RE: Psychology of RC flying
Radical, that makes perfect sense. And in fact that's what I was doing on those occasions when I lost sight of my model. It was exactly like instrument flying. All I had to go on was the position of the stick...that and my last memory of the attitude of the model before it disappeared.
Worth pointing out here is that you don't have to actually look down at the sticks. You just shift your mental attention to the pressure on your fingers, which immediately tells you something like: "Your holding a bit of up elevator and some right aileron."