focus on a single thing for the duration of the test, about five minutes.  The results of the test indicated that people who let their minds wander regularly were apt to be more creative than other people.

Calming Influence

Imagination has also been linked to excess anxiety.  So, the key element regarding slots games is to let the games take your mind to far away adventures and experiences without letting any “dangers” you might encounter along the way cause anxiety.  When you’ve accomplished this simple feat of creative imagination, your slots game play will become exponentially more enjoyable.

There are several ways we can use our imagination to reduce anxiety.  As we researched this article, we came up with the usual ways to reduce anxiety: yoga, meditation, deep slow breathing and so on.  Not a single site listed playing slots as a form of imaginative exercise that could reduce anxiety.  So it becomes our great pleasure to tell you that slots play does indeed release anxiety.  We all know that the adventure we’re in in a slots game is not real.  It’s a game we play.  If we let our brains play the game “all the way” our brains relax.

The Senoi tribes of Malaysia live deep in the rainforest.  They have no crime, show no anxiety or mental illness.  What they do have are vivid dreams.  From the youngest child to the most revered patriarchs and matriarchs, everyone is encouraged to dream, to tell others about their dreams, and to prepare for that night’s dreams.

Not everyone in the world has a positive attitude toward dreaming.  Vladimir Nabokov, the famed Russian novelist, called it a “betrayal of reason, humanity, and genius.”  The Senoi see it in exactly the opposite way.  The lesson for us is that playing slots, admittedly a pure game of luck, can also untrap our anxieties and release the creative spark.  President Ronald Reagan was criticized by his political opponents for taking a nap in the afternoon.  It could be that his sharp wit was strengthened and rejuvenated by those naps.

Looking at Things

Here is another mind exercise you can do whilst you’re playing slots.  Look out the window.  Look at whatever you see.  First, looking is far more active than seeing.  The problem with the critics of the Senoi dreamers is that they see dreams whilst the Senoi look at their dreams.

Similarly, when you look out the window and really look at whatever you see, you can notice patterns and connections that you would never have seen before.  In their own way, the creative impulse that goes into every video slot allows us to look at the symbols and characters.  We can see the insights and even the motives of the creators of every character.  We can look and see the details that otherwise would spin past us.

Looking closely enough to see details and other nuances can carry over into our everyday lives where suddenly we seemingly out of nowhere see details and nuances that we were theretofore not aware of.

Vicarious Experience

It has been said that the most important element in fiction is its ability to take us into a time and place we could never enter in real life.  The experience we feel when we read great fiction is a very real albeit vicarious experience.  The better the writing and creative imagination, the longer we remember and “feel” the power of the novel.

In his great work on fiction, “Aspects of the Novel” E. M. Forster added an important element to the power of the novel: song.  He said of Herman Melville that to him “all is song” by which Mr. Forster meant that the story wasn’t enough to Melville no matter how ingenious it was; the characters weren’t enough to him either no matter how sharply he drew them; and the actual writing wasn’t enough no matter how technically excellent it was.

To Melville, the book had to “sing” from the start to the finish.

The best slots games are those that “sing” to players from the first spin to the last.  Connecting looking to the element of song we can conclude that a great slots game may have some of the same effect as a great written story.  A great slot is a lot more than pictures on spinning reels.  There is a great deal of thought behind every image in a slots game.  By channeling our thoughts through the thoughts of the slots developer, we can arrive at insights that we never knew we could imagine.

Child’s Play

M. Scott Peck wrote in “The Road Less Travelled” that most adults think that all kids do is play and they dismiss child’s play as senseless and valueless.  Peck’s insight, and ours, is that, whilst almost everything kids do really is play, kids use their imaginations in a freer way than most adults allow themselves to do.  A kid who brings you a plastic cup with “coffee” is not just playing nor is he or she “imagining things”.  If we don’t “drink” the coffee, the kid will be upset not because the kid actually believes that there is coffee in the cup but because the kid knows instinctively that playing is good for us and they want us adults to get the good benefit of the child’s play. 

Slots are good for us because they bring us back to the pure play of childhood.  We don’t believe that we are really travelling into outer space or hunting big game on the African savannah.  Slots are good for us because they allow us to play and play allows us to make contact with the most creative part of our brain.

Slots may not be rocket science but they can help us solve our mundane everyday problems though some insight and some child’s play.