Our Episode

welcome to the huberman Lab podcast
where we discuss science and
science-based tools for everyday
[Music]
life I’m Andrew huberman and I’m a
professor of neurobiology and
Opthalmology at Stanford school of
medicine today we are discussing mental
training and visualization mental
training and visualization is a
fascinating process that has been shown
over and over again in now hundreds of
studies to improve our ability to learn
anything when I say anything I mean the
ability to learn music the ability to
learn and perform mathematics the
ability to learn and perform motor
skills in sport in dance across
essentially all domains the other
incredible thing about mental training
and visualization is that as you’ll soon
see when you go into the literature that
is the scientific studies on mental
training and visualization you quickly
realize that it does not take a lot of
mental training and visualization in
order to get better at anything however
that mental training and visualization
has has to be performed in a very
specific way and today we will discuss
exactly how to do mental training and
visualization in the specific ways that
allow it to complement the actual
performance of a motor or cognitive
skill to allow you to learn more quickly
and to consolidate that is to keep that
information in mind and body so that you
can perform those cognitive tasks music
tasks motor tasks etc for long periods
of time without ever forgetting how to
do them all of mental training and
visualization relies on what I consider
consider really the Holy Grail of our
brain and nervous system and that’s
neuroplasticity neuroplasticity is our
nervous system which of course includes
the brain the spinal cord and all the
connections between the brain and spinal
cord and the organs and tissues of the
body and then all the neural connections
back from the organs and tissues of the
body to the brain and spinal cord so the
whole thing in both directions has the
ability to change in response to
experience in ways that are adaptive
that is that allows us to do things that
we could not do before and by doing
those things or by being able to perform
those mental operations we can do better
in the world that we live in we can
perform new tasks we can think new
thoughts we can come up with novel
solutions to pre-existing problems that
before really vexed us and that we
couldn’t overcome all of that is
considered neuroplasticity so today what
I’m going to cover is a brief summary of
what neuroplasticity is that is how it
occurs in the brain and body this is
extremely important to understand if
you’re going to use Mental training and
visualization then I’m going to talk
about what happens in our brain and body
when we do mental visualization in a
dedicated way many people have heard
perhaps that when you imagine something
happening that your brain doesn’t know
the difference between that imagination
of the thing happening and the real
thing happening turns out that is not
true it is simply not true however there
is somewhat of an equivalence between a
real experience and an imagined
experience and we’ll talk about the
difference between those and how that
can be leveraged in order to get the the
most out of mental training and
visualization then I will cover exactly
which types of mental training and
visualization work best across all
domains meaning for Music Learning
mathematics solving puzzles motor
learning Sports Performance etc etc to
really allow you a template in which you
can plug in or designate what you’re
going to do each day for a brief period
of time in order to accelerate your
learning in whatever you choose and then
I’m going to go into a bit of what
happens in the brains of different types
of people uh these different types of
people that I’m referring to are people
who have more or less of a natural
ability to imagine things and visualize
them because it turns out that we vary
tremendously from one individual to the
next in terms of our ability to mentally
visualize and imagine things and our
ability to get better at that over time
and the good news is anyone can get
better at mental training and
visualization in ways that can serve
them well I’ll also briefly touch on the
fact that certain people in particular
people on the autism spectrum as well as
people with synesthesias which is the
combining of different perceptual
experiences so you may be one of these
people or you may have heard of people
that for instance when they think of a
number they also just naturally
spontaneously think of a color and vice
versa we talk about how that relates to
mental imagery and visualization and the
creative process and problem solving in
general and then finally what I’ll do is
I’ll recap mental training and
visualization from the standpoint of how
best to apply mental training and
visualization according to specific
challenges things like challenges with
public speaking or challenges with
sports performance or challenges with
test taking Performance challenges with
essentially anything that will allow you
to build specific mental training
visualization practices that are brief
that are supported by Neuroscience
studies and that are highly effective
before we begin I’d like to emphasize
that this podcast is separate from my
teaching and research roles at Stanford
it is however part of my desire and
effort to bring zero cost to Consumer
information about science and science
related tools to the general public in
keeping with that theme I’d like to
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talk about mental training and
visualization now perhaps surprisingly
mental training and visualization has
been studied since the late 1800s
there’s actually a paper published in
1880 by gton called the statistics of
mental imagery so long ago people were
quantifying and trying to understand how
is it that people come up with mental
images and how they can apply that to
learning things more quickly and more
stable over time now as I mentioned
earlier mental training and
visualization relies on a process that
we call neuroplasticity neuroplasticity
is a term that many people have heard
and encompasses many different things so
broadly speaking neuroplasticity
includes developmental plasticity which
is the sort of plasticity that occurs
between about birth and age 25 and that
can be summarized very easily as passive
plasticity in other words the sorts of
changes that happen in one’s nervous
system simply by engaging in the world
and experiencing Life as a child as a
young adult as an adolescent and as a 22
23 24 year old Etc now of course of
course of course it is not the case that
on your 25th birthday you close out
passive developmental plasticity and
start engaging in the other type of
neuroplasticity which is adult
neuroplasticity it’s a gradual tapering
off of Developmental plasticity that
occurs between age 0 and 25 and for some
people might occur somewhere around 26
for other people around 23 when we say
25 we’re really just talking about the
average age in which passive plasticity
tapers off however starting fairly early
in adolescence and extending all the way
out into one’s 80s or 90s or hundreds
should one live that long is the other
form of neuroplasticity which is adult
neuroplasticity adult neuroplasticity is
very different than developmental
plasticity
because it is the sort of plasticity
that one can direct towards one’s own
specific desired learning so if we
wanted to get a little bit technical
here for sake of clarity not for sake of
confusion we would say adult plasticity
is really about self-directed adaptive
plasticity and the reason we call it
that as opposed to something else or
simply adult plasticity is that there
are many different forms of
neuroplasticity there is for instance
maladaptive neuroplasticity that occurs
if one gets a really hard head hit and
concussion there will be changes to the
brain and nervous system but those
changes to the brain and nervous system
do not allow it to perform better in
fact it often impairs the brain and
nervous system’s ability to function and
therefore is maladaptive so I don’t want
to get overly wordy with a number of
different terms here but I do think it’s
important to understand that we have
developmental plasticity again in which
the brain and nervous system changes
simply in response to experiencing
specific things for better or worse and
there’s adult self-directed adaptive
plasticity in which one can direct
specific changes in terms of learning
things cognitively or learning things in
terms of motor function so sport Dance
Etc or combination of the two now just
to really clarify what I mean by
developmental versus self-directed
adaptive plasticity I mentioned that
self-directed adaptive plasticity
actually can start in adolescence right
even though there’s ongoing
developmental plasticity I mean let’s be
really direct the brain of a 14-year-old
is very different than the brain of that
same individual when that person is 21
because there’s ongoing developmental
plasticity however starting at about
adolescence we can all start to decide
what it is that we want to learn and
engage in self-directed adaptive
plasticity now the way to engage
self-directed adaptive plasticity
regardless of whether or not you’re a
13-y old 14y old or you’re a 90-year-old
or anywhere in between is that it
requires two things the first thing it
requires is focused dedicated attention
to the thing that you’re trying to learn
that’s the first step and that actually
triggers a number of different chemical
and electrical processes in the brain
that are often associated with agitation
and frustration believe it or not the
agitation and frustration is a
reflection of the release of specific
chemicals in particular nor epinephrine
and epinephrine also called nor
adrenaline and adrenaline in the brain
and body that creates this discomfort
and this heightened level of alertness
and attention that many of us don’t like
and tend to back away from but it is
exactly that chemical or I should say
neurochemical milu which signals to the
neurons the nerve cells in the brain and
elsewhere in the body that something
needs to change because if you think
about it if you can do something
perfectly or if you try and do something
and it doesn’t cause any neurochemical
change in your brain and body well then
there’s no reason for your brain and its
connections with the body to change in
any particular way okay so you need
Focus dedicated attention to the thing
that you’re trying to learn it’s often
accompanied by agitation frustration Etc
so that’s perfectly normal in fact
that’s a signal that things are going
right meaning they’re headed towards
learning but there’s a second component
that’s really required for self-directed
adaptive plasticity and that’s periods
of deep rest in particular a goodn night
sleep in particular on the night that
follows that focused attention to the
thing you’re trying to learn there are
now hundreds of studies in both animal
models and in humans showing that it is
really during sleep and other states of
deep relaxation things like meditation
and non-sleep deep rest which I’ve
talked about before on this podcast but
really during our main night of sleep
that the rewiring of neural connections
that is the actual neuroplasticity takes
place so the verb neuroplasticity the
rearrangement of connections between
neurons really occurs during sleep in
particular on the first night following
an attempt to learn something through
this focused attention now developmental
plasticity which is passive also
requires good sleep it’s slightly
different or frankly it’s a lot
different in terms of the underlying
mechanisms than self-directed adaptive
plasticity but because today we’re
mainly talking about how to learn faster
through mental training and
visualization and that really Maps more
closely onto self-directed adaptive
plasticity just really want to emphasize
this two-step process there has to be
focused dedicated attention and then
there needs to be sleep and in
particular sleep on the first night
following that training now should you
have the unfortunate experience of
getting woken up in the middle of the
night following trying to learn
something or should you simply not be
able to sleep for whatever reason on the
night following
a bout of learning or an attempt to
learn do not despair because it turns
out that there are what are called
second and third night effects also once
you sleep you will learn those
neuroplastic events the reordering of
connections that we call synapses and
the changes that occur in neural
circuits that reflects what we call
self-directed adaptive plasticity that
still will occur but ideally you got a
great night’s sleep on the first night
following trying to learn and the second
night and the third and so on and so on
on now there are a few other things that
are critical to understand about
self-directed adaptive plasticity that
will become especially important when
thinking about protocols for developing
the ideal mental training and
visualization process for you and that
is that there are different forms of
plasticity that occur between neurons
although the two main forms are what are
called long-term potentiation and
long-term depression I just want to ceue
up right now that the word depression is
a very loaded word because the moment
people hear the word depression oh no
that’s bad but in the case of
neuroplasticity long-term depression is
simply a change in the connections
between neurons and the excitability
between neurons that in many ways can be
excellent for learning things in
particular motor skills and we’ll get
into this in more detail in a little bit
but it turns out that a lot of our
ability to get better at some sort of
motor skill involves this thing that we
call long-term depression and that’s
because much of what is happening when
we learn a new motor skill is that we
are deped pressing or suppressing
specific actions in order to generate a
very specific coordinated action some of
the best examples of long-term
depression can actually be borrowed from
developmental plasticity so for instance
if you’ve ever sat across from an infant
who is trying to eat their meal so
imagine a one and a half-year-old or a
2-year-old trying to eat some noodles or
some soup or any kind of baby suitable
food with a spoon and they’re holding
the spoon or they’re trying to hold the
spoon what you’ll notice is that their
motor movements are terribly
uncoordinated they often will take that
spoon to their cheek or to their eye or
to their head we’ve all seen these very
amusing photos of babies with bowls of
food on their head or with food all over
their face or just everywhere it appears
that they’re basically getting the food
everywhere except where it’s supposed to
go which is in their mouth and that’s
because their motor movements are not
very well coordinated at that age and
they’re not very well coordinated not
because they lack sufficient numbers of
neural connections synapses between
neurons but rather because they have too
many connections between too many
different neurons the neural circuits
that control very dedicated coordinated
movement are not there yet instead too
many neurons are connected to too many
other neurons and so they can’t generate
the precise movements that are required
in order to get that spoon to their
mouth now over time they get better at
moving the utensil to their mouth such
that hopefully by about F age five or
six they are eating you know in a
relatively cleaner way and hopefully by
time they’re 10 or 11 or 12 they’re
getting the food into their mouth and
not all over their face uh people learn
this to varying degrees all you have to
do is go to a restaurant and watch how
people eat um and you will see a vast
variation in people’s coordinated
movements with utensils but in general
there’s a theme the younger the person
the more uncoordinated their movement of
utensils and as they get older the more
coordinated now of course in people that
are very very old they have challenges
moving objects and their limbs in very
smooth ways and that has to do with a
topic that we’ll get into when we talk
about age related cognitive decline and
motor related dementias but for sake of
today’s discussion if you just want to
think about what happens with long-term
depression and the development of a
motor skill both as a baby as an
adolescent and as an adult when you’re
trying to learn a new motor skill is
that you are eliminating incorrect
movement and when you are eliminating
incorrect movements to arrive at only
the correct movements in a very
reflexive and repeated way so think your
golf swing your tennis serve think
serving of volleyball think a child
learning to crawl and then walk think a
child learning to eat with utensils in
the example I gave before what’s
happening in all of those cases is that
yes certain Connections in the brain are
being strengthened or what we call
potentiated they are undergoing
long-term potentiation the so-called
quote unquote fire together wire
together Mantra that was popularized by
the great neurobiologist Dr Carla shatz
my colleague at Stanford but in addition
to that long-term depression the
quieting or the silencing of specific
synapses that is connections between
neurons is absolutely critical for motor
skill learning so we have ltp long-term
potentiation and LTD long-term
depression is every bit as important as
ltp long-term potentiation for getting
better at some sort of motor skill and
indeed at getting better at some sort of
cognitive skill now as we hear this this
should be intuitive to all of us if you
look at somebody’s attempt to learn a
particular dance step or at somebody’s
attempt to do a tennis serve the first
time it’s all over the place now it’s
not perhaps all over the place in that
they’re doing a jumping jack while
trying to serve the tennis ball but
they’re generally arcing the racket too
widely on one trial and then they’re
arcing it too close to their body on the
next trial so if we were to draw a line
over each one of those trials we would
see that there were lines everywhere
over time whereas once they quote
unquote perfect the tennis serve it’s
going to be line drawn directly over
line drawn directly over line meaning
the Arc of that tennis serve is going to
be very restricted and that without
question has reflected the removal or
the quieting of particular synapses
connections between neurons in the brain
and body to allow that very narrow
coordinated and direct movement the same
is true for learning anything in the
cognitive domain meaning if you are to
learn a language it is not of course the
case that you know every word in that
language and then you simply remove
certain words and arrive at the correct
sentence structure that you’re trying to
achieve but rather you have to suppress
your native language or if you’re a
young child you have to suppress the
generation of just kind of random
babbling sounds turns out babbling isn’t
random at all but the point is that you
have to suppress the enunciation of
particular sounds and direct the
pronunciation of other sounds in order
to generate that new language or your
ability to speak at all okay so we can
really think about neuroplasticity as
both a building up process in which you
increase connection so-call long-term
potentiation and a sculpting down or a
removal of connections process that
we’re going to call long-term depression
now I have to acknowledge that of course
there are other forms of neuroplasticity
too I know there are probably some
afficionados listening to this who will
be perhaps shouting back at uh whatever
device my voice is coming out of wait
what about Spike timing dependent
plasticity or what about pair pulse
facilitation yes yes and yes there are
multiple forms of communication between
neurons that can strengthen those
connections or weaken those connections
but for today’s discussion we just
broadly want to think about long-term
potentiation and long-term depression
because it captures the two most
important themes related to mental
training and visualization which is that
when we perform a given cognitive or
physical task in the real world so we
actually try the dance step or the
tennis serve or when we actually try a
math problem where we try and learn some
specific knowledge and write it down and
remember
it that is engaging particular neurons
right they’re firing they’re releasing
chemicals but it is also actively
suppressing the activity of other
neurons and we are always completely
unaware of the ways in which our brain
is suppressing certain activity okay so
today we have to keep in mind that where
there is strengthening of connections
there is also weakening of connections
and when it comes to mental training and
visualization and here’s the really key
point with mental training and
visualization you are capturing both
processes both the potentiation that is
the building up and strengthening of
connections and the weakening of the
connections that are inappropriate for
the thing you’re trying to learn and
there are different aspects of mental
training and visualization protocols
that really harness the potentiation
versus the depression aspect and today
we will cover mental training and
visualization protocols that capture
both the potentiation and the depression
aspect of neuroplasticity and in that
way serve as an augment that is a
complement to the actual real world
cognitive and physical training that
you’re doing because I’ll just give this
away right now turns out that mental
training and visualization is not a
replacement for real world cognitive or
motor
Behavior again mental training and
visualization cannot replace real world
execution of cognitive tasks or of motor
tasks if you want to learn however
mental training and visualization can
and has been shown to be effective for
greatly enhancing the speed at which you
learn and the stability of that learning
over time okay so let’s take a second
and really think about what’s happening
in the brain and body when we do mental
training or visualization in fact we can
do a little experiment right now that is
not unlike many of the classic
experiments looking at what’s happening
in the brain and body Dre mental
training and visualization in which I
just ask you to close your eyes and
imagine a yellow Cube okay and next to
that yellow cube is a red rose and
perhaps I also ask you to float or fly
up above the cube and the rows and look
at them from the top top down and then I
tell you to fly back around and land
behind those and look at them from the
perspective of behind that yellow Cube
and that red rose okay now what the data
tell us is that most people will be able
to do that most of you will be able to
do that to some degree or another
regardless of your attention span
whether or not you have ADHD or not most
of you will be able to do that to some
degree or another we also know from
neuroimaging studies in which people are
placed into a functional magnetic
resonance imaging scanner that during
the sort of visualization you just did
or that I described that your visual
cortex and Associated areas quote
unquote light up they become very active
in similar but not identical ways to how
they would light up and be activated
were you to actually look at a yellow
cube and a red rose on a screen and
perhaps Fly Above them virtually of
course and land behind them virtually of
course or if you were to actually look
at a yellow Cube and red rose in the
real world right in front of you on a
table then you know get up on your tippy
toes and look down at them from the top
and then walk around the table and look
at them from the other side so there is
some degree of what we call perceptual
equivalence between real world
experiences digital experiences and
imagined meaning with our eyes closed
just in our Mind’s Eye experiences this
is true not just of vision and what we
call the visual domain but also the
auditory domain okay so for instance I
could play for you a short motif of a
song Let’s just pick something that I
think most people know goodness I’m a
terrible musician and even worse um
singer but let’s just take the the
opening to acdc’s back and black right I
think I can do that when it’s like
[Music]
okay got it that’s the the actual sound
although admittedly a dreadful version
of of the great ACDC song Back in Black
but now I ask you to close your eyes or
you could keep them open and just
imagine
that okay or for instance I place you in
a quiet room so you close your eyes and
ask you to imagine the opening to acdc’s
black and black but I ask you to pause
it halfway through what you would find
again is that most people somewhere
between 90 and 95% of people would be
able to do all the sorts of things I
described right Cube and rows ACD back
and
black even a samata sensory task I
imagine you to imagine what it’s like to
touch felt or to touch chinchilla hair
or something like that a Chinchilla’s
hair ideally alive chinchilla sitting
still those little critters move really
really fast but they have very very soft
hair High hair density So Soft okay most
people can do that a about 5 to 15% of
people are less able to do that and
there’s a small percentage of people in
that 5 to
15% that simply cannot do it at all that
just cannot visualize well we’ll talk
later about these people they have
what’s called
aasia an inability to mentally visualize
but most people are actually pretty good
at visualizing things when they are told
what to visualize and and this is a
really key point and if what they are
told to visualize is very simple
and the whole visualization is quite
brief lasting on the order of about 15
seconds to generate the visualization in
the auditory or in the visual aspect of
one’s mind’s eye or ear if you will and
if it’s repeated over and over what’s
far harder for everybody to do and in
fact what most people simply cannot do
is Imagine long extended scenes and
stories in their mind that go on for
minutes and minutes and involve a lot of
different sensory stim
this is a really key point in fact as we
start to home in on ideal mental
training and visualization protocols I’d
like to establish this as the first
principle of mental training and
visualization which is that if you are
going to use Mental training and
visualization to its best effect in
order to engage neuroplasticity and
learning you need to keep those
visualizations quite brief really on the
order of about 15 to 20 seconds or so
and pretty darn sparse meaning not
including a lot of elaborate
visualization not including a lot of
sequences of motor steps what I mean are
motor sequences if you’re trying to
learn something in terms of physical
movement or visual sequences or auditory
sequences if you’re trying to learn
things in terms of music or Dance Etc
that can be completed and repeated in 15
seconds or less now later I’ll give you
a couple of specific examples but if you
want to use Mental training and
visualization understand this is the key
first principle they have to be very
short visualizations that you can repeat
over and over and over again with a high
degree of accuracy so you don’t want to
embark on a mental training and
visualization Paradigm in which it
involves a lot of elaborate stimul and
you have to think really hard and work
really hard even if you’re in that
category of people who can do mental
visualization pretty naturally and
easily now if you’re somebody who can’t
do mental visualization in fact if
you’re somebody who has full-blown FN or
the inability to mentally visualize well
then it’s especially important that you
make those mental trainings and
visualizations really brief and very
very simple I’d like to take a quick
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travel packs and the year supply of
vitamin D3 K2 now in order to develop
the best mental training and
visualization protocols for you let’s go
a little bit deeper into what the
research says about mental visualization
now the classic work on mental
visualization really hinges on a number
of different researchers and their work
but in particular Roger Shepard who did
this work at Stanford and Steven klin
who’s now at Harvard there of course
others in the field but it’s really the
work of Shephard and cin that lay the
foundation for our understanding of what
happens in the brain when we mentally
visualize
something Shephard did these incredible
experiments in which he had students
mentally visualize simple objects like a
square like a triangle and he measured
how long it took them to do that now of
course at the time when he did these
experiments there were no sophisticated
brain Imaging devices and machines like
fmri however everything I’m about to
describe has been later confirmed using
things like fmri what Shephard did and
what he found is that if people were
told to visualize very simple objects
they did it pretty quick
however if they were told to visualize
more complex objects or importantly to
rotate those objects in their Mind’s Eye
well then it took longer for them to
perform those mental visualizations now
many of you might think duh if I have to
just imagine a triangle or a cube that’s
going to be very easy and very fast
whereas if I have to rotate that
triangular cube in my mind’s eye that’s
going to take more time and indeed that
is somewhat of a duh except and this is
so very important except that what
shepher and his colleagues found is that
how long it takes somebody to generate
and rotate a given visual image scales
directly with the complexity of that
image in fact kyin did some experiments
I think illustrate this even better and
here’s the experiment I love this
experiment I think you’ll love it too
because it illustrates something so
fundamentally important about how our
brains work not just for sake of mental
training and visualization but this is
how our brains work at
all he showed people a picture of a map
so a map drawn on a piece of paper this
was a map of an island it included
things like a loading dock for some
boats it had a location for getting food
on the island it had some trees it had
some other small landmarks drawn out and
people looked at this and memorized it
or in other experiments they just had
people imagine this island and the
location of these different landmarks on
the island so didn’t really matter which
but then he had people imagine moving or
walking from one location on the island
to another so they’d say okay you’re at
the loading dock now move to the
restaurant okay you’re at the restaurant
now move to the palm tree you’re on the
NorthShore of the island now go around
the side of the island clockwise to
arrive at the bay on the southwest
corner this sort of thing what klin
found was absolutely incredible what he
found was that the amount of time that
it takes people to move from one
location on the map to another scaled
linearly directly with the actual
physical location between those objects
on the map so for those of you that can
understand or in the importance of what
Shephard and coslin showed great I’m
guessing however that for most people
out there you’re still grasping it like
okay interesting you know how things
happen in the real world dictates how
they happen in our mind’s eye but I want
to make sure that I really nail home the
importance of this for everybody the
importance of this is that when we look
at something in the real world so if I
look at the pen in front of me I’m
holding up my pen for those of you there
listening just holding up my pen in
front of me I move it to the right and
back and forth what’s happening is I’m
activating or I’m triggering the
electrical activity of neurons which we
can think of kind of as pixels in my eye
okay so it’s you know leftward to
rightward motion for me and back and
forth and those are getting activated
and they’re sending signals up to my
visual cortex and that information is
processed at a given
speed what the visualization experiments
that Shepard and klin and others did
show is that the processing speed of
imagined experiences is exactly the same
as the processing speed of real
experiences and the spatial relationship
between imagined and real experiences is
exactly the same as well put simply when
we imagine something in our mind’s eye
or mind’s ear we are Imagining the real
thing happening and when I say the real
thing it’s not the obvious real thing of
course if you’re imagining something
that’s the thing you’re imagining what I
mean is that your brain at the level of
neurons is behaving exactly the same way
and this needn’t have been the case okay
there could have been a result for
instance that if people were asked to
visualize a cube and rotate it from you
know flip it from top to bottom okay so
put the top that’s upward on a table now
down on the table and so forth or to
migrate around the island you know
counterclockwise going from you know the
northern coast all the way down to the
southern coast clockwise and then back
up to the northern coast that they could
have just done it really quickly like
all in one second but that’s not what
happens they always match the speed at
which they do things in their Mind’s Eye
to the same speed that they do them in
the real world so in telling you this
what I’m saying is that mental
visualization at the neural level is
identical to real world events so when
you’ve heard that when we imagine
something it’s identical in terms of our
brain’s experience of it and our body’s
experience of it as when we actually
experience something that is true at the
neural level however when it comes to
learning and improving performance in
the cognitive or physical domain they
are not equivalent so this is the second
principle of mental training and
visualization as you recall the first
principle of mental training and
visualization was that in in order to
make it effective it needs to be very
brief and very simple and repeated over
and over again the second principle of
mental training and visualization is
that while yes mental training and
visualization recaptures the same
patterns of neural firing in the exact
same ways as real world behavior and
thinking it is not as effective as real
world behavior and thinking in other
words if you want to learn something the
ideal situation is to combine real
training in the physical world with
mental training and I’ll talk about
exactly how to do that and in what
ratios a little bit later now there’s a
really incredible set of experiments
that illustrate why it is that mental
training and visualization can be
extremely effective but that it’s always
going to be most effective when combined
with real world training and experiences
the experiments that I’m talking about
involve the use of what are called by
stable images or impossible figures some
of you are probably familiar with
possible figures these are figures or
objects that when you look at them they
have these odd features like you’re not
sure where they stop and where they
start where they end uh one good example
would be the so-called Mobius strip the
mobus strip is literally a strip or a
line that is contiguous it goes up and
it loops around and then it curves
around and then it goes back and and it
just continues and continues and when
you look at it you can never really tell
where it starts and where it stops
because it doesn’t have any of the
features that allow you to see what’s
the front and what’s the back in any
kind of stable way another example of an
impossible figure would be you know a
little um set of Cubes that look like
they’re coming out toward you maybe with
a little Bend in them going up at a
right angle perhaps but then if you look
at it a little bit longer that little
piece that’s facing up looks like it’s
in front and you can’t really tell
what’s in front and what’s in back and
so it’s called an impossible figure
because you don’t really know how to
frame it in your mind to tell what’s
closer to you and what’s further apart
by stable images are somewhat similar
although different in the sense that
they typically are simple Silhouettes so
for instance the faces vases by stable
image is perhaps the most famous of
these where you look at this image it’s
very simple and it looks like two vases
but then you look at it a little bit
longer and you realize that you’re
looking at the side angle or the profile
of two faces looking at one another and
when you see those two faces looking at
one another you can’t see the vases at
the same time but then if you decide to
see the vases again you can see the
vases again but the faces disappear so
it’s by stable meaning that you can’t
see the faces and vases at the same time
and impossible figures and by stable
images are capturing the fact that your
visual cortex and some of the associated
areas that compute visual scenes in your
world are essentially trying to recreate
whatever it is that’s out in front of
them and that’s effectively what your
visual system does it’s very good at
recreating visual images in your brain
in your mind’s eye because if you think
about it even with your eyes open your
brain is just creating an abstract
representation of what it thinks is out
there but that when it comes to
assigning an identity to something like
oh that’s a face or oh that’s a vase
that is constrained by different neural
circuits by different areas of the brain
and somehow those circuits can’t be
coactive we cannot see the faces and the
vases at exactly the same time we can
switch back and forth really quickly
just as we can switch back and forth
really quickly when we’re looking at the
impossible figure and think okay that’s
the front of it that’s the back no wait
that’s the back that’s the front and
it’s going back and forth but we can’t
see them both at the same time no one
can see them both at the same time okay
we know this from brain Imaging studies
now impossible figures in bable images
can be seen right you could look them up
right now on your phone or computer or I
could show you pictures of them on paper
right in front of you and you can do
these sorts of perceptual experiments of
telling people look at the face look at
the vase look at the front of the cube
and I’ll make it at the back of the cube
and they can do somewhat
deliberately however and this is I think
so very interesting to understanding how
mental training and visualization does
and does not support Real World
Learning if you try to imagine a by
stable image you can’t do it in fact no
one can do it until they do something
else okay so for those of you that
saying wait I can do it I can do faces
vases in my mind’s eye I promise you
that the
neuroimaging disputes your belief okay
and supports the idea that we can see
real world by stable images we can see
real world impossible figures but when
we try and imagine those in our Mind’s
Eye we simply can’t do it we can’t do
the perceptual shift in our Mind’s Eye
we can’t switch back and forth between
faces and vases however and I just have
to chuckle because I think these
experiments are so clever if I have you
trace or
Draw with a pen on a piece of paper and
imp possible figure or the faces vases
by stable image and then I ask you to
imagine that bable image or impossible
figure and to switch back and forth you
were able to do it so what that
illustrates is that it’s the combination
of imagined and real world experiences
real motor movements real perceptual
experiences combined with motor
movements combined with what you imagine
in your mind’s eye that really gives you
the most depth and flexibility over your
mental
visualization and in doing so we can
really stamp down a third principle of
mental training and visualization which
is that your mental training and
visualization will be far more effective
if you are performing the exact same or
very similar mental and physical tasks
in the real world okay so first
principle is mental training and
visualization needs to be simple and
brief and repeated second is that mental
training and visualization is not a
replacement for
realworld motor training or cognitive
training it’s an augment it’s an
addition that can really help and the
third principle of mental training and
visualization is that you need to
combine mental training and
visualization with real world behaviors
and experiences that are very very
similar now as a brief but I think
really relevant aside one of the things
that also makes mental training and
visualization more effective is when we
assign cogni ative labels to what’s
going on when we visualize so what I
mean is that people are much better at
manipulating faces and vases in their
Mind’s Eye of course only once they’ve
drawn them out physically with their
hand as I mentioned before then they are
manipulating abstract objects like
impossible figures in part because by
labeling them faces and
vases people are able to capture a lot
of other neural Machinery that’s related
to faces and bases in fact we have
entire brain areas on both sides of the
brain devoted to the processing of faces
called fusiform face area we have other
areas in our brain that are involved in
processing of 3D objects but faces are
of particular value there’s a there’s a
value to understanding what a face is as
opposed to a non-face and there’s a
value to understanding what a particular
face is in fact the simplest way to put
this is that the human brain is in many
ways a face recognition and expression
of faces recognition machine it of
course does other things but it is
exceptionally good at that unless you’re
a profession in which the relationships
between 3D objects and your ability to
manipulate them is exceedingly important
you’re not going to have a lot of neural
real estate specifically devoted to that
some people will be better at it some
people will be worse but when it comes
to faces unless you have a condition
like propath agnosia which is an
inability to recognize say famous faces
and distinguish them from non-f famous
faces or if you have some sort of face
recognition deficit which about anywhere
from one perhaps to 3% of people out
there have they’re just terrible at
recognizing faces and by the way there’s
about half a percent of people out there
that are what are called super
recognizers that can recognize faces in
a large crowd they can recognize
specific faces even from just partial
profiles by the way these people are
extremely valuable to Securities
agencies and security agencies are very
good at finding these people um machines
are quickly
getting better or at least as good as
super recognizers but the best super
recognizers are still better than the
best Ai and machine algorithms out there
but the point is that in your mind’s eye
you are better able to manipulate
specific objects or to see things more
clearly and with more specificity when
it has a label that you recognize from
your real world experience as opposed to
abstract or fictional labels okay again
stamping home the idea that what you
experience in the real world really
serves to support your mental imagery
and therefore the key importance of
experiencing and doing things in the
real world and supporting that with
mental training and visualization and
not just relying on mental training and
visualization and the tangent here
that’s a little bit of fun and I don’t
think we’ve ever talked about before on
this podcast is that of UFOs
unidentified flying objects you know
there’s a lot of people out there who
think that they’ve seen UFOs I guess
technically they have because a UFO is
an identified flying object and if it’s
unidentified at least to them then it is
indeed a UFO I guess the question is
whether or not uh or the disput rather
is whether or not those UFOs are
actually flown by aliens or controlled
by aliens I think that’s where the
dispute lies but you can imagine how if
somebody sees an object in their
environment and decides Ah that’s a UFO
okay remember these faces vases or these
impossible figures if they say oh that
thing is a UFO as opposed to something
else they see in other words the face
not the vase well that stamps it down as
a memory in their visual system and
related systems and then in their Mind’s
Eye they are seeing the UFO they’re not
seeing the other thing that it could
possibly be okay so it stamped down a
very specific memory so the point here
is that mental training and
visualization relies on not just the
physical Contours and the exact spatial
profiles and the speed of movement of
particular things that we experience in
the real world it also heavily depends
on the cognitive labels and the
decisions we make about the things that
we see and this will become very
important as we build up toward our
fourth principle of mental training and
visualization which is that our
cognitive labels that is what we decide
is happening when we do mental training
and visualization turns out to be very
important now this is not simply to say
that you can decide okay I want to learn
how to play piano and so I’m going to
tell myself that a particular chord I
imagine in my mind’s eye is identical to
the real world chord just because I
decide it is the brain doesn’t work that
way it’s not possible to just lie to
yourself and learn better as a
consequence of the lies you tell
yourself
however what this tells us is that it is
very very important that your mental
training and visualization accurately
recapitulate the real world training
that you’re doing so we are going to
stamp down a fourth principle of
effective mental training and
visualization based on what we know from
the scientific literature is that your
mental training and visualization should
assign labels to what you’re doing that
can be matched to real world training
and experiences now these can be
somewhat abstract so for instance if
you’re trying to learn a particular
aspect of the golf swing okay so let’s
say that you’re working on your golf
swing seems to be there are a lot of
people out there working on their golf
swing and you’re going to do some mental
training and visualization in order to
improve your golf swing we already know
again let’s just March through them that
your mental training visualization needs
to be brief and simple it needs to be
the same or in fact it will be we can
say the same as your real world golf
swing in other words it will take you
exactly the same amount amount of time
to perform that golf swing in your
mind’s eye as it would in the real world
incredible right again something that
maybe is taking a little bit of time to
sink in but once it does you’re going to
be like wow the brain is really an
incredible machine and that third
principle that you still have to do golf
swings in the real world in addition to
the mental training of golf swings and
fourth that if you want that mental
training and visualization to really
improve your golf swing you’re going to
have to name or apply an identity to the
specific golf swing or aspect of the
golf swing that you’re practicing so
this could be abstract you could call it
mental training and visualization of
golf swing 1A and you could imagine your
mind’s eye you know the perfect golf
swing over and over and over and over
but then when you’re in the real world
you’re also going to have to call that
either out loud or just to yourself golf
swing 1 a okay as opposed to a putt
which might be 1B so naming and giving
an identity to a real world skill and
applying the same name or identity to
the mental version of that the
visualization of that can enhance the
mental training and visualization in
significant ways so when we apply
identities or names to these mental
trainings and visualizations and again
provide that they are brief and repeated
and so on WE greatly enhance the amount
of neural Machinery in the brain and
body that we are able to recruit when we
go to perform those real world golf
swings and golf putts and here just
replace golf swing and golf putt with
anything that you’re trying to learn
you’re able to recruit a lot more neural
machinery and greatly increase the
probability of proper execution so
before we go any further I want to share
with you a couple of incredible aspects
of mental visualization that really can
be harnessed and applied toward mental
training and visualization some of these
were done by Roger Shepard and his
graduate students in postdocs some were
done by Steve klin and by others what
these experiments really show is that
mental training and visualization is
capturing many many of the exact same
features of real world behavior and
perceptions not all of them but many of
them so for instance if I tell you to
close your eyes and
imagine a ceiling that has tiles that
are black and white checkered tiles you
know one black tile one white tile for
instance we know based on experiments
where we measure eye movements Behind
Closed eyelids that people tend to move
their eyes up when they imagining things
above them such as a ceiling whereas if
I tell you to imagine things down on the
floor like you’re taking a hike and
you’re looking for rattlesnakes actually
just recently I experienced because it’s
spring here in California rattlesnake
along a hiking trail it’s really quite
beautiful although I um have to confess
I enjoyed keeping my distance uh I don’t
like snakes uh very much I don’t dislike
snakes but I prefer not to interact with
them unless I have to if I have you
imagine that rattlesnake depending on
your relationship or thoughts about
rattlesnakes number of things will
happen in your brain of course
activation of the limic system or not
for instance but what I know is that
regardless of how you feel about
snakes most of you will move your eyes
down when imagining a snake okay it
might be subtle it might be fast but
statistically that result shows up as
opposed to when I imagine or I ask you
to imagine something above you you tend
to move your eyes up in addition to that
if I tell you for instance to imagine an
elephant and a mouse next to one another
you presumably have some real world
understanding about the relative sizes
of elephants versus mice elephants
generally are bigger than mice thank
goodness mice are smaller than elephants
if I ask you to tell me about the
details of that Mouse’s face so for
instance can you see its
whiskers the processing time required
for you to do that is much longer than
the processing time required if I say
tell me what the position of that
elephant’s trunk is now why would that
be so okay the position of the
elephant’s trunk wasn’t something that I
told you it wasn’t dictated by me it’s
in your mind’s eye maybe you don’t even
know and you have to go searching for it
but what we do know is that if I tell
you to look at a small object in your
mind’s eye versus a larger object so for
instance the mouse versus the elephant
it takes longer for you to do that in
other words just as with the map
experiment the distance between things
on a map is conserved in your mind’s eye
as a linear relationship takes longer to
go far distances between things on a map
in your mind than it does to go shorter
distances it’s also the case that it
takes you longer to look at the details
of a small object versus a large object
because why because you are zooming in
in your mind’s eye again all of which
speaks to the equivalence of mental
imagery with real world imagery and
perception and as I mentioned earlier
and as we’ll see in a moment this also
extends into the motor domain it takes
you longer to perform Complex Motor
sequences in your mind’s eye than it
does simple motor sequences just as it
would in the real world and if you’re
saying of course of course of course
well then great then we’ve really
underscored the point which is that when
you imagine things it is not exactly the
same but it is very very much the same
as actually doing or perceiving those
things in the real world and the fifth
principle of effective mental training
and visualization
is this notion of equivalence of mental
imagery versus Real World perception and
behavior these are the experiments as
you recall where if people are told to
look for clouds in their mental
visualization they tend to look up or if
they’re looking for something on the
floor they tend to look down even Behind
Closed eyelids now this can be applied
toward building an especially effective
mental training and visualization
protocol if you deliberately move your
eyes in the direction of the thing or
things that you are trying to
recapitulate in your mind in your
visualization that is you don’t
necessarily have to include this step
but mental training and visualization is
going to be more effective if you do
because with consciously generated eye
movements again even Behind Closed
eyelids you are bringing about more of
the neural circuitry that one would
experience if you were to perform that
particular cognitive task or motor task
in the real world which as I mentioned
before in principle number three you
need to be doing anyway sep separately
from your mental training and
visualization so what we’re talking
about here is thus far five principles
of mental training and visualization
that are well established from the
scientific research literature in fact I
haven’t mentioned this quite yet and
I’ll refer to some other references but
there’s a wonderful systematic review of
a large number of studies that have
looked at mental training and
visualization what’s effective what’s
less effective across a bunch of
different disciplines that include
education medicine music psychology and
sports we will provide a link to this
paper in the show captions but the title
of the paper is best practice for motor
imagery a systematic literature view on
motor imagery training elements in five
different disciplines as the title
suggests it’s mainly for motor imagery
training but it extends into music which
of course involves motor training and
execution but as well as education this
review establishes a number of different
important things I’m going to read off
some of the um key or uh highlight
takeaways for instance I described
principle one of effective mental
training and visualization which is that
the visualization be brief and it be
simple and it be repeated may ask um how
many times that very brief 5 to 15
second exercise of going through some
routine should be repeated well
different Studies have used different
ranges of let’s call them repetitions in
a given training session but the number
that seems to be most effective is
somewhere between 50 and 75 repeats per
session that brings about the question
of how long one should rest between each
repeat this gets a little tricky
depending on what you’re trying to do uh
remember that we have this of threshold
of about 15 seconds for completion of
the entire motor sequence let’s say what
you’re trying to do like a golf swing
takes you 5 Seconds to imagine in your
mind’s eye from the point where you
let’s just say have the ball on the te
you bring the the golf club up you might
reposition your your feet just a little
bit you know that kind of a little
wiggle that golf golfers do and then the
swing if that whole thing takes five
seconds in your mind’s eye and roughly 5
seconds in the real world well then
you’d be able to repeat it of course
three times in 15 seconds that would be
one repetition even though you’re doing
it three times so it’s one 15sec Epoch
as it’s sometimes called EPO Epoch and
then you would rest for an approximately
equivalent amount of time 15 seconds or
so and then repeat and rest 15 seconds
or so and then repeat rest 15 seconds
and then repeat again three golf swings
within that 15 seconds rest 15 seconds
three golf swings within that 15 seconds
rest 15 seconds truth told these Epoch
and these rest periods do not need to be
exact you could imagine for instance
that you get three repetitions of the
Swing within 14 seconds well then do you
do another one or do you wait until the
end of that 15 seconds I encourage you
not to obsess too much about those sorts
of points rather you want to do as many
repeats as you can in about a
15-second Epoch and then rest for about
15 seconds and then repeat for a total
of 50 to 75 repetitions which might not
sound like a lot to some of you might
sound like an awful lot to others of you
to me it sounds like a lot you know 50
repetitions of something in where you’re
trying to concentrate in your mind’s eye
on getting something accomplished over
and over over again in exactly the same
way might seem like a lot we know based
on the learning literature that your
ability to successfully perform
something in the real world will lend
itself to better performance of that
thing in the imagined world within your
mind’s eye that’s also one of these sort
of does but if you’re trying to get
better at something that you’ve never
performed before you really should know
that the mental training visualization
is probably not the best augment to that
real world training until you’re able to
perform it successfully in the real
world at least some of the time mental
training visualization can be effective
however at increasing the accuracy or
the frequency at which you can do that
real world Behavior so if normally
you’re only getting the correct swing or
you’re only hitting the the golf ball
correctly say 10% of the time mental
training and visualization can really
help bring that number up but it is
important that you are able to
successfully complete that motor task in
the real world similarly for performance
of cognitive tasks so say for instance
um speaking a new language you might ask
well gosh what what in the landscape ape
of speaking a new language can be
restricted to 5 to 15 seconds where I
could repeat it anywhere from you know
one to three times in a given Epoch and
then rest and then keep repeating 50 to
75 times Well there I would encourage
you to pick something that you are able
to do perhaps very slowly so to speak a
particular sentence but with some
challenge in getting the accent and the
enunciation right but you’ve completed
it successfully before and you want to
get more smooth or more fluid with it
likewise for you know playing piano
guitar again you have to translate to
the specific cognitive and or motor
activity that you are seeking to improve
at but those epochs lasting 5 to 15
seconds are really the Cornerstone of an
effective mental training and
visualization practice and the repeated
nature of it 50 to 75 repetitions in a
given session is also another
Cornerstone of an effective mental
training and visualization practice uh
so says this review and some of the
other papers that I’m going to get to in
a few moments now now one of the other
key components of a successful mental
training and visualization practice is
how often you perform that mental
training and visualization practice and
again number of different Studies have
looked at this through a number of
different lenses meaning anywhere from
two to eight times per week it does
appear that performing these sessions
anywhere from 3 to five times per week
is going to be effective we could
perhaps even say most effective because
most of the
uh let’s just call it the strongest data
really point to repeating these 50 to 75
Trials of the same thing three to five
times per week so you can come up with a
number that’s reasonable for you to do
consistently and you might ask do you
have to continue to perform the mental
training and visualization forever and
the good news is the answer to that
question is no it does seem that once
you have what’s called Consolidated the
Motor Performance or the cognitive
performance of something it can be
further supported or reinforced that is
Consolidated in the neural circuits that
are responsible for performing that
mental or physical task so in other
words once you are performing that
cognitive or motor task in a way that’s
satisfactory or perhaps just improved
perhaps you’re not 100% but it’s
improved in the real world you don’t
need to continue to do mental training
and visualization to to maintain that
real world performance so that’s a good
thing in fact the ideal situation would
be than to pick a different sequence or
thing that you’re trying to learn and do
mental training and visualization for
that uh I perhaps might have misspoke
there although I don’t want to edit this
out I misspoke in the sense that again I
said for the thing that you’re trying to
learn remember mental training
visualization is going to be most
effective for building up the number of
accurate trials or the your ability to
do something with a greater frequency of
something that you’re already capable of
doing or have done at least once in the
real world okay this is not to say that
mental training and visualization can’t
be used to acquire new skills it can in
principle but it has been shown to be
most effective for enhancing the speed
and the accuracy of skills that one has
already demonstrated some degree of
proficiency at in the real world I think
that’s important to point out because we
often hear mental training visualization
and this equivalence of perceptual and
motor experiences in our Mind’s Eye to
the real world and we think oh all we
have to is Imagine doing something and
we will get better at it and
unfortunately that’s not the case the
good news is however if you can do
something once even very slowly in the
real world and then you bring it to the
mental imagery and visualization domain
you can get much faster at it in a way
that really does translate back to the
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if you recall principle number three or
what I’m calling principle number three
of effective mental training and
visualization which was that you have to
be able to perform the thinger that
you’re trying to get better at through
visualization and imagery in the real
world that should raise the question of
what is The Rao of real world training
versus mental training that’s going to
be most effective ah well here there are
some really interesting data uh not just
in the review that I mentioned but in a
couple of the other papers that we’re
going to talk about in a few minutes but
what I’ve done is I’ve synthesized the
information across those papers and they
really all point to the fact that real
world training is more effective than
mental training and mental training is
more effective than no training now the
mental training more effective than no
training is kind of a duh except that
there are people for instance people who
are injured who are trying to maintain
or replenish some motor skill or ability
to move in a particular way or who have
had traumatic brain injury and are
trying to recreate experiences in a way
that’s safe for them while in a somewhat
restricted format so for instance if
you’ve damaged a limb or you’re
experiencing chronic pain and you need
to take a layoff from some physical
activity there are now many studies
looking at stroke patients at um
patients that have been in accidents TBI
also people who are suffering from more
conventional limb and connective tissue
injuries that if they do mental training
it obviously is not going to put them at
risk of doing those same movements as it
would in the real world right but that
it can actually accelerate or at least
maintain skill performance so this is
pretty exciting if you think about it
what this means and the reason it
underscores this mental training is
better than no training is that should
you find yourself in the unfortunate
circumstance of being injured or unable
to perform a given Behavior
Imagining the sequence of behavior that
you’d like to maintain or even build up
over time provided you’ve done that
motor sequence before in the real world
well the mental training and
visualization can really help keep that
online or even help you improve over
time in fact I have a colleague in the
psychology department at Stanford who
told me an anecdote and admittedly it’s
just an anecdote of a student who was
recruited to Stanford um both for their
academic prowess but also for their
abilities in tennis and was injured in
their first year and at first thought
this was devastating but did a cognitive
reframe around the idea that that let’s
call it extended layoff from actual
tennis was going to afford them the
ability to do more mental training than
they would otherwise even though they
were um quite sad to not be able to do
actual physical training for tennis and
when they came back from that injury
they did indeed manage to improve beyond
the initial non-injured State they were
in before the injury which is pretty
remarkable but as this colleague pointed
out to me they were very careful to
include a lot of mental training and
visualization during that quote unquote
layoff period so again mental training
better than no training physical
training better than mental training but
when we say physical training better
than mental training what we’re really
talking about is when you allocate a
certain amount of training hours for a
given skill per week okay so how would
this look what these Studies have done
is they’ve said okay if people have the
option of doing the real world training
for 10 hours a week versus mental
training for 10 hours a week which group
performs better it turns out it’s the
ones that do the physical training for
10 hours per week however we also know
that combinations of physical training
and mental training can bring about
results that are greater than either one
of those alone how would that work well
I wish I could tell you that if you did
nine hours of physical training per week
plus one hour of mental training that
your performance would be better than if
you did 10 hours of physical training
and that’s not the case okay this is why
we can reliably say physical real world
training and again this could be in the
cognitive domain is always going to be
more effective on an hour by hour basis
compared to mental training so if you
can do real world training and perhaps
we should be calling it real world as
opposed to physical but if you can do
real world training compared to purely
mental training that’s going to be the
best use of your time this is really
important it doesn’t underscore
everything that we’re talking about
because here’s the really cool thing if
you do 10 hours per week of real world
physical training again could be running
could be music could be math could be
whatever it is you’re trying to learn
shooting basketballs hitting golf balls
and you add one hour or even half an
hour of mental training to that real
world training well then the results are
significantly greater than you would
experience with physical training alone
and of course it would be greater than
you could achieve with mental training
alone because we already established
that real world training is more
powerful in learning skills and
retaining skills than is mental training
okay if any of that was confusing let me
just say it one more time just to be
ultra clear if you have the option to do
real world training for a cognitive
Andor motor skill versus mental training
always go with real world training
however if you can add to a maximum
amount of real world training by doing
some mental training and you follow the
principles that we’ve been discussing
here which are gleaned from the
scientific
literature well then you are going to
get significantly greater results in
terms of speed accuracy and consistency
of performance of those real world
behaviors and cognitive
abilities and of course if you are
unable to do physical training for
whatever reason injury travel whatever
the case may be well then doing mental
training is still far far significantly
greater than doing no training at all
okay so total layoffs it turns out are a
bad thing if you want to get better at
something and indeed if you want to
retain certain skills both cognitive and
motor now a couple of other things to
keep in mind as you’re thinking about
how to build up skills through a
combination of physical and mental
training well remember back to the
beginning of the episode where we talked
about neuroplasticity and the fact that
self-directed adaptive plasticity which
is really what we’re talking about here
in this entire episode things that
you’re trying to learn in a deliberate
way that is as you recall a two-part
process requires focused attention both
when you’re doing it in the real world
and when you’re doing mental training
and it requires rest and sleep and in
fact you would be very wise to try and
get a good night’s sleep both on the
days when you do physical training again
also called real world training and
mental training you may also be asking
can you do them on the same day and this
gets into some Nuance in the literature
but by my read of the literature here’s
the
takeaway if you are doing the maximum
amount of physical training that you can
do according to your schedule preventing
injury and all those sorts of important
constraints and you’re going to add
mental training and imagery it doesn’t
really matter when you do it you could
do it immediately after your physical
training you could do it on a separate
day but you do want to place it at a
time in which you can try and get good
sleep that night so for instance Believe
It or Not Studies have been done where
people are doing mental training at
times when they should be sleeping that
is going to offset some of the
degradation and performance that you
would normally see but it’s generally a
bad idea you should do your real world
training and your mental training
whenever it is that you can and then you
should try and get as much quality sleep
as you possibly can on the night
following that physical Andor mental
training okay this is true pretty much
every night of your life right if had my
way that is if I had a magic wand which
obviously I don’t I would ensure that I
and everyone else in the world get
sufficient amounts of quality sleep
every single night but that’s just not
realistic there are going to be times
where that’s simply not going to happen
for whatever reason and I always say if
you’re not going to get sufficient
amounts of quality sleep for whatever
reason try to make it for a fun reason
or a good reason but I think getting
sufficient amounts of quality sleep 80%
of the nights of your life is a
reasonable goal and one that’s worth
driving toward and we have lots of
episodes now three really on mastering
sleep on perfecting your sleep and uh
episode guest episode with the great
Matthew Walker uh who wrote the book why
why we
sleep incredibly important book all of
those as well as our toolkit for Sleep
describe ways to improve your sleep so
you can refer to those episodes if
you’re having challenges with sleep and
want to improve on sleep and things like
non-sleep deep rest which can support
your ability to sleep and your ability
to learn so sleep is still vitally
important not just for ensuring
neuroplasticity occurs following real
world training but also following mental
training and again when you place that
mental training is not so critical at
least it doesn’t appear to be based on
the literature so if anyone out there
has knowledge of any peer-reviewed
studies stating that mental training
should be done either before or after
some hours away from Real World Training
please send that to me or put it in the
show um excuse me put it in the comments
on YouTube and I’ll see it there because
I do read all the comments but I’m not
aware of any any such data or analysis
and by the way if you are interested in
understanding the relationship between
motor skill acquisition and retention
and this first night phenomenon of sleep
the first night after training versus
sleep on the second night Etc there’s a
really wonderful paper that was
published by none other than the great
Matthew Walker when I believe he was a
graduate student maybe he was a postto
when he did this in Robert stick Gold’s
Lab at Harvard uh the title of the paper
is sleep and time course of motor skill
learning uh this is a paper published in
2003 uh still an incredibly important
paper I will provide a link to it in the
show note captions it really highlights
um some of the key aspects of when
people sleep and how critical sleep is
on the night following and the nights
following that training in order to
really consolidate certain types of
learning and what phases of sleep relate
to the consolidation of motor learning
Etc a really wonderful paper and of
course but just one of Matthew and
Robert stick Gold’s incredible papers on
sleep and learning remember at the
beginning of the episode when I
mentioned that many people are good at
mental training and visualization but
people are not well sex differences have
been explored and age related
differences have been explored in terms
of people’s ability to mentally
visualize and train up specific skills
and while initially there were some sex
differences identified really the bulk
of the subsequent literature that is the
majority of quality peer-reviewed
studies on this aspect of mental
training visualization point to the fact
that there are no significant
differences between males and females in
terms of their ability to mentally
visual visualiz nor their ability to use
that mental visualization toward
improving cognitive or motor skills uh
that point was uh covered in some detail
in the review I mentioned earlier best
practice for motor imagery a systematic
literature review on motor imagery
training elements and five different
disciplines this review also looked at
age related effects and perhaps the only
thing that really popped out from this
literature review in terms of age
dependent differences that point to
changes in protocols that you might make
is that for individuals 65 or older a
common comination of physical and mental
training may actually allow them to gain
and consolidate skills better than were
they to do physical training alone now
whether or not that’s due to some lower
upper limit of physical training that
they can do because of their age or
whether or not that’s something specific
to do with older versus younger neural
circuits isn’t clear but what this
review also makes clear is that for the
vast majority of people out there so
teens people in their 20s and their 40s
and so on physical training more
effective than mental training we said
that before combination of physical and
mental training more effective than
physical training alone provided the
mental training is on top of the maximum
amount of physical training that one
could do and of course mental training
more effective than no training at all
okay so we talked about sets and Reps we
talked about you know 5 to 15sec EPO
with about 15sec breaks in between or
rest between sets if you will repeated
for 50 to 75 trials done three to five
times per week some of the conditions of
keeping it really simple The Importance
of Being able to actually perform those
sequences in the real world and so on
what we haven’t discussed is first
person versus third person and eyes open
versus eyes closed so what are we really
talking about here well first person
mental training and visualization would
be where you are imagining doing
something and you are seeing yourself
doing something from the inside out as
opposed from the outside in Imagine for
instance wearing a head cam okay or a
body Cam and doing something with your
hands or being in virtual reality and
having the sense that whatever you see
in front of you and that’s moving and
that you’re doing that’s you so what I
mean by this is a mental training or
visualization protocol for instance if
you were at the piano or at a guitar
where you’re actually looking down at or
sensing the feeling of your hands but
you’re not actually moving your hands
okay as opposed to seeing yourself from
outside of your body so looking at
yourself say standing next to you or
from across the room you’re looking at
yourself playing the piano or playing
guitar or swinging a golf club or doing
a tennis serf okay first person versus
third person and what the data tell us
is that first person mental training and
visualization is generally more
effective than third person mental
training and visualization which perhaps
raises another chorus of does out there
but it needn’t have been the case right
I mean you could imagine that seeing
yourself doing something and doing it
perfectly because you’ve done it
perfectly once before hopefully would
allow you to build up that skill more
quickly because you have that third
person perspective where you can really
see every aspect and every element of
what you’re trying to
perform Well turns out that the first
person mental training and visualization
is significantly more effective than
that third person mental training and
visualization so if what you’re trying
to learn lends itself well to this
firsters mental experiencing of self as
you perform the cognitive Andor motor
skill I suggest you do that as opposed
to the third person version now what if
what you’re trying to learn doesn’t lend
itself well to firstperson visualization
for instance what if you’re trying to
learn a specific cognitive skill that
doesn’t involve any overt modor Behavior
to be observed well in that case it’s
very clear that closing your eyes
ideally and trying to perform that
specific cognitive task or the statement
or the you know uttering of a particular
sentence in another language or doing
some sort of computation or problem
solving of some sort in your head well
that itself of course is first person
because it’s inside your own body as
opposed to and I don’t know that anyone
would actually do this but looking at
yourself from a third person perspective
in your mind’s eye and seeing yourself
perform that cognitive challenge
whatever that challenge may happen to be
okay now we have to address eyes open
versus eyes closed and this is where the
literature gets pretty interesting I
always thought for some reason I don’t
know why but I presumed that mental
training and visualization should always
be done eyes closed but it turns out
that’s not how a lot of studies of
mental training and visualization have
been done and in fact many of them have
arrived at really impressive protocols
which are essentially the protocols that
I’ve distilled out and I’m listing out
during today’s episode having people
either watch videos of themselves
performing a given skill and imagining
themselves in that role and again it’s
them so again during the mental training
visualization they’re watching a movie
of themselves so they’re somewhat in the
third person perspective I guess we
could technically say they are in the
third person perspective but they’re
watching thems so in doing that we know
based on neuroimaging studies that when
we watch videos of ourselves doing
things we experience that more from a
first-person perspective than if we
watch videos of other people doing
things use your imagination here folks
so if you’re somebody for instance who’s
trying to get better at a particular
skill this could be not just sport but
also public speaking watching videos of
yourself doing that can be very
effective but of course we have to come
back to the first principle of effective
mental training and visualization which
is that whatever it is that we’re trying
to build up or consolidate as a skill
needs to be brief and repeated so what
we’re really talking about here is
watching a video of ourselves on Loop or
listening to a audio or audio video
recording of ourselves on Loop for
whatever aspect uh that we’re trying to
build up or improve upon now for people
that for instance are trying to get
better at dealing with public speaking
and there isn’t a particular skill or
utterance of particular sentences or
words that they’re trying to accomplish
but rather they’re trying to learn to be
more relaxed or to articulate better in
the public speaking scenario there would
be one of the few instances in which I
suggest more General theme and not exact
recapitulation of some specific words
that you’re going to say perhaps it
could be a sequence of you walking out
onto stage toward the podium or out from
the podium and facing the audience and
looking in multiple directions up and
down to see people in every corner of
the room and just repeating that on Loop
in your mind’s eye or watching yourself
do that on video and making yourself
calm in your internal State as you’re
doing that this is more of mental
autonomic training because what you’re
really trying to do is control your
autonomic nervous system the nervous
system aspect that controls how alert or
calm you are as opposed to a specific
skill however you could also translate
this to you know dance steps or to motor
sequences for playing an instrument and
so on so the point here is that it’s not
as if there is zero utility to third
person mental training and visualization
there can be but firsters mental
training visualization is going to be
more effective as I mentioned before and
if you’re are going to use third person
mental training visualization ideally
you would be looking at yourself either
on video or listening to yourself in
audio Andor video that is going to be
more effective than closing your eyes
and trying to imagine yourself from a
third person perspective in your mind’s
eye okay so just to make it really
simple first person better than third
person visualization if you’re going to
go with third person visualization try
and go with real third person
visualization where you’re actually
seeing and or hearing yourself on a
screen and again this was somewhat of a
surprise surprised to me I always
thought that mental training and
visualization was done with eyes closed
I thought okay you close your eyes you
imagine this you imagine that that’s
actually not the case for many many
studies some of which are considered
real Hallmark studies within the field
of mental training and visualization and
the different neural circuits that it
recruits and along those lines there’s a
really interesting study it came out not
that long ago this was just a summer of
2022 I’d like to discuss in a little bit
of detail because it really hammers home
a number of the principles that we’ve
talked about the title of the article is
mental practice modulates functional
connectivity between the cerebellum and
the primary motor
cortex going to tell you the essential
features of this study first of all
primary motor
cortex sometimes called M1 is a
relatively small but vitally important
strip of neurons in or near the front of
your
brain the neurons there are called upper
motor neurons they communicate through a
set of neural connections with what are
called lower motor neurons the lower
motor neurons sit what’s called the
ventral Horn of the spinal cord so along
the spinal cord you have sensory inputs
coming from skin and muscle and what’s
called propri receptive feedback that
tells you where your limbs are in
relation to each other and to yourself
and so on you also have motor neurons
that live in the spinal cord they’re
actually the ones that send little wires
that we call axons out to the muscles
release acolan onto those muscles and
allow those muscles to contract lower
motor neurons are the ones that actually
generate movement however they are
largely responsible for reflexive
movements or already learned movements
and they require some input from things
like Central pattern generators and some
other circuits within the spinal cord
and brain stem but it’s those M1 primary
motor cortex neurons that are called
upper motor neurons because they control
lower motor neurons through directed
action
okay so when I say primary motor cortex
I’m really talking about those upper
motor neurons M1 the cerebellum is an
area in the back of your brain if you
were to look at a brain You’ see two
little loes back there that are highly
foliated foliated means that lots of
lots of f and lots of bumps and grooves
back there and it actually means mini
brain it looks like a kind of a mini
brain stuffed in the back of the brain
in certain animals the cerebellum is
much larger than the rest of the brain
in humans the cerebellum is relatively
small compared to the rest of so-called
neocortex the outer shell the human
brain the cerebellum is involved in
Balance it’s also involved in eye
movements it’s also involved in timing
and motor learning and the key thing to
understand is that the cerebellum
communicates with the primary motor
cortex and it can do so through what’s
called inhibition and it has outputs
that inhibit the activity of neurons in
the motor cortex and elsewhere and that
has a profound influence on the
execution of motor Behavior and the
learning of particular motor behaviors
now I don’t want to get into too much
detail around all this but what you need
to know is that the cerebellum
communicates with M1 primary motor
cortex M1 is primary motor cortex those
are the upper motor neurons that are
going to control the lower motor neurons
and are going to control physical
Behavior an execution of physical
movements the communication between
cerebellum and primary motor cortex is
inhibitory although it can activate
motor cortex too and this gets into a
little bit of technical detail but there
can be inhibition of inhibition so if
you take something that’s a break and
you inhibit that break what you end up
with is more excitation okay so the
takeaway here that’s key and everyone
should be able to understand even though
you may or may not be following this
whole cerebellum primary motor cortex
thing is that when we gain a new skill
or we get more proficient at a skill so
faster more accurate there tends to be
more net excitation of the cerebellum to
motor cortex communication and that is
accomplished by reducing inhibition so
that’s where it gets a little bit
confusing to some but in this paper what
they did is they explored people’s
ability to improve on a very specific
but very simple motor sequence it’s one
that you’re already familiar with it’s
that t sequence that I talked about
before where the thumb is digit one
index finger number two middle finger
number three ring finger number four and
pinky finger number five and it’s a one
two 1 3 1 4 1 15 1 two 1 3 1 14 one 15
and they had people actually perform
this and they measured their speed and
accuracy and then they had them do a
practice session that was either an
intentional task so one group just
looked at an attentional queue and had
to maintain uh focus on that attentional
and another group did mental practice
they basically did 50 imagined trials so
just in their Mind’s Eye of this 1 two
13 1 1415 rep on repeat okay 50 trials
much in the same way as what I
referenced as the ideal protocol earlier
okay 50 rounds of that then they got
tested again on the motor task in the
real world and there were also
recordings of the cerebella to primary
motor cortex communication so there were
a bunch of different results in this
study I think are interesting but the
ones that are most important are that
quote we found that mental practice
enhanced both the speed and accuracy of
this 1 two 13 1 145 performance in the
real world when people did these 50
imagin trials there are many results out
there different papers that parallel and
essentially say the same thing as what
is said in this paper remember there
have been studies of mental training
dating back to the
1880s but what this paper really does it
looks at the neur machinery and the
changes in the neurom machinery and what
they found using transcranial magnetic
stimulation both in the context of
stimulating but also recording activity
and connectivity between cerebellum and
primary motor cortex is that mental
training
enhanced the net excitation of
cerebellum to motor cortex communication
that is it reduced the inhibition in a
way that allowed motor cortex to
generate these movements with more
accuracy and more speed what’s also
interesting about this paper is that it
showed that the Improvement in
performance of this task was not related
to activation of the motor pathways
themselves so it’s not the case that the
cerebellum activation or inhibition
changed the patterns of excitation going
directly to the spinal cord because
those Pathways actually exist through a
couple of intermediate stations what it
really showed is that when people do
mental training and here you could say
Okay 50 trials that’s a lot of Trials
but it’s not actually that many trials
is pretty fast learning if you think
about do a task in the real world do 50
Trials of the imagined task do the trial
in the real world again significant
Improvement in speed and accuracy
through now what are becoming to be
established neural circuit connections
between cerebellum and primary motor
cortex okay so this study is one of
several but not a tremendous number of
studies out there that are starting to
really pinpoint the underlying neural
circuits that allow mental training and
visualization to really improve motor
skill performance but again and please
hear me on this in this study and in the
vast majority of other studies that have
shown significant Improvement in Motor
Performance in the real world by use of
mental training and visualization there
was an ability of each and everyone in
the study to perform the specific motor
sequence in the real world that then
they were able to enhance with mental
training and visualization now thus far
we’ve been talking mostly about
performance of motor sequences and one
of the things to really understand about
performance of motor sequences both in
the real world and in the Imagine
context is that it involves the doing
that’s what we call a go action and not
doing certain things what do I mean by
not doing well for many tasks out there
even ones as simple as the 1 two 13 1
1415 task that we talked about a moment
ago there is the need not just to tap
those fingers in the correct sequence as
quickly as possible but also to be
accurate about it to not do 1314 or 13
and four at the same time so there’s
both a go component an action component
and a withhold action component and the
ability to withhold action is strongly
constrained by the time domain in other
words the faster that we need to perform
a given motor sequence the more likely
we are to perform incorrect components
of the motor sequence as well okay so
one of the key things about mental
training and visualization that’s really
remarkable is that it can also be used
and has been shown to improve not just
go aspects of Motor Performance and
cognitive performance but also
noo aspects of Motor Performance and
skill learning now the go noo thing is
something I’ve discussed before on this
podcast in reference to the so-called
basil ganglia basil ganglia are
subcortical so they’re below that bumpy
surface of the human brain that we’re
most accustomed to seeing when we look
at it from the outside and the basil
ganglia are strongly involved in Go
versus noo type tasks and learning now
there are only a few studies that have
really looked at the learning and the
Improvement of noggo components of motor
learning but these no-go components are
really really important in fact if we
were to look at what’s involved at
Improvement in a golf swing or shooting
free throws or getting better at piano
or getting better at math or language
speaking I think it’s fair to say that
at least half and probably as much as
75% of motor learning is about
restricting inappropriate movements or
utterances or thoughts if what you’re
trying to learn is purely cognitive okay
I think that’s an important point that
brings us back to our initial learning
when we come into this world that
developmental plasticity which as you
recall we have a lot of interconnected
aspects of our brain and nervous system
early in life remember the example of
the kid trying to eat and getting the
spoon of food and Bowl on their head Etc
and then over time getting more accurate
at bringing food to their mouth and
eating in a in a clean way things most
but not all people accomplish in at some
point in the course of their lifetime
well there haven’t been many but there
have been a few very interesting studies
looking at how mental training and
visualization can improve the no-go
aspect of motor learning and I think
this is important to highlight because
it really mirrors What’s Done in the
real world as opposed to just the finger
tapping type things which are mostly go
tasks again there’s a little bit of a
no-go component there but there are
specific tasks that people have
developed for the laboratory that really
closely mimic action learning and
cognitive learning in the real world and
one of the more um important of those is
What’s called the stop signal task now
the stop signal task is something that
I’ll explain to you I’ll also provide a
link in the show note caption so you can
try it it’s actually a lot of fun to try
this because it really gives you a sense
of just how challenging some of these
laboratory tasks are let me just
describe it for a moment the stop signal
task was really developed and
popularized by Gordon Logan and William
Cowen Gordon Logan is at Vanderbilt
University and has done a lot of really
important work uh but one of the
important aspects of his work is looking
at Motor Performance and skill
acquisition and the development of the
stop signal task I’ll describe the stop
signal task for you now in Broad Contour
you or another research subject would
sit in front of a screen there are two
keys on that keyboard or two keys among
the other keys on that keyboard one
which is designated left the other which
is designated right and then on the
screen you’ll be Pres presented for
instance with a left facing or a right
facing Arrow so in the initial trial
what would happen is that Arrow would
pop up on the screen and your job is to
press the left key when the right facing
arrow is presented you press the right
key okay pretty straightforward but
there’s a limited amount of time in
which you can do this and the idea is
that you’re going to need to do this
within approximately 500 milliseconds of
the presentation of that Arrow or else
it’s going to tell you that you missed
that trial now of course if you press
the wrong key so if the arrow goes goes
left and you press the right key then
you would be told you got that one wrong
okay so this is a reaction time test and
not one that’s particularly novel what’s
novel and what Logan and Cowan developed
was that in the stop signal task every
once in a while not every trial but
every once in a while that arrow is
presented and then with some delay
ranging from anywhere from 100
milliseconds to maybe 350 milliseconds
there would be a red circle or a red X
also presented which is a stop signal
and your job is to not press the key
that corresponds to the direction of
arrow in fact not press any key at all
now you can imagine how if the stop
signal shows up with a longer delay
after the presentation of the arrow
there’s a higher probability that you
will have already generated the key
pressing movement okay so at the link
that we provided in the show note
caption you can actually do these two
tasks and what you’ll find is that you
and most people will be able to do this
Arrow to Reaction Time pressing of the
left to right key somewhere in the
neighborhood between 300 milliseconds
and maybe as long as 500 millisecond
delay you’ll get an average of how
quickly you respond and then of course
if you choose to and I would hope you
would choose to go on and do the stop
signal task you will be told trial by
trial whether or not you are hitting the
right keys because if you are you’ll be
allowed to progress to the next trial or
if you are told to stop
that is you get the stop signal and you
press the key anyway you’ll be told that
you made an error because you did not
stop now again with very short delays
between the presentation of the arrow
and the stop signal you are going to be
much better at inhibiting or preventing
yourself from the behavior at the no-go
aspect of motor execution that is what
you will find is that if the stop signal
is presented very shortly after let’s
say 100 milliseconds which is very very
brief amount of time after the
presentation of the arrow there’s a good
chance that you’re going to be able to
withhold the key pressing behavior
however if the delay is anywhere from
200 to 350 milliseconds after the
presentation of the arrow chances are
that you’re going to press the button
even when you shouldn’t have on at least
some of those trials okay and if you try
and game the system and wait a certain
amount of time after the presentation of
each Arrow there will also be times in
which the stop signal does not appear
and you fail to hit the button in the
appropriate amount of time so it’s a fun
little task it doesn’t cost any or is
that maybe a couple of minutes of your
time and if you do have time to go to it
I think um it will give you a much
deeper flavor for the sorts of
experiments that we’re talking about
here and that you find that these stop
signals are actually pretty hard to
generate when you’re trying to learn
some new motor behavior and that
actually illustrates a bigger Point here
if today you sense that we’ve been
talking about studies of you know
tapping fingers and you know stopping
button presses and that those examples
are highly artificial and don’t really
translate to the real world
well keep in mind that the tasks that
are used in these studies really Target
the specific neural circuits that is the
same neural circuits that you would use
for the performance of essentially any
motor task now of course other motor
tasks like ones where you involve your
feet or cognitive tasks where you have
to think really hard about specific
information and search for that
information assemble it in particular
ways of course involve other neurons and
neural circuits that we haven’t
discussed today but the core components
of these go and no-go tasks or the stop
signal task really capture the core
elements of most all of cognitive endoor
motor learning in some way that’s
fundamentally important okay so they
have real world
relevance the paper that I’d like to
just briefly describe to you is entitled
motor imagery combined with physical
training improves response inhibition in
the stop signal task okay so that title
is a little bit uh wordy but now you
know what the stop signal task is and
what this paper essentially found was
that if people did physical training so
the sort of experiment that I just
described versus mental training where
they sat eyes open and imagined their
responses to those arrows and stop
signals but they didn’t actually
generate any key presses versus a
combination of the physical training so
the actual pressing of the buttons or
withholding pressing of the buttons as
the case may be plus mental
training over the course of about 5 days
using the Contour described of the key
principles of mental training and
performance we talked about I’ll get to
the specifics in a moment but it really
obeyed most all of what we’ve talked
about if not all of it so repetition
simple repeated over about five days and
so on and so forth what they found was
that the mental training and physical
training group so mental and real world
training groups performed significantly
better in the stop signal reaction time
that is they were able to withhold
action when they needed to withhold
action more frequently and with more
accuracy vended either the physical
training or mental training groups alone
so this
actually spits in the face of what we
said earlier which is that physical
training is always better than mental
training and mental training is always
better than no training and it’s
important to point out here that both
the physical training and the mental
training groups experience significant
improvements in their reaction time and
accuracy at the stop signal task but in
the case of this study which is
exploring the withholding of
inappropriate
behaviors the combination of mental
training and physical training
outperformed either physical or mental
training alone so while earlier we said
that if you have a certain amount of
time in order to train something up
physical training is always going to be
better than mental training well here we
have somewhat of an exception where if
the thing you’re trying to learn
involves withholding mistakes as opposed
to trying to generate the right
behaviors per se well then you are
probably better off doing a combination
of mental training and physical training
let me state that a little bit
differently if you’re finding that
you’re screwing up something not because
you can’t initiate that particular motor
Behavior but you’re doing the wrong
thing at the wrong time you’re not able
to withhold a particular action well
then in that case mental training in
combination with physical training
becomes especially important so for you
coaches for you students out there keep
that in mind when trying to learn how to
withhold particular action sequences
because they’re not serving you well in
the real world using a combination of
real world training and physical
training is actually better for you on
an hour per hour basis than is physical
training alone a couple of key details
about this study should you decide to
implement these protocols in this study
they did approximately 30 Trials of the
thing that they were trying to get
better at now they did those in the real
world so in this case the stop signal
task involved actually pressing those
buttons and then they had a test phase
of about 144 go trials and about 48 stop
trials okay so this is important if you
are a coach or you’re a student or
you’re just going to self-direct this
kind of learning in your self-directed
adaptive plasticity it’s important that
you mix in both go and no-go trials okay
it wasn’t always the case that there was
a stop signal
generated the other thing that was
really impressive about the study is
that the changes occurred very quickly
so the training was performed five times
over five days so once a day for five
days again back to to this three to five
times per week principal
and the improvements were really
significant in some cases in fact if you
decide to puruse this paper uh you can
go to um table two and you can see you
know in some cases a near doubling in
the reduction in reaction time through a
combination of mental and physical
training compared to physical training
alone or mental training alone again
however both physical training and
mental training groups alone saw
significant improvements but the
combination of mental training and
physical training was far greater than
you saw with either one of those alone
so that’s all nicely Quantified for you
in this paper so again I really like
this paper despite it not involving a
huge number of subjects I think it is a
key paper because it really points to
such an important element of motor
learning and training which is this
action withholding component this no-go
component that here is captured so
nicely in the stop signal task so before
we round up our discussion about motor
training visualization I wanted to just
briefly touch on some of the studies
that have explored why certain
individuals are better or worse at motor
training and visualization and what that
might correlate with at the beginning of
today’s episode I briefly mentioned
aphantasia which is this phenomenon
where some people just simply can’t or
seem to have extreme Challenge
generating visual imagery been a number
of studies exploring how fantasic as
they’re sometimes called although
nowadays it’s um not considered polite
if you will to refer to people according
to their condition so for instance
propas agnosia is a condition in which
people are unable to recognize
particular faces and in the past these
people were referred to as propac
agnostics okay as if their condition
defined them right um nowadays it’s not
considered polite to do that rather we
say the person has propath agnosia or
suffers from propath agnosia Al other
words suffer then also has become a
little bit touchy I’m going to do my
best to just try and be as clear as
possible here and explain that people
who have Fantasia can have a Fantasia to
varying degrees so they can either have
a complete absence of ability to
generate mental imagery or they have a
poor or kind of rudimentary ability to
generate visual imagery in their Mind’s
Eye it was thought that people who have
aphantasia are not capable of what’s
called synesthesia synesthesia or when
people have perceptual blending and this
is not while under the influence of any
kind of psychedelic or other kind of
drug perceptual blending of an atypical
kind or rare kind I actually have some
friends I two friends that have
different forms of synesthesia One
Associates different keys on the piano
or musical notes with specific colors in
a very very onetoone specific way so
they’ll tell you that E flat on the
piano is a particular tone in their mind
of of Amber
Hue okay and that I forget what other
key is associated with a particular
shade of red and so on and so forth are
these people better at piano are they
more perceptive of colors in their
environment not necessarily so this is
just a perceptual blending it doesn’t
necessarily lend itself to any improved
ability now you could imagine why people
would hypothesize that people have a
Fantasia especially it’s its extreme
form would not be capable of or have
synesthesias but turns out that’s not
the case there are a couple of really
interesting papers again we will link
these in the show note captions um one
is entitled what is the relationship
between aphantasia synesthesia and
autism and the other one is aphantasia
the science of visual imagery extremes
and I really like the review aphantasia
the science of visual imagery extremes
for those of you that are interested in
understanding aphantasia with more depth
the study addressing the relationship
between aphantasia cesia and autism
found that aphantasia is indeed linked
to weak visual imagery but that
aphantasia can also be synesthesics and
vice versa what was also interesting
about this study is they address the
question of whether or not people who
have a Fantasia that is a challenge or
inability to generate mental or visual
imagery tend to have features associated
with autism or residing somewhere on the
autism spectrum and I’m not trying to
use ambiguous language here but the
whole set of language and nomenclature
around autism and autism spectrum is
also undergoing revision now because we
are now coming to understand that
autism and nowadays it’s generally not
considered correct to call people
autistics in that sense but autism is
considered one set of positions along a
spectrum that includes things like
Aspergers Etc but that may also include
other aspects of cognition and even
personality so these are starting to be
viewed not just as a spectrum or one
Continuum ranging from you know
non-autistic to autistic but a lot of
variation and subtlety in between and
even crossing over with other aspects of
U personality Psychology and
Neuroscience okay so I’m not trying to
be vague here I’m trying to be accurate
rather by saying the whole description
and categorization of autistic
non-autistic Etc is undergoing vast
revision right now but the important
point I think from this paper is that
indeed
it was found that people who have
aphantasia tend to exhibit more of the
features that are associated with the
autism spectrum now how those things
relate to one another in terms of their
clinical relevance isn’t clear and of
course it is entirely unclear as to
what’s the chicken and what’s the egg
there so you could imagine no pun
intended for instance that people that
are on the autism spectrum might be less
proficient at generating visual imagery
because they are exceedingly proficient
at other things you could also imagine
that people are placed onto the autism
spectrum as it’s sometimes referred to
or are associated with particular
features on the autism spectrum because
in a causal way of the aphantasia and of
course it’s extremely important to
highlight that not all people that
consider themselves or that people
consider Autistic or that are on the
autism spectrum or Aspergers or any
variation thereof necessarily have
aphantasia just as it is that not all
people that are on the autism spectrum
completely lack or even lack what’s
called theory of mind which is the
ability to sort of empathize And
subscribe feelings and motivations of
others when viewing the actions and
perceived feelings of others okay so
what I just described hopefully doesn’t
come across as just a bunch of words
soup what I’m trying to pinpoint is that
there does seem to be a relationship
between one’s ability to generate visual
imagery and certain constellations of
cognitive emotional perception and
behavior and vice versa okay in a future
episode I promise to cover synesthesia
and autism and some of the related
cognitive and motor aspects of autism
and things like Aspergers I’m going to
feature an expert guest or actually
several expert guests in this area
because it is a rapidly evolving and
somewhat controversial field meanwhile I
think it’s important to at least
consider how mental training and
visualization might relate to to certain
aspects of cognition and our ability to
visualize things not just in terms of
other people’s behavior which is one of
the common ways that people probe for
autism and Asbergers versus non-autistic
and non- Asbergers and so on the So-Cal
theory of Mind task in effect asking
whether or not children or adults can
really get in the mind of others that’s
a typical task developed by Simon Baron
Cohen but also whether or not children
and adults are capable of generating
mental imagery in a really Vivid way or
whether or not they have minor or even
extreme Challenge in doing so and
perhaps the most direct way to explain
why I included this aspect of the
discussion of mental training and
visualization as it relates to different
cognitive phenotypes or neurocognitive
phenotypes such as autism Asbergers Etc
is because if you think about motor
skill execution or cognitive skill
execution and the relationship between
mental training and visualization and
motor skills or cognitive skills that’s
all pretty straightforward when you’re
talking about finger tapping and go noo
tasks and learning piano and things of
that sort but in many many ways our
learning of social cognition our
learning of how to behave in certain
circumstances what’s considered normal
or
atypical neurotypical and neuroatypical
if you will a lot of that is not just
generated from the inside out but it
also involves observation and
visualization of what are considered
appropriate and inappropriate definitely
placed in quotes by the way folks I’m
not placing judg judement I’m just
saying appropriate and inappropriate for
a given context behavior in other words
social learning and social cognition is
every bit as much a learned behavior and
pattern of cognitive and motor patterns
as is tapping fingers or withholding
keypresses in a go noo task it’s just
that it transmits into a domain that
involves smiling versus frowning versus
asking a question versus staying silent
versus sitting still versus fidgeting
what’s appropriate and when what’s
inappropriate and when all of that is
what we call social cognition and has
direct parallels to everything we’ve
been talking about up until this point
so today we did a deep dive which is
often the case on this podcast into
mental training and
visualization during the course of the
episode I try to lay down one by one the
key components of an effective mental
training and visualization practice
everything ranging from making sure that
the practice involve brief EPO repeats
of specific sequences of motor Endor
cognitive behavior that those be
relatively simple so that you can
imagine them even if you’re somebody
who’s not good at doing mental training
and visualization and I should mention
that if you do mental training and
visualization repeatedly over time you
get better at mental training and
visualization there’s a what’s called
metaplasticity here so it’s not just
about engaging neuroplasticity of
particular circuits it’s also about
getting better at engaging plasticity so
plasticity of
plasticity I also describe the key
Importance of Being able to actually
execute specific movements and cognitive
tasks in the real world if you want the
mental training and visualization to be
especially effective and we talked about
the importance of naming things we
talked about the importance of creating
not just one but many parallels between
real world training and mental training
and visualization and really on the
whole what we established was that
cognitive Andor motor learning really is
something that you should do in the real
world as much as possible but if you
can’t due to injury or whatever
conditions using mental training is a
reasonable substitute but not a complete
substitute and if you can’t do real
world training for whatever reason
injury or otherwise that mental training
is going to be better than no training
at all and of course we established that
at least for withholding action in order
to get better at a skill a combination
of physical training and mental training
is going to be best but that if you’re
trying to learn a new skill and you’re
having challenges with performing that
skill because of an inability to do the
skill in the first place or on a
consistent basis will then on an hour
by- hour basis you’re best off investing
your time into the physical training
only incorporating mental training and
visualization if you are able to do that
on top of the maximum amount of real
world training that you’re capable of
doing and of course we talked about the
actual neural circuits and a bit about
how the actual neuroplasticity occurs
early in the episode I mentioned
long-term depression well in describing
the improvements in no-go tasks those
stop signal tasks a lot of what’s
observed during those tasks is
Improvement or rather an increase in
long-term depression of specific neural
connections so my hope is that in
learning about those basic neural
circuits and plasticity mechanisms and
in learning about the critical
importance of focus and attention during
learning both real world and imagined as
well as the importance of sleep and deep
rest for really consolidating learning
and the different tools the various
steps or principles of effective mental
training and visualization that you now
have a fairly coherent or maybe even a
very coherent picture of how to develop
the best mental training and
visualization protocols for you I
realize that everyone has different
goals everyone has different time
constraints if you are somebody that’s
interested in developing a mental
training and visualization protocol so
if you’re a coach or teacher or simply a
learner or you’re trying to self-direct
your own adaptive plasticity I want to
emphasize that the key components that
we discussed today are essential to
include but I wouldn’t obsess about
whether or not a given Epoch is 15 or 20
seconds or even 25 seconds I wouldn’t
obsess over whether or not you got 30
repetitions in and then your mind
drifted or whether or not you could do
the full 50 to 75 or whether or not even
in your mind’s eye you made some errors
what’s been shown over and over again in
this literature is that performing
mental training and visualization
repeatedly and in a very restricted way
that makes it easier to perform those
trials over and over and over again and
with a high degree of accuracy almost
always really we can fairly say in a
entally every study where it’s been
explored has led to improvements in real
world performance of both cognitive
Andor physical tasks so if you’re trying
to learn anything at all I do encourage
you to explore motor training and
visualization because basically all the
studies out there in fact I couldn’t
find one exception where some degree of
improvement wasn’t observed when people
use motor training and visualization on
a consistent basis even just the three
to five times per week these simple
repeats over and over so I don’t want to
over complicate or make it sound like
mental training and visualization has to
be performed in a very precise way or
that it has to be done perfectly each
and every time quite to the contrary
what is clear is that mental training
and visualization is a very effective
way to improve real world performance if
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you once again for joining me for
today’s discussion all about the science
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training and visualization and last but
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