Science-Based Mental Training & Visualization for Improved Learning

00:00:00.000 | - Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast,

00:00:02.260 | where we discuss science and science-based tools

00:00:04.900 | for everyday life.

00:00:05.900 | I'm Andrew Huberman,

00:00:10.260 | and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology

00:00:13.020 | at Stanford School of Medicine.

00:00:14.900 | Today, we are discussing mental training and visualization.

00:00:18.300 | Mental training and visualization

00:00:19.700 | is a fascinating process that has been shown

00:00:22.080 | over and over again in now hundreds of studies

00:00:25.420 | to improve our ability to learn anything.

00:00:28.340 | When I say anything, I mean the ability to learn music,

00:00:31.900 | the ability to learn and perform mathematics,

00:00:34.980 | the ability to learn and perform motor skills in sport,

00:00:38.000 | in dance, across essentially all domains.

00:00:41.420 | The other incredible thing

00:00:42.300 | about mental training and visualization

00:00:44.260 | is that you'll soon see when you go into the literature,

00:00:47.360 | that is the scientific studies

00:00:48.700 | on mental training and visualization,

00:00:50.540 | you quickly realize that it does not take

00:00:52.760 | a lot of mental training and visualization

00:00:54.900 | in order to get better at anything.

00:00:57.580 | However, that mental training and visualization

00:00:59.840 | has to be performed in a very specific way.

00:01:01.940 | And today we will discuss exactly how to do

00:01:04.260 | mental training and visualization in the specific ways

00:01:07.300 | that allow it to compliment the actual performance

00:01:09.980 | of a motor or cognitive skill

00:01:11.520 | to allow you to learn more quickly and to consolidate,

00:01:14.900 | that is to keep that information in mind and body

00:01:17.880 | so that you can perform those cognitive tasks,

00:01:20.340 | music tasks, motor tasks, et cetera,

00:01:23.380 | for long periods of time

00:01:24.620 | without ever forgetting how to do them.

00:01:26.580 | All of mental training and visualization

00:01:28.820 | relies on what I consider really the holy grail

00:01:31.400 | of our brain and nervous system,

00:01:32.780 | and that's neuroplasticity.

00:01:34.380 | Neuroplasticity is our nervous system,

00:01:37.300 | which of course includes the brain, the spinal cord,

00:01:39.180 | and all the connections between the brain and spinal cord

00:01:41.300 | and the organs and tissues of the body,

00:01:43.060 | and then all the neural connections

00:01:44.460 | back from the organs and tissues of the body

00:01:46.980 | to the brain and spinal cord,

00:01:48.220 | so the whole thing in both directions,

00:01:50.760 | has the ability to change in response to experience

00:01:53.820 | in ways that are adaptive,

00:01:55.000 | that is, that allows us to do things

00:01:56.940 | that we could not do before,

00:01:58.720 | and by doing those things

00:02:00.400 | or by being able to perform those mental operations,

00:02:02.860 | we can do better in the world that we live in.

00:02:05.400 | We can perform new tasks, we can think new thoughts,

00:02:09.020 | we can come up with novel solutions

00:02:11.080 | to preexisting problems that before really vexed us

00:02:14.140 | and that we couldn't overcome,

00:02:15.640 | all of that is considered neuroplasticity.

00:02:18.000 | So today, what I'm going to cover

00:02:19.640 | is a brief summary of what neuroplasticity is,

00:02:22.380 | that is, how it occurs in the brain and body.

00:02:25.020 | This is extremely important to understand

00:02:26.860 | if you're going to use mental training and visualization.

00:02:29.660 | Then I'm going to talk about

00:02:30.740 | what happens in our brain and body

00:02:32.580 | when we do mental visualization in a dedicated way.

00:02:35.880 | Many people have heard, perhaps,

00:02:37.760 | that when you imagine something happening,

00:02:39.880 | that your brain doesn't know the difference

00:02:41.340 | between that imagination of the thing happening

00:02:44.640 | and the real thing happening.

00:02:45.900 | Turns out that is not true, it is simply not true.

00:02:49.580 | However, there is somewhat of an equivalence

00:02:53.020 | between a real experience and an imagined experience.

00:02:55.660 | And we'll talk about the difference between those

00:02:57.480 | and how that can be leveraged

00:02:59.140 | in order to get the most out of mental training

00:03:00.980 | and visualization.

00:03:01.900 | Then I will cover exactly which types of mental training

00:03:04.340 | and visualization work best across all domains,

00:03:07.680 | meaning for music learning, mathematics, solving puzzles,

00:03:11.220 | motor learning, sports performance, et cetera, et cetera,

00:03:14.180 | to really allow you a template in which you can plug in

00:03:18.180 | or designate what you're going to do each day

00:03:20.740 | for a brief period of time

00:03:22.000 | in order to accelerate your learning in whatever you choose.

00:03:25.260 | And then I'm going to go into a bit of what happens

00:03:28.360 | in the brains of different types of people.

00:03:30.860 | These different types of people that I'm referring to

00:03:32.680 | are people who have more or less of a natural ability

00:03:36.300 | to imagine things and visualize them,

00:03:38.700 | because it turns out that we vary tremendously

00:03:40.580 | from one individual to the next

00:03:42.080 | in terms of our ability to mentally visualize

00:03:44.740 | and imagine things and our ability to get better at that

00:03:47.940 | over time.

00:03:48.780 | And the good news is anyone can get better

00:03:50.860 | at mental training and visualization

00:03:52.860 | in ways that can serve them well.

00:03:54.540 | I'll also briefly touch on the fact that certain people,

00:03:57.700 | in particular people on the autism spectrum,

00:03:59.980 | as well as people with synesthesia,

00:04:01.500 | which is the combining of different perceptual experiences.

00:04:04.100 | So you may be one of these people,

00:04:05.580 | or you may have heard of people that, for instance,

00:04:07.540 | when they think of a number,

00:04:08.780 | they also just naturally spontaneously think of a color

00:04:12.540 | and vice versa.

00:04:13.620 | Talk about how that relates to mental imagery

00:04:15.620 | and visualization and the creative process

00:04:17.420 | and problem solving in general.

00:04:19.180 | And then finally,

00:04:20.060 | what I'll do is I'll recap mental training and visualization

00:04:23.300 | from the standpoint of how best to apply

00:04:25.060 | mental training and visualization

00:04:26.620 | according to specific challenges,

00:04:28.740 | things like challenges with public speaking

00:04:31.420 | or challenges with sports performance

00:04:33.360 | or challenges with test taking performance,

00:04:35.780 | challenges with essentially anything

00:04:37.720 | that will allow you to build specific mental training

00:04:39.860 | and visualization practices that are brief,

00:04:42.580 | that are supported by neuroscience studies,

00:04:45.140 | and that are highly effective.

00:04:46.700 | Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast

00:04:49.120 | is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.

00:04:51.540 | It is, however, part of my desire and effort

00:04:53.640 | to bring zero cost to consumer information about science

00:04:56.000 | and science-related tools to the general public.

00:04:58.340 | In keeping with that theme,

00:04:59.380 | I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast.

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00:08:03.880 | Let's talk about mental training and visualization.

00:08:07.120 | Now, perhaps surprisingly, mental training and visualization

00:08:09.660 | has been studied since the late 1800s.

00:08:12.700 | There's actually a paper published in 1880 by Galton

00:08:16.340 | called "The Statistics of Mental Imagery."

00:08:19.060 | So long ago, people were quantifying

00:08:21.580 | and trying to understand how is it that people come up

00:08:24.500 | with mental images and how they can apply that

00:08:27.100 | to learning things more quickly and more stably over time.

00:08:31.100 | Now, as I mentioned earlier,

00:08:33.020 | mental training and visualization relies on a process

00:08:36.340 | that we call neuroplasticity.

00:08:38.080 | Neuroplasticity is a term that many people have heard

00:08:41.160 | and it encompasses many different things.

00:08:43.480 | So broadly speaking,

00:08:45.040 | neuroplasticity includes developmental plasticity,

00:08:48.200 | which is the sort of plasticity that occurs

00:08:49.960 | between about birth and age 25.

00:08:53.440 | And that can be summarized very easily as passive plasticity.

00:08:57.300 | In other words, the sorts of changes that happen

00:09:00.100 | in one's nervous system simply by engaging in the world

00:09:03.780 | and experiencing life as a child, as a young adult,

00:09:08.400 | as an adolescent, and as a 22, 23, 24-year-old, et cetera.

00:09:13.140 | Now, of course, of course, of course,

00:09:15.220 | it is not the case that on your 25th birthday,

00:09:18.180 | you close out passive developmental plasticity

00:09:21.220 | and start engaging in the other type of neuroplasticity,

00:09:23.700 | which is adult neuroplasticity.

00:09:25.540 | It's a gradual tapering off of developmental plasticity

00:09:28.940 | that occurs between age zero and 25.

00:09:31.620 | And for some people, it might occur somewhere around 26.

00:09:34.300 | For other people around 23.

00:09:36.460 | When we say 25, we're really just talking

00:09:38.000 | about the average age in which passive plasticity tapers off.

00:09:41.960 | However, starting fairly early in adolescence

00:09:45.580 | and extending all the way out into one's 80s or 90s

00:09:49.820 | or hundreds, should one live that long,

00:09:52.140 | is the other form of neuroplasticity,

00:09:53.620 | which is adult neuroplasticity.

00:09:55.940 | Adult neuroplasticity is very different

00:09:58.300 | than developmental plasticity

00:10:00.020 | because it is the sort of plasticity that one can direct

00:10:02.940 | towards one's own specific desired learning.

00:10:05.820 | So if we wanted to get a little bit technical here

00:10:07.740 | for sake of clarity, not for sake of confusion,

00:10:10.660 | we would say adult plasticity

00:10:12.420 | is really about self-directed adaptive plasticity.

00:10:16.540 | And the reason we call it that

00:10:17.780 | as opposed to something else,

00:10:19.340 | we're simply adult plasticity,

00:10:20.540 | is that there are many different forms of neuroplasticity.

00:10:22.820 | There is, for instance, maladaptive neuroplasticity

00:10:25.320 | that occurs if one gets a really hard head hit

00:10:27.700 | and concussion, there will be changes

00:10:29.660 | to the brain and nervous system,

00:10:31.220 | but those changes to the brain and nervous system

00:10:33.240 | do not allow it to perform better.

00:10:35.120 | In fact, it often impairs the brain and nervous system's

00:10:37.340 | ability to function and therefore is maladaptive.

00:10:39.980 | So I don't want to get overly wordy

00:10:41.820 | with a number of different terms here,

00:10:43.140 | but I do think it's important to understand

00:10:44.580 | that we have developmental plasticity,

00:10:46.540 | again, in which the brain and nervous system changes

00:10:48.980 | simply in response to experiencing specific things

00:10:52.040 | for better or worse.

00:10:53.340 | And there's adult self-directed adaptive plasticity

00:10:57.300 | in which one can direct specific changes

00:10:59.880 | in terms of learning things cognitively

00:11:02.740 | or learning things in terms of motor function,

00:11:05.000 | so sport, dance, et cetera, or a combination of the two.

00:11:08.940 | Now, just to really clarify what I mean by developmental

00:11:12.120 | versus self-directed adaptive plasticity,

00:11:14.820 | I mentioned that self-directed adaptive plasticity

00:11:17.260 | actually can start in adolescence, right?

00:11:19.380 | Even though there's ongoing developmental plasticity,

00:11:21.860 | I mean, let's be really direct.

00:11:23.260 | The brain of a 14-year-old is very different

00:11:26.000 | than the brain of that same individual

00:11:27.840 | when that person is 21

00:11:29.860 | because there's ongoing developmental plasticity.

00:11:32.420 | However, starting at about adolescence,

00:11:35.300 | we can all start to decide what it is that we want to learn

00:11:39.140 | and engage in self-directed adaptive plasticity.

00:11:41.940 | Now, the way to engage self-directed adaptive plasticity,

00:11:44.340 | regardless of whether or not you're a 13-year-old,

00:11:46.000 | 14-year-old, or you're a 90-year-old, or anywhere in between,

00:11:49.840 | is that it requires two things.

00:11:51.900 | The first thing it requires is focused, dedicated attention

00:11:55.880 | to the thing that you're trying to learn.

00:11:57.840 | That's the first step.

00:11:58.860 | And that actually triggers a number of different chemical

00:12:01.520 | and electrical processes in the brain

00:12:03.840 | that are often associated with agitation and frustration.

00:12:06.860 | Believe it or not, the agitation and frustration

00:12:09.100 | is a reflection of the release of specific chemicals,

00:12:12.280 | in particular norepinephrine and epinephrine,

00:12:14.420 | also called noradrenaline and adrenaline

00:12:16.060 | in the brain and body,

00:12:17.340 | that creates this discomfort

00:12:19.260 | and this heightened level of alertness and attention

00:12:21.700 | that many of us don't like and tend to back away from,

00:12:24.380 | but it is exactly that chemical,

00:12:26.440 | or I should say neurochemical milieu,

00:12:28.540 | which signals to the neurons, the nerve cells in the brain

00:12:31.220 | and elsewhere in the body that something needs to change.

00:12:33.600 | Because if you think about it,

00:12:35.140 | if you can do something perfectly,

00:12:36.640 | or if you try and do something

00:12:38.440 | and it doesn't cause any neurochemical change

00:12:40.540 | in your brain and body,

00:12:42.060 | well, then there's no reason for your brain

00:12:44.820 | and its connections with the body to change

00:12:46.540 | in any particular way, okay?

00:12:47.840 | So you need focused, dedicated attention

00:12:50.300 | to the thing that you're trying to learn.

00:12:51.600 | It's often accompanied by agitation, frustration, et cetera.

00:12:55.060 | So that's perfectly normal.

00:12:56.060 | In fact, that's a signal that things are going right,

00:12:57.920 | meaning they're headed towards learning,

00:12:59.600 | but there's a second component that's really required

00:13:01.680 | for self-directed adaptive plasticity,

00:13:03.640 | and that's periods of deep rest,

00:13:06.000 | in particular, a good night's sleep in particular

00:13:09.600 | on the night that follows that focused attention

00:13:13.140 | to the thing you're trying to learn.

00:13:14.760 | There are now hundreds of studies

00:13:16.340 | in both animal models and in humans

00:13:18.520 | showing that it is really during sleep

00:13:21.280 | and other states of deep relaxation,

00:13:23.720 | things like meditation and non-sleep deep rest,

00:13:26.220 | which I've talked about before on this podcast,

00:13:28.280 | but really during our main night of sleep,

00:13:30.880 | that the rewiring of neural connections,

00:13:32.920 | that is the actual neuroplasticity takes place.

00:13:36.360 | So the verb neuroplasticity,

00:13:38.000 | the rearrangement of connections between neurons

00:13:40.760 | really occurs during sleep,

00:13:41.960 | in particular on the first night

00:13:44.020 | following an attempt to learn something

00:13:46.360 | through this focused attention.

00:13:48.220 | Now, developmental plasticity, which is passive,

00:13:50.360 | also requires good sleep.

00:13:52.400 | It's slightly different, or frankly, it's a lot different

00:13:55.000 | in terms of the underlying mechanisms

00:13:56.880 | than self-directed adaptive plasticity,

00:13:59.000 | but because today we're mainly talking about

00:14:00.760 | how to learn faster through mental training

00:14:02.380 | and visualization, and that really maps more closely

00:14:05.000 | onto self-directed adaptive plasticity,

00:14:07.720 | just really want to emphasize this two-step process.

00:14:10.480 | There has to be focused, dedicated attention,

00:14:12.920 | and then there needs to be sleep,

00:14:15.160 | and in particular, sleep on the first night

00:14:17.260 | following that training.

00:14:18.720 | Now, should you have the unfortunate experience

00:14:21.160 | of getting woken up in the middle of the night

00:14:22.560 | following, trying to learn something?

00:14:24.700 | Or should you simply not be able to sleep

00:14:27.400 | for whatever reason on the night following

00:14:29.680 | a bout of learning or an attempt to learn?

00:14:32.860 | Do not despair, because it turns out

00:14:34.520 | that there are what are called

00:14:35.480 | second and third night effects also.

00:14:37.560 | Once you sleep, you will learn those neuroplastic events,

00:14:41.380 | the reordering of connections that we call synapses,

00:14:44.300 | and the changes that occur in neural circuits

00:14:47.360 | that reflects what we call self-directed adaptive plasticity.

00:14:50.520 | That still will occur, but ideally,

00:14:53.080 | you got a great night's sleep on the first night

00:14:55.100 | following, trying to learn, and the second night,

00:14:57.200 | and the third, and so on and so on.

00:14:59.360 | Now, there are a few other things that are critical

00:15:00.840 | to understand about self-directed adaptive plasticity

00:15:03.380 | that will become especially important

00:15:04.980 | when thinking about protocols

00:15:06.720 | for developing the ideal mental training

00:15:09.280 | and visualization process for you,

00:15:11.920 | and that is that there are different forms of plasticity

00:15:15.800 | that occur between neurons,

00:15:17.440 | although the two main forms are what are called

00:15:19.440 | long-term potentiation and long-term depression.

00:15:22.640 | I just want to cue up right now that the word depression

00:15:25.740 | is a very loaded word,

00:15:26.720 | because the moment people hear the word depression,

00:15:28.960 | they think, "Oh, no, that's bad."

00:15:31.300 | But in the case of neuroplasticity,

00:15:33.080 | long-term depression is simply a change

00:15:35.320 | in the connections between neurons

00:15:37.080 | and the excitability between neurons

00:15:39.120 | that in many ways can be excellent for learning things,

00:15:42.720 | in particular, motor skills.

00:15:44.480 | And we'll get into this in more detail in a little bit,

00:15:46.720 | but it turns out that a lot of our ability

00:15:48.980 | to get better at some sort of motor skill

00:15:52.080 | involves this thing that we call long-term depression.

00:15:54.640 | And that's because much of what is happening

00:15:56.280 | when we learn a new motor skill

00:15:58.120 | is that we are depressing or suppressing specific actions

00:16:02.200 | in order to generate a very specific coordinated action.

00:16:06.480 | Some of the best examples of long-term depression

00:16:08.640 | can actually be borrowed from developmental plasticity.

00:16:11.840 | So for instance, if you've ever sat across from an infant

00:16:15.720 | who is trying to eat their meal,

00:16:17.800 | so imagine a one and a half year old or a two year old

00:16:21.500 | trying to eat some noodles or some soup

00:16:24.520 | or any kind of baby suitable food with a spoon,

00:16:28.720 | and they're holding the spoon

00:16:30.720 | or they're trying to hold the spoon,

00:16:32.260 | what you'll notice is that their motor movements

00:16:33.820 | are terribly uncoordinated.

00:16:36.000 | They often will take that spoon to their cheek

00:16:38.000 | or to their eye or to their head.

00:16:39.680 | We've all seen these very amusing photos of babies

00:16:42.800 | with bowls of food on their head

00:16:44.520 | or with food all over their face or just everywhere.

00:16:46.300 | It appears that they're basically getting the food

00:16:48.700 | everywhere except where it's supposed to go,

00:16:50.560 | which is in their mouth.

00:16:51.560 | And that's because their motor movements

00:16:53.240 | are not very well coordinated at that age.

00:16:55.280 | And they're not very well coordinated,

00:16:57.360 | not because they lack sufficient numbers

00:16:59.760 | of neural connection synapses between neurons,

00:17:02.260 | but rather because they have too many connections

00:17:04.840 | between too many different neurons.

00:17:06.740 | The neural circuits that control very dedicated

00:17:10.080 | coordinated movement are not there yet.

00:17:13.260 | Instead, too many neurons are connected

00:17:15.960 | to too many other neurons.

00:17:17.300 | And so they can't generate the precise movements

00:17:19.660 | that are required in order to get that spoon to their mouth.

00:17:22.880 | Now over time, they get better at moving the utensil

00:17:26.680 | to their mouth such that hopefully by about age five or six,

00:17:31.680 | they are eating in a relatively cleaner way.

00:17:34.820 | And hopefully by the time they're 10 or 11 or 12,

00:17:36.960 | they're getting the food into their mouth

00:17:38.280 | and not all over their face.

00:17:39.880 | People learn this to varying degrees.

00:17:41.320 | All you have to do is go to a restaurant

00:17:42.600 | and watch how people eat.

00:17:44.600 | And you will see a vast variation

00:17:47.360 | in people's coordinated movements with utensils.

00:17:49.640 | But in general, there's a theme.

00:17:51.680 | The younger the person,

00:17:53.220 | the more uncoordinated their movement of utensils.

00:17:56.280 | And as they get older, the more coordinated.

00:17:57.840 | Now, of course, in people that are very old,

00:17:59.180 | they have challenges moving objects

00:18:02.600 | and their limbs in very smooth ways.

00:18:04.900 | And that has to do with a topic that we'll get into

00:18:07.080 | when we talk about age-related cognitive decline

00:18:09.240 | and motor-related dementias.

00:18:11.360 | But for sake of today's discussion,

00:18:13.200 | if you just want to think about what happens

00:18:15.340 | with long-term depression and the development

00:18:17.720 | of a motor skill, both as a baby, as an adolescent,

00:18:21.660 | and as an adult when you're trying to learn a new motor skill

00:18:25.100 | is that you are eliminating incorrect movements.

00:18:29.080 | And when you are eliminating incorrect movements

00:18:32.080 | to arrive at only the correct movements

00:18:34.120 | in a very reflexive and repeated way.

00:18:36.860 | So think your golf swing, your tennis serve,

00:18:39.920 | think serving a volleyball,

00:18:41.840 | think a child learning to crawl and then walk,

00:18:45.320 | think a child learning to eat with utensils,

00:18:47.240 | an example I gave before.

00:18:48.520 | What's happening in all of those cases

00:18:50.400 | is that yes, certain connections in the brain

00:18:52.640 | are being strengthened or what we call potentiated.

00:18:55.440 | They are undergoing long-term potentiation,

00:18:57.840 | the so-called quote-unquote fire together,

00:18:59.560 | wire together mantra that was popularized

00:19:01.820 | by the great neurobiologist, Dr. Carla Schatz,

00:19:04.480 | my colleague at Stanford.

00:19:06.580 | But in addition to that long-term depression,

00:19:09.940 | the quieting or the silencing of specific synapses,

00:19:13.560 | that is connections between neurons,

00:19:15.220 | is absolutely critical for motor skill learning.

00:19:18.940 | So we have LTP, long-term potentiation,

00:19:21.620 | and LTD, long-term depression,

00:19:23.640 | is every bit as important as LTP, long-term potentiation

00:19:28.320 | for getting better at some sort of motor skill

00:19:30.200 | and indeed at getting better at some sort

00:19:31.900 | of cognitive skill.

00:19:33.360 | Now, as we hear this, this should be intuitive to all of us.

00:19:36.600 | If you look at somebody's attempt

00:19:38.520 | to learn a particular dance step

00:19:40.980 | or at somebody's attempt to do a tennis serve

00:19:43.560 | the first time, it's all over the place.

00:19:46.280 | Now, it's not perhaps all over the place

00:19:47.960 | in that they're doing a jumping jack

00:19:49.180 | while trying to serve the tennis ball,

00:19:50.920 | but they're generally arcing the racket too widely

00:19:55.160 | on one trial and then they're arcing it too close

00:19:58.420 | to their body on the next trial.

00:19:59.620 | So if we were to draw a line over each one of those trials,

00:20:02.320 | we would see that there were lines everywhere over time.

00:20:05.040 | Whereas once they "perfect" the tennis serve,

00:20:07.780 | it's going to be line drawn directly over line,

00:20:10.880 | drawn directly over line,

00:20:12.720 | meaning the arc of that tennis serve

00:20:14.700 | is going to be very restricted.

00:20:16.720 | And that without question has reflected the removal

00:20:20.280 | or the quieting of particular synapses,

00:20:22.860 | connections between neurons in the brain and body,

00:20:25.280 | to allow that very narrow coordinated

00:20:28.240 | and directed movement.

00:20:29.940 | The same is true for learning anything

00:20:31.680 | in the cognitive domain,

00:20:32.640 | meaning if you are to learn a language,

00:20:35.240 | it is not of course the case

00:20:36.560 | that you know every word in that language

00:20:38.080 | and then you simply remove certain words

00:20:40.020 | and arrive at the correct sentence structure

00:20:41.720 | that you're trying to achieve,

00:20:43.380 | but rather you have to suppress your native language.

00:20:47.340 | Or if you're a young child,

00:20:48.520 | you have to suppress the generation

00:20:50.360 | of just kind of random babbling sounds,

00:20:52.200 | turns out babbling isn't random at all.

00:20:53.700 | But the point is that you have to suppress the enunciation

00:20:57.680 | of particular sounds and direct the pronunciation

00:21:00.280 | of other sounds in order to generate that new language

00:21:04.320 | or your ability to speak at all.

00:21:06.480 | Okay, so we can really think about neuroplasticity

00:21:08.720 | as both a building up process

00:21:11.040 | in which you increase connection,

00:21:12.320 | so-called long-term potentiation,

00:21:14.260 | and a sculpting down or a removal of connections process

00:21:18.680 | that we're going to call long-term depression.

00:21:21.260 | Now I have to acknowledge that of course

00:21:23.360 | there are other forms of neuroplasticity too.

00:21:25.920 | I know there are probably some aficionados listening to this

00:21:28.960 | who will be perhaps shouting back at whatever device

00:21:33.360 | my voice is coming out of.

00:21:34.260 | Wait, what about spike timing dependent plasticity?

00:21:36.880 | Or what about paired pulse facilitation?

00:21:39.040 | Yes, yes, and yes.

00:21:39.940 | There are multiple forms of communication between neurons

00:21:42.660 | that can strengthen those connections

00:21:43.960 | or weaken those connections.

00:21:45.200 | But for today's discussion,

00:21:46.360 | we just broadly want to think about long-term potentiation

00:21:49.480 | and long-term depression

00:21:50.920 | because it captures the two most important themes

00:21:53.320 | related to mental training and visualization,

00:21:55.980 | which is that when we perform a given cognitive

00:21:59.760 | or physical task in the real world,

00:22:01.360 | so we actually try the dance step or the tennis serve,

00:22:03.760 | or when we actually try a math problem

00:22:05.480 | or we try and learn some specific knowledge

00:22:07.340 | and write it down and remember it,

00:22:09.040 | that is engaging particular neurons, right?

00:22:12.660 | They're firing, they're releasing chemicals,

00:22:15.200 | but it is also actively suppressing

00:22:17.680 | the activity of other neurons.

00:22:19.360 | And we are always completely unaware

00:22:22.320 | of the ways in which our brain

00:22:23.400 | is suppressing certain activity, okay?

00:22:25.800 | So today we have to keep in mind

00:22:27.120 | that where there is strengthening of connections,

00:22:29.200 | there is also weakening of connections.

00:22:30.840 | And when it comes to mental training and visualization,

00:22:33.280 | and here's the really key point,

00:22:35.160 | with mental training and visualization,

00:22:37.120 | you are capturing both processes,

00:22:39.440 | both the potentiation,

00:22:41.080 | that is the building up and strengthening of connections,

00:22:43.400 | and the weakening of the connections

00:22:45.480 | that are inappropriate for the thing you're trying to learn.

00:22:48.120 | And there are different aspects

00:22:49.980 | of mental training and visualization protocols

00:22:52.360 | that really harness the potentiation

00:22:55.460 | versus the depression aspect.

00:22:57.200 | And today we will cover mental training

00:22:58.840 | and visualization protocols

00:23:00.400 | that capture both the potentiation

00:23:02.020 | and the depression aspect of neuroplasticity,

00:23:05.280 | and in that way serve as an augment,

00:23:07.960 | that is a compliment to the actual real world

00:23:11.040 | cognitive and physical training that you're doing,

00:23:13.000 | because I'll just give this away right now,

00:23:15.080 | turns out that mental training and visualization

00:23:17.600 | is not a replacement for real world

00:23:20.720 | cognitive or motor behavior.

00:23:23.620 | Again, mental training and visualization

00:23:25.760 | cannot replace real world execution of cognitive tasks

00:23:30.760 | or of motor tasks if you want to learn.

00:23:32.740 | However, mental training and visualization

00:23:35.200 | can and has been shown to be effective

00:23:37.340 | for greatly enhancing the speed at which you learn

00:23:40.220 | and the stability of that learning over time.

00:23:42.880 | Okay, so let's take a second

00:23:44.460 | and really think about what's happening

00:23:46.180 | in the brain and body

00:23:48.360 | when we do mental training or visualization.

00:23:50.680 | In fact, we can do a little experiment right now

00:23:53.280 | that is not unlike many of the classic experiments

00:23:55.920 | looking at what's happening in the brain and body

00:23:58.160 | during mental training and visualization,

00:24:00.000 | in which I just ask you to close your eyes

00:24:03.280 | and imagine a yellow cube, okay?

00:24:06.940 | And next to that yellow cube is a red rose.

00:24:10.760 | And perhaps I also ask you to float

00:24:15.280 | or fly up above the cube and the rose

00:24:17.180 | and look at them from the top, top down.

00:24:20.280 | And then I tell you to fly back around

00:24:23.300 | and land behind those and look at them

00:24:24.740 | from the perspective of behind that yellow cube

00:24:27.280 | and that red rose, okay?

00:24:29.200 | Now, what the data tell us is that most people

00:24:32.460 | will be able to do that.

00:24:33.800 | Most of you will be able to do that

00:24:35.000 | to some degree or another,

00:24:36.240 | regardless of your attention span,

00:24:38.320 | whether or not you have ADHD or not,

00:24:40.120 | most of you will be able to do that

00:24:42.280 | to some degree or another.

00:24:43.780 | We also know from neuroimaging studies

00:24:45.660 | in which people are placed

00:24:46.540 | into a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner,

00:24:50.300 | that during the sort of visualization you just did

00:24:52.900 | or that I described,

00:24:54.340 | that your visual cortex and associated areas

00:24:57.380 | quote unquote light up.

00:24:58.380 | They become very active in similar but not identical ways

00:25:02.600 | to how they would light up and be activated

00:25:04.840 | were you to actually look at a yellow cube and a red rose

00:25:08.180 | on a screen and perhaps fly above them,

00:25:11.380 | virtually of course, and land behind them,

00:25:13.580 | virtually of course,

00:25:14.700 | or if you were to actually look at a yellow cube

00:25:16.780 | and red rose in the real world,

00:25:18.380 | right in front of you on a table,

00:25:19.800 | then get up on your tippy toes

00:25:21.500 | and look down on them from the top

00:25:22.860 | and then walk around the table

00:25:23.740 | and look at them from the other side.

00:25:25.340 | So there is some degree of what we call

00:25:27.620 | perceptual equivalence between real world experiences,

00:25:30.780 | digital experiences and imagined,

00:25:33.260 | meaning with our eyes closed,

00:25:34.520 | just in our mind's eye experiences.

00:25:37.220 | This is true not just of vision

00:25:39.460 | and what we call the visual domain,

00:25:41.200 | but also the auditory domain, okay?

00:25:42.740 | So for instance, I could play for you

00:25:44.220 | a short motif of a song.

00:25:45.940 | Let's just pick something that I think most people know.

00:25:48.020 | Goodness, I'm a terrible musician and even worse singer,

00:25:50.860 | but let's just take the opening to AC/DC's

00:25:53.060 | Back in Black, right?

00:25:54.260 | I think I can do that one.

00:25:55.080 | It's like, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, okay, got it.

00:25:59.740 | That's the actual sound,

00:26:01.340 | although admittedly a dreadful version

00:26:03.560 | of the great AC/DC song Back in Black.

00:26:06.460 | But now I ask you to close your eyes

00:26:08.100 | or we could keep them open and just imagine that,

00:26:10.660 | dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, okay?

00:26:13.820 | Or for instance, I place you in a quiet room,

00:26:17.940 | so you close your eyes and ask you to imagine the opening

00:26:22.700 | to AC/DC's Black in Black,

00:26:24.780 | but ask you to pause it halfway through.

00:26:26.920 | What you would find again is that most people,

00:26:28.900 | somewhere between 90 and 95% of people

00:26:31.660 | would be able to do all the sorts of things I described,

00:26:34.260 | right, cube and rose, AC/DC Back in Black.

00:26:37.600 | Even a somatosensory task,

00:26:39.980 | imagine what it's like to touch felt

00:26:43.140 | or to touch chinchilla hair or something like that,

00:26:46.140 | a chinchilla's hair,

00:26:47.420 | ideally a live chinchilla sitting still.

00:26:49.820 | Those little critters move really, really fast,

00:26:51.540 | but they have very, very soft hair,

00:26:52.580 | high hair density, so soft.

00:26:54.980 | Okay, most people can do that.

00:26:57.140 | About 5% to 15% of people are less able to do that,

00:27:02.600 | and there's a small percentage of people

00:27:05.220 | in that 5% to 15% that simply cannot do it at all,

00:27:09.200 | that just cannot visualize well.

00:27:11.300 | We'll talk later about these people.

00:27:12.820 | They have what's called aphantasia,

00:27:15.420 | an inability to mentally visualize,

00:27:17.400 | but most people are actually pretty good

00:27:19.420 | at visualizing things when they are told what to visualize,

00:27:22.380 | and this is a really key point,

00:27:25.200 | and if what they are told to visualize is very simple,

00:27:28.620 | and the whole visualization is quite brief,

00:27:31.520 | lasting on the order of about 15 seconds

00:27:33.580 | to generate the visualization in the auditory

00:27:36.220 | or in the visual aspect of one's mind's eye or ear,

00:27:40.440 | if you will, and if it's repeated over and over.

00:27:43.980 | What's far harder for everybody to do,

00:27:46.500 | and in fact, what most people simply cannot do,

00:27:49.780 | is imagine long extended scenes and stories in their mind

00:27:54.180 | that go on for minutes and minutes

00:27:56.360 | that involve a lot of different sensory stimuli.

00:27:58.760 | This is a really key point.

00:28:00.040 | In fact, as we start to home in

00:28:02.060 | on ideal mental training and visualization protocols,

00:28:04.960 | I'd like to establish this as the first principle

00:28:07.540 | of mental training and visualization,

00:28:09.440 | which is that if you are going to use mental training

00:28:12.480 | and visualization to its best effect

00:28:15.060 | in order to engage in neuroplasticity and learning,

00:28:17.540 | you need to keep those visualizations quite brief,

00:28:20.440 | really on the order of about 15 to 20 seconds or so,

00:28:24.960 | and pretty darn sparse,

00:28:27.620 | meaning not including a lot of elaborate visualization,

00:28:32.400 | not including a lot of sequences of motor steps.

00:28:35.380 | What I mean are motor sequences,

00:28:37.780 | if you're trying to learn something

00:28:39.080 | in terms of physical movement,

00:28:40.940 | or visual sequences or auditory sequences,

00:28:43.600 | if you're trying to learn things

00:28:44.800 | in terms of music or dance, et cetera,

00:28:47.100 | that can be completed and repeated in 15 seconds or less.

00:28:52.100 | Now, later, I'll give you a couple of specific examples,

00:28:56.220 | but if you want to use mental training and visualization,

00:28:59.400 | understand this is the key first principle.

00:29:01.400 | They have to be very short visualizations

00:29:03.360 | that you can repeat over and over and over again

00:29:05.680 | with a high degree of accuracy.

00:29:07.860 | So you don't want to embark

00:29:09.440 | on a mental training and visualization paradigm

00:29:12.040 | in which it involves a lot of elaborate stimuli

00:29:14.480 | and you have to think really hard and work really hard,

00:29:17.080 | even if you're in that category

00:29:18.760 | of people who can do mental visualization

00:29:21.200 | pretty naturally and easily.

00:29:22.800 | Now, if you're somebody who can't do mental visualization,

00:29:25.540 | in fact, if you're somebody who has full-blown aphantasia

00:29:28.400 | or the inability to mentally visualize,

00:29:30.840 | well, then it's especially important

00:29:32.120 | that you make those mental trainings and visualizations

00:29:34.680 | really brief and very, very simple.

00:29:37.100 | I'd like to take a quick break

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00:30:51.460 | Now, in order to develop the best mental training

00:30:53.480 | and visualization protocols for you,

00:30:55.440 | let's go a little bit deeper into what the research says

00:30:57.960 | about mental visualization.

00:30:59.840 | Now, the classic work on mental visualization

00:31:02.240 | really hinges on a number of different researchers

00:31:05.200 | and their work, but in particular, Roger Shepard,

00:31:07.720 | who did this work at Stanford,

00:31:09.780 | and Stephen Kosslyn, who's now at Harvard.

00:31:12.400 | There are, of course, others in the field,

00:31:13.580 | but it's really the work of Shepard and Kosslyn

00:31:15.820 | that lay the foundation for our understanding

00:31:18.120 | of what happens in the brain

00:31:19.640 | when we mentally visualize something.

00:31:21.620 | Shepard did these incredible experiments

00:31:25.700 | in which he had students mentally visualize simple objects,

00:31:29.500 | like a square, like a triangle,

00:31:31.540 | and he measured how long it took them to do that.

00:31:34.300 | Now, of course, at the time when he did these experiments,

00:31:37.260 | there were no sophisticated brain imaging devices

00:31:40.260 | and machines like fMRI.

00:31:41.960 | However, everything I'm about to describe

00:31:44.700 | has been later confirmed using things like fMRI.

00:31:49.540 | What Shepard did and what he found is that

00:31:52.980 | if people were told to visualize very simple objects,

00:31:57.000 | they did it pretty quickly.

00:31:58.720 | However, if they were told to visualize more complex objects

00:32:02.040 | or, importantly, to rotate those objects in their mind's eye,

00:32:06.480 | well, then it took longer for them to perform

00:32:08.900 | those mental visualizations.

00:32:10.480 | Now, many of you might think, duh,

00:32:12.280 | if I have to just imagine a triangle or a cube,

00:32:14.420 | that's going to be very easy and very fast,

00:32:16.040 | whereas if I have to rotate that triangle or a cube

00:32:18.420 | in my mind's eye, that's going to take more time.

00:32:21.000 | And indeed, that is somewhat of a duh,

00:32:23.620 | except, and this is so very important,

00:32:26.300 | except that what Shepard and his colleagues found

00:32:29.380 | is that how long it takes somebody to generate

00:32:32.760 | and rotate a given visual image scales directly

00:32:37.240 | with the complexity of that image.

00:32:39.520 | In fact, Koslin did some experiments,

00:32:41.780 | I think illustrate this even better.

00:32:43.500 | And here's the experiment.

00:32:44.340 | I love this experiment.

00:32:45.360 | I think you'll love it too,

00:32:46.260 | because it illustrates something so fundamentally important

00:32:49.780 | about how our brains work,

00:32:51.120 | not just for sake of mental training and visualization,

00:32:53.540 | but just how our brains work at all.

00:32:55.500 | He showed people a picture of a map,

00:32:59.860 | so a map drawn on a piece of paper.

00:33:02.540 | This was a map of an island.

00:33:04.340 | It included things like a loading dock for some boats.

00:33:07.080 | It had a location for getting food on the island.

00:33:09.620 | It had some trees.

00:33:10.740 | It had some other small landmarks drawn out,

00:33:13.580 | and people looked at this and memorized it.

00:33:16.380 | Or in other experiments,

00:33:17.520 | they just had people imagine this island

00:33:19.900 | and the location of these different landmarks on the island.

00:33:22.480 | So it didn't really matter which.

00:33:24.460 | But then he had people imagine moving or walking

00:33:29.280 | from one location on the island to another.

00:33:31.380 | So they'd say, okay, you're at the loading dock.

00:33:33.120 | Now move to the restaurant.

00:33:36.140 | Okay, you're at the restaurant.

00:33:37.080 | Now move to the palm tree.

00:33:38.620 | You're on the North shore of the island.

00:33:40.100 | Now go around the side of the island clockwise

00:33:43.480 | to arrive at the bay on the Southwest corner,

00:33:47.940 | this sort of thing.

00:33:49.300 | What Coslin found was absolutely incredible.

00:33:52.100 | What he found was that the amount of time

00:33:54.660 | that it takes people to move from one location on the map

00:33:58.700 | to another scaled linearly, directly,

00:34:02.900 | with the actual physical location

00:34:05.380 | between those objects on the map.

00:34:07.700 | So for those of you that can understand

00:34:10.020 | or into the importance of what Shepard and Coslin showed,

00:34:12.820 | great.

00:34:13.960 | I'm guessing, however, that for most people out there,

00:34:16.320 | you're still grasping it like, okay, interesting.

00:34:19.840 | How things happen in the real world

00:34:21.760 | dictates how they happen in our mind's eye.

00:34:24.980 | But I want to make sure that I really nail home

00:34:27.000 | the importance of this for everybody.

00:34:29.120 | The importance of this is that

00:34:30.860 | when we look at something in the real world,

00:34:32.880 | so if I look at the pen in front of me,

00:34:34.740 | I'm holding up my pen.

00:34:35.580 | For those of you that are listening,

00:34:36.420 | just holding up my pen in front of me.

00:34:38.320 | I move it to the right and back and forth.

00:34:40.600 | What's happening is I'm activating

00:34:42.600 | or I'm triggering the electrical activity of neurons,

00:34:45.820 | which we can think of kind of as pixels in my eye, okay?

00:34:48.780 | So it's leftward to rightward motion for me

00:34:51.700 | and back and forth.

00:34:52.780 | And those are getting activated

00:34:53.940 | and they're sending signals up to my visual cortex.

00:34:56.700 | And that information is processed at a given speed.

00:35:00.040 | What the visualization experiments

00:35:03.000 | that Shepard and Coslin and others did show

00:35:06.520 | is that the processing speed of imagined experiences

00:35:11.420 | is exactly the same as the processing speed

00:35:14.260 | of real experiences.

00:35:15.780 | And the spatial relationship between imagined

00:35:18.040 | and real experiences is exactly the same as well.

00:35:22.160 | Put simply, when we imagine something in our mind's eye

00:35:25.580 | or mind's ear, we are imagining the real thing happening.

00:35:29.980 | And when I say the real thing,

00:35:31.900 | it's not the obvious real thing.

00:35:33.440 | Of course, if you're imagining something,

00:35:34.580 | that's the thing you're imagining.

00:35:35.900 | What I mean is that your brain at the level of neurons

00:35:39.940 | is behaving exactly the same way.

00:35:42.780 | And this needn't have been the case, okay?

00:35:45.500 | There could have been a result, for instance,

00:35:47.580 | that if people were asked to visualize a cube

00:35:50.780 | and rotate it from, you know, flip it from top to bottom,

00:35:54.940 | okay, so put the top that's upward on a table,

00:35:57.300 | now down on the table and so forth,

00:35:59.380 | or to migrate around the island, you know,

00:36:02.020 | counterclockwise going from, you know,

00:36:03.780 | the Northern coast all the way down to the Southern coast,

00:36:06.860 | clockwise, and then back up to the Northern coast,

00:36:09.500 | that they could have just done it really quickly,

00:36:10.980 | like all in one second, but that's not what happens.

00:36:14.620 | They always match the speed at which they do things

00:36:18.040 | in their mind's eye to the same speed

00:36:20.500 | that they do them in the real world.

00:36:22.580 | So in telling you this,

00:36:23.460 | what I'm saying is that mental visualization

00:36:25.780 | at the neural level is identical to real world events.

00:36:30.780 | So when you've heard that when we imagine something,

00:36:33.660 | it's identical in terms of our brain's experience of it

00:36:37.220 | and our body's experience of it,

00:36:39.260 | as when we actually experience something,

00:36:41.500 | that is true at the neural level.

00:36:43.840 | However, when it comes to learning and improving performance

00:36:47.140 | in the cognitive or physical domain,

00:36:48.940 | they are not equivalent.

00:36:50.460 | So this is the second principle

00:36:52.340 | of mental training and visualization.

00:36:54.120 | As you recall, the first principle

00:36:55.500 | of mental training and visualization

00:36:57.060 | was that in order to make it effective,

00:36:58.560 | it needs to be very brief and very simple

00:37:01.060 | and repeated over and over again.

00:37:03.340 | The second principle of mental training and visualization

00:37:06.340 | is that while yes, mental training and visualization

00:37:10.440 | recaptures the same patterns of neural firing

00:37:13.280 | in the exact same ways as real world behavior and thinking,

00:37:17.860 | it is not as effective as real world behavior and thinking.

00:37:22.300 | In other words, if you want to learn something,

00:37:24.480 | the ideal situation is to combine real training

00:37:28.580 | in the physical world with mental training.

00:37:31.620 | And I'll talk about exactly how to do that

00:37:33.500 | and in what ratios a little bit later.

00:37:35.680 | Now there's a really incredible set of experiments

00:37:38.080 | that illustrate why it is that mental training

00:37:40.700 | and visualization can be extremely effective,

00:37:43.660 | but that it's always going to be most effective

00:37:45.660 | when combined with real world training and experiences.

00:37:49.660 | The experiments that I'm talking about involve the use

00:37:51.500 | of what are called bistable images or impossible figures.

00:37:55.900 | Some of you are probably familiar with impossible figures.

00:37:58.260 | These are figures or objects that when you look at them,

00:38:01.820 | they have these odd features.

00:38:02.940 | Like you're not sure where they stop and where they start,

00:38:05.500 | where they end.

00:38:06.600 | One good example would be the so-called Möbius strip.

00:38:10.040 | The Möbius strip is literally a strip

00:38:12.700 | or a line that is contiguous.

00:38:15.140 | It goes up and it loops around and then it curves around

00:38:17.700 | and then it goes back and it just continues and continues.

00:38:20.620 | And when you look at it, you can never really tell

00:38:22.620 | where it starts and where it stops

00:38:24.540 | because it doesn't have any of the features

00:38:26.940 | that allow you to see what's the front and what's the back

00:38:29.900 | in any kind of stable way.

00:38:31.400 | Another example of an impossible figure

00:38:33.000 | would be a little set of cubes

00:38:36.340 | that look like they're coming out toward you,

00:38:38.480 | maybe with a little bend in them,

00:38:40.200 | going up at a right angle perhaps.

00:38:42.120 | But then if you look at it a little bit longer,

00:38:43.900 | that little piece that's facing up looks like it's in front

00:38:46.800 | and you can't really tell what's in front

00:38:48.160 | and what's in back.

00:38:49.120 | And so it's called an impossible figure

00:38:51.480 | because you don't really know how to frame it in your mind

00:38:54.720 | to tell what's closer to you and what's further apart.

00:38:57.740 | Bistable images are somewhat similar,

00:39:00.240 | although different in the sense that they typically

00:39:03.440 | are simple silhouettes.

00:39:04.960 | So for instance, the faces vases bistable image

00:39:07.640 | is perhaps the most famous of these,

00:39:09.200 | where you look at this image, it's very simple

00:39:11.240 | and it looks like two vases.

00:39:13.080 | But then you look at it a little bit longer

00:39:14.520 | and you realize that you're looking at the side angle

00:39:17.160 | or the profile of two faces looking at one another.

00:39:20.520 | And when you see those two faces looking at one another,

00:39:23.680 | you can't see the vases at the same time,

00:39:25.440 | but then if you decide to see the vases again,

00:39:27.800 | you can see the vases again, but the faces disappear.

00:39:30.320 | So it's bistable, meaning that you can't see the faces

00:39:32.560 | and vases at the same time.

00:39:34.280 | And impossible figures and bistable images

00:39:37.040 | are capturing the fact that your visual cortex

00:39:41.100 | and some of the associated areas

00:39:42.480 | that compute visual scenes in your world

00:39:46.240 | are essentially trying to recreate whatever it is

00:39:48.880 | that's out in front of them.

00:39:50.240 | And that's effectively what your visual system does.

00:39:52.600 | It's very good at recreating visual images in your brain,

00:39:55.460 | in your mind's eye.

00:39:56.560 | 'Cause if you think about it, even with your eyes open,

00:39:58.480 | your brain is just creating an abstract representation

00:40:01.360 | of what it thinks is out there.

00:40:03.540 | But that when it comes to assigning an identity

00:40:06.140 | to something like, oh, that's a face or, oh, that's a vase,

00:40:09.460 | that is constrained by different neural circuits,

00:40:12.800 | by different areas of the brain.

00:40:14.240 | And somehow those circuits can't be co-active.

00:40:18.000 | We cannot see the faces and the vases

00:40:20.600 | at exactly the same time.

00:40:21.880 | We can switch back and forth really quickly

00:40:23.920 | just as we can switch back and forth really quickly

00:40:26.160 | when we're looking at the impossible figure and think,

00:40:27.820 | okay, that's the front of it, that's the back.

00:40:29.840 | No, wait, that's the back, that's the front.

00:40:31.440 | And it's going back and forth,

00:40:32.360 | but we can't see them both at the same time.

00:40:34.420 | No one can see them both at the same time, okay?

00:40:37.480 | We know this from brain imaging studies.

00:40:39.480 | Now, impossible figures in bistable images can be seen,

00:40:43.720 | right, you could look them up right now

00:40:44.800 | on your phone or computer,

00:40:46.420 | or I could show you pictures of them on paper

00:40:48.280 | right in front of you.

00:40:49.400 | And you can do these sorts of perceptual experiments

00:40:52.020 | of telling people, look at the face, look at the vase,

00:40:54.120 | look at the front of the cube, now make it at the back

00:40:56.400 | of the cube, and they can do this somewhat deliberately.

00:40:59.080 | However, and this is, I think, so very interesting

00:41:02.900 | to understanding how mental training and visualization

00:41:04.960 | does and does not support real-world learning.

00:41:07.740 | If you try to imagine a bistable image, you can't do it.

00:41:14.180 | In fact, no one can do it until they do something else, okay?

00:41:19.900 | So for those of you that are saying, wait, I can do it,

00:41:21.520 | I can do faces, vases in my mind's eye.

00:41:23.720 | I promise you that the neuroimaging disputes your belief,

00:41:28.160 | okay, and supports the idea that we can see real-world

00:41:31.320 | bistable images, we can see real-world impossible figures,

00:41:34.720 | but when we try and imagine those in our mind's eye,

00:41:37.200 | we simply can't do it.

00:41:38.520 | We can't do the perceptual shift in our mind's eye.

00:41:41.080 | We can't switch back and forth between faces and vases.

00:41:44.400 | However, and I just have to chuckle

00:41:47.000 | 'cause I think these experiments are so clever,

00:41:49.120 | if I have you trace or draw with a pen on a piece of paper,

00:41:54.120 | an impossible figure or the faces, vases, bistable image,

00:42:01.400 | and then I ask you to imagine that bistable image

00:42:05.640 | or impossible figure and to switch back and forth,

00:42:08.600 | you are able to do it.

00:42:10.220 | So what that illustrates is that it's the combination

00:42:13.180 | of imagined and real-world experiences,

00:42:15.760 | real motor movements, real perceptual experiences

00:42:18.640 | combined with motor movements,

00:42:20.060 | combined with what you imagine in your mind's eye

00:42:23.120 | that really gives you the most depth and flexibility

00:42:27.620 | over your mental visualization.

00:42:30.360 | And in doing so, we can really stamp down a third principle

00:42:34.000 | of mental training and visualization,

00:42:35.560 | which is that your mental training and visualization

00:42:38.360 | will be far more effective

00:42:40.280 | if you are performing the exact same or very similar mental

00:42:45.800 | and physical tasks in the real world, okay?

00:42:48.680 | So first principle is mental training and visualization

00:42:51.340 | needs to be simple and brief and repeated.

00:42:53.800 | Second is that mental training and visualization

00:42:56.960 | is not a replacement for real-world motor training

00:43:01.300 | or cognitive training.

00:43:02.320 | It's an augment.

00:43:03.600 | It's an addition that can really help.

00:43:05.000 | And the third principle of mental training and visualization

00:43:08.420 | is that you need to combine mental training and visualization

00:43:12.100 | with real-world behaviors and experiences

00:43:15.060 | that are very, very similar.

00:43:17.720 | Now as a brief, but I think really relevant aside,

00:43:21.020 | one of the things that also makes mental training

00:43:22.980 | and visualization more effective

00:43:25.560 | is when we assign cognitive labels

00:43:28.400 | to what's going on when we visualize.

00:43:30.700 | So what I mean is that people are much better

00:43:32.340 | at manipulating faces and vases in their mind's eye,

00:43:35.500 | of course, only once they've drawn them out physically

00:43:37.240 | with their hand, as I mentioned before,

00:43:39.460 | then they are manipulating abstract objects

00:43:43.020 | like impossible figures, in part,

00:43:45.680 | because by labeling them faces and vases,

00:43:49.240 | people are able to capture a lot of other neural machinery

00:43:53.180 | that's related to faces and vases.

00:43:54.860 | In fact, we have entire brain areas

00:43:56.360 | on both sides of the brain

00:43:57.220 | devoted to the processing of faces.

00:43:58.780 | They're called fusiform face area.

00:44:00.760 | We have other areas in our brain

00:44:02.180 | that are involved in processing of 3D objects,

00:44:05.000 | but faces are of particular value.

00:44:07.380 | There's a value to understanding what a face is

00:44:10.220 | as opposed to a non-face,

00:44:11.540 | and there's a value to understanding

00:44:12.780 | what a particular face is.

00:44:13.860 | In fact, the simplest way to put this

00:44:15.640 | is that the human brain is, in many ways,

00:44:18.820 | a face recognition and expression

00:44:21.660 | of faces recognition machine.

00:44:23.760 | It, of course, does other things,

00:44:24.700 | but it is exceptionally good at that.

00:44:26.580 | Unless you're in a profession

00:44:28.380 | in which the relationships between 3D objects

00:44:30.600 | and your ability to manipulate them is exceedingly important,

00:44:33.880 | you're not going to have a lot of neural real estate

00:44:36.140 | specifically devoted to that.

00:44:38.180 | Some people will be better at it, some people will be worse,

00:44:40.520 | but when it comes to faces,

00:44:42.120 | unless you have a condition like proprasagnosia,

00:44:44.460 | which is an inability to recognize, say, famous faces

00:44:48.100 | and distinguish them from non-famous faces,

00:44:50.060 | or if you have some sort of face recognition deficit,

00:44:52.740 | which about anywhere from one, perhaps,

00:44:55.520 | to 3% of people out there have,

00:44:57.960 | they're just terrible at recognizing faces.

00:44:59.740 | And by the way, there's about half a percent of people

00:45:02.240 | out there that are what are called super recognizers

00:45:04.600 | that can recognize faces in a large crowd,

00:45:07.780 | they can recognize specific faces

00:45:09.380 | even from just partial profiles.

00:45:11.160 | By the way, these people are extremely valuable

00:45:12.680 | to securities agencies and security agencies

00:45:15.300 | are very good at finding these people.

00:45:17.140 | Machines are quickly getting better,

00:45:22.200 | or at least as good as super recognizers,

00:45:24.340 | but the best super recognizers are still better

00:45:26.220 | than the best AI and machine algorithms out there.

00:45:29.700 | But the point is that in your mind's eye,

00:45:33.320 | you are better able to manipulate specific objects

00:45:37.660 | or to see things more clearly and with more specificity

00:45:41.920 | when it has a label that you recognize

00:45:44.360 | from your real world experience,

00:45:45.920 | as opposed to abstract or fictional labels, okay?

00:45:48.960 | Again, stamping home the idea

00:45:50.980 | that what you experience in the real world

00:45:53.540 | really serves to support your mental imagery,

00:45:56.320 | and therefore the key importance of experiencing

00:45:59.000 | and doing things in the real world

00:46:00.960 | and supporting that with mental training and visualization

00:46:03.860 | and not just relying on mental training and visualization.

00:46:06.240 | And the tangent here that's a little bit of fun,

00:46:08.920 | and I don't think we've ever talked about before

00:46:10.420 | on this podcast, is that of UFOs,

00:46:12.520 | unidentified flying objects.

00:46:14.240 | You know, there's a lot of people out there

00:46:16.260 | who think that they've seen UFOs.

00:46:17.940 | I guess technically they have

00:46:19.140 | because a UFO is an identified flying object,

00:46:21.260 | and if it's unidentified, at least to them,

00:46:23.440 | then it is indeed a UFO.

00:46:24.700 | I guess the question is whether or not,

00:46:26.440 | or the dispute rather, is whether or not those UFOs

00:46:28.860 | are actually flown by aliens or controlled by aliens.

00:46:31.320 | I think that's where the dispute lies.

00:46:33.200 | But you can imagine how if somebody sees an object

00:46:36.400 | in their environment and decides, ah, that's a UFO, okay?

00:46:40.320 | Remember these faces, vases, or these impossible figures?

00:46:43.200 | If they say, oh, that thing is a UFO

00:46:45.020 | as opposed to something else,

00:46:46.080 | they see, in other words, the face, not the vase.

00:46:49.100 | Well, that stamps it down as a memory

00:46:52.000 | in their visual system and related systems.

00:46:54.040 | And then in their mind's eye, they are seeing the UFO.

00:46:58.840 | They're not seeing the other thing

00:47:00.740 | that it could possibly be, okay?

00:47:02.360 | So it stamped down a very specific memory.

00:47:04.460 | So the point here is that mental training and visualization

00:47:07.720 | relies on not just the physical contours

00:47:11.120 | and the exact spatial profiles and the speed of movement

00:47:14.080 | of particular things that we experience in the real world.

00:47:16.380 | It also heavily depends on the cognitive labels

00:47:19.540 | and the decisions we make about the things that we see.

00:47:22.240 | And this will become very important

00:47:24.040 | as we build up toward our fourth principle

00:47:26.640 | of mental training and visualization,

00:47:28.140 | which is that our cognitive labels,

00:47:30.640 | that is, what we decide is happening

00:47:32.680 | when we do mental training and visualization

00:47:34.240 | turns out to be very important.

00:47:35.960 | Now, this is not simply to say that you can decide,

00:47:38.500 | okay, I want to learn how to play piano.

00:47:41.500 | And so I'm going to tell myself

00:47:43.560 | that a particular chord I imagine in my mind's eye

00:47:46.640 | is identical to the real world chord

00:47:48.320 | just because I decide it is.

00:47:49.740 | The brain doesn't work that way.

00:47:50.800 | It's not possible to just lie to yourself

00:47:53.640 | and learn better as a consequence of the lies

00:47:56.140 | you tell yourself.

00:47:57.120 | However, what this tells us is that

00:47:59.520 | it is very, very important

00:48:01.400 | that your mental training and visualization

00:48:03.600 | accurately recapitulate the real world training

00:48:06.760 | that you're doing.

00:48:07.760 | So we are going to stamp down a fourth principle

00:48:10.600 | of effective mental training and visualization

00:48:13.060 | based on what we know from the scientific literature

00:48:16.040 | is that your mental training and visualization

00:48:19.120 | should assign labels to what you're doing

00:48:22.320 | that can be matched to real world training and experiences.

00:48:26.160 | Now, these can be somewhat abstract.

00:48:27.860 | So for instance, if you're trying to learn

00:48:30.540 | a particular aspect of the golf swing, okay?

00:48:33.860 | So let's say that you're working on your golf swing,

00:48:36.260 | seems to be there are a lot of people out there

00:48:37.560 | working on their golf swing,

00:48:38.880 | and you're going to do some mental training and visualization

00:48:42.180 | in order to improve your golf swing.

00:48:43.960 | We already know, again, let's just march through them,

00:48:46.120 | that your mental training and visualization

00:48:47.800 | needs to be brief and simple.

00:48:49.280 | It needs to be the same, or in fact, it will be,

00:48:52.640 | we can say the same as your real world golf swing.

00:48:55.040 | In other words, it will take you

00:48:55.880 | exactly the same amount of time to perform that golf swing

00:48:58.700 | in your mind's eye as it would in the real world.

00:49:01.020 | Incredible, right?

00:49:01.920 | Again, something that maybe is taking

00:49:03.420 | a little bit of time to sink in, but once it does,

00:49:05.120 | you're going to be like, wow,

00:49:06.020 | the brain is really an incredible machine.

00:49:08.380 | And that third principle that you still have to do

00:49:12.080 | golf swings in the real world

00:49:13.700 | in addition to the mental training of golf swings.

00:49:16.580 | And fourth, that if you want that mental training

00:49:18.920 | and visualization to really improve your golf swing,

00:49:21.880 | you're going to have to name or apply an identity

00:49:25.560 | to the specific golf swing or aspect of the golf swing

00:49:29.200 | that you're practicing.

00:49:30.040 | So this could be abstract.

00:49:31.360 | You could call it mental training and visualization

00:49:33.560 | of golf swing 1A, and you could imagine in your mind's eye

00:49:37.100 | the perfect golf swing over and over and over and over.

00:49:40.360 | But then when you're in the real world,

00:49:41.760 | you're also going to have to call that,

00:49:44.360 | either out loud or just to yourself, golf swing 1A, okay?

00:49:48.520 | As opposed to a putt, which might be 1B.

00:49:50.800 | So naming and giving an identity to a real world skill

00:49:55.800 | and applying the same name or identity

00:50:00.400 | to the mental version of that, the visualization of that,

00:50:04.000 | can enhance the mental training and visualization

00:50:06.440 | in significant ways.

00:50:07.680 | So when we apply identities or names

00:50:09.980 | to these mental trainings and visualizations,

00:50:12.040 | and again, provided that they are brief and repeated

00:50:15.000 | and so on, we greatly enhance the amount of neural machinery

00:50:18.900 | in the brain and body that we are able to recruit

00:50:21.520 | when we go to perform those real world golf swings

00:50:26.060 | and golf putts, and here just replace golf swing

00:50:28.980 | and golf putt with anything that you're trying to learn,

00:50:31.360 | you're able to recruit a lot more neural machinery

00:50:34.000 | and greatly increase the probability of proper execution.

00:50:37.280 | So before we go any further, I want to share with you

00:50:39.240 | a couple of incredible aspects of mental visualization

00:50:42.800 | that really can be harnessed and applied

00:50:45.320 | toward mental training and visualization.

00:50:48.040 | Some of these were done by Roger Shepherd

00:50:50.140 | and his graduate students and postdocs,

00:50:51.940 | some were done by Steve Costlin and by others.

00:50:54.880 | What these experiments really show

00:50:56.680 | is that mental training and visualization

00:50:59.020 | is capturing many, many of the exact same features

00:51:02.440 | of real world behavior and perceptions,

00:51:04.800 | not all of them, but many of them.

00:51:06.640 | So for instance, if I tell you to close your eyes

00:51:10.880 | and imagine a ceiling that has tiles

00:51:15.880 | that are black and white checkered tiles,

00:51:17.580 | you know, one black tile, one white tile, for instance,

00:51:20.880 | we know based on experiments where we measure eye movements

00:51:23.560 | behind closed eyelids, that people tend to move their eyes up

00:51:27.200 | when they are imagining things above them,

00:51:29.220 | such as the ceiling.

00:51:30.400 | Whereas if I tell you to imagine things down on the floor,

00:51:32.540 | like you're taking a hike and you're looking

00:51:34.440 | for rattlesnakes, actually just recently I experienced

00:51:37.520 | because it's spring here in California,

00:51:39.200 | rattlesnake along a hiking trail,

00:51:40.840 | it's really quite beautiful, although I have to confess,

00:51:43.740 | I enjoyed keeping my distance, I don't like snakes,

00:51:47.440 | very much, I don't dislike snakes,

00:51:49.160 | but I prefer not to interact with them unless I have to.

00:51:52.000 | If I have you imagine that rattlesnake,

00:51:53.900 | depending on your relationship or thoughts

00:51:55.400 | about rattlesnakes, number of things will happen

00:51:57.140 | in your brain, of course, activation of the limbic system

00:51:59.540 | or not, for instance.

00:52:02.180 | But what I know is that regardless of how you feel

00:52:04.840 | about snakes, most of you will move your eyes down

00:52:09.840 | when imagining a snake, okay?

00:52:12.280 | It might be subtle, it might be fast,

00:52:13.980 | but statistically, that result shows up as opposed

00:52:17.820 | to when I imagine or I ask you to imagine something

00:52:20.460 | above you, you tend to move your eyes up.

00:52:22.680 | In addition to that, if I tell you, for instance,

00:52:25.080 | to imagine an elephant and a mouse next to one another,

00:52:28.500 | you presumably have some real world understanding

00:52:30.460 | about the relative sizes of elephants versus mice.

00:52:33.100 | Elephants generally are bigger than mice, thank goodness.

00:52:36.320 | Mice are smaller than elephants.

00:52:39.900 | If I ask you to tell me about the details

00:52:42.460 | of that mouse's face, so for instance,

00:52:44.820 | can you see its whiskers?

00:52:46.940 | The processing time required for you to do that

00:52:50.420 | is much longer than the processing time required

00:52:53.260 | if I say, tell me what the position

00:52:56.220 | of that elephant's trunk is.

00:52:57.940 | Now, why would that be so, okay?

00:53:00.020 | The position of the elephant's trunk wasn't something

00:53:02.380 | that I told you, it wasn't dictated by me,

00:53:03.960 | it's in your mind's eye.

00:53:05.140 | Maybe you don't even know

00:53:06.100 | and you have to go searching for it.

00:53:08.180 | But what we do know is that if I tell you

00:53:10.680 | to look at a small object in your mind's eye

00:53:12.840 | versus a larger object, so for instance,

00:53:14.860 | the mouse versus the elephant,

00:53:16.400 | it takes longer for you to do that.

00:53:18.520 | In other words, just as with the map experiment,

00:53:21.220 | the distance between things on a map is conserved

00:53:24.140 | in your mind's eye as a linear relationship,

00:53:27.120 | takes longer to go far distances between things on a map

00:53:30.580 | in your mind than it does to go shorter distances.

00:53:35.400 | It's also the case that it takes you longer

00:53:39.160 | to look at the details of a small object

00:53:41.620 | versus a large object because why?

00:53:43.700 | Because you are zooming in in your mind's eye.

00:53:47.140 | Again, all of which speaks to the equivalence

00:53:50.100 | of mental imagery with real world imagery and perception.

00:53:54.660 | And as I mentioned earlier, and as we'll see in a moment,

00:53:57.360 | this also extends into the motor domain.

00:53:59.620 | It takes you longer to perform complex motor sequences

00:54:03.220 | in your mind's eye than it does simple motor sequences,

00:54:06.200 | just as it would in the real world.

00:54:07.980 | And if you're saying, of course, of course, of course,

00:54:10.740 | well then great, then we've really underscored the point,

00:54:13.820 | which is that when you imagine things,

00:54:16.060 | it is not exactly the same, but it is very,

00:54:19.020 | very much the same as actually doing

00:54:21.940 | or perceiving those things in the real world.

00:54:24.040 | And the fifth principle of effective mental training

00:54:25.820 | and visualization is this notion of equivalence

00:54:29.220 | of mental imagery versus real world perception and behavior.

00:54:34.020 | These are the experiments, as you recall,

00:54:36.100 | where if people are told to look for clouds

00:54:39.540 | in their mental visualization, they tend to look up,

00:54:41.500 | or if they're looking for something on the floor,

00:54:43.660 | they tend to look down even behind closed eyelids.

00:54:46.400 | Now, this can be applied toward building

00:54:48.400 | an especially effective mental training

00:54:49.900 | and visualization protocol if you deliberately move

00:54:53.220 | your eyes in the direction of the thing or things

00:54:57.420 | that you are trying to recapitulate in your mind,

00:55:00.220 | in your visualization, that is.

00:55:02.120 | You don't necessarily have to include this step,

00:55:04.180 | but mental training and visualization is going to be

00:55:06.140 | more effective if you do, because with consciously generated

00:55:10.620 | eye movements, again, even behind closed eyelids,

00:55:13.760 | you are bringing about more of the neural circuitry

00:55:16.380 | that one would experience if you were to perform

00:55:18.780 | that particular cognitive task or motor task

00:55:21.700 | in the real world, which as I mentioned before

00:55:24.120 | in principle number three, you need to be doing anyway,

00:55:26.140 | separately from your mental training and visualization.

00:55:28.820 | So what we're talking about here is thus far five principles

00:55:32.360 | of mental training and visualization that are well-established

00:55:35.080 | from the scientific research literature.

00:55:36.440 | In fact, I haven't mentioned this quite yet,

00:55:38.420 | and I'll refer to some other references,

00:55:39.900 | but there's a wonderful systematic review

00:55:43.640 | of a large number of studies that have looked

00:55:46.020 | at mental training and visualization, what's effective,

00:55:48.640 | what's less effective across a bunch of different disciplines

00:55:51.340 | that include education, medicine, music,

00:55:53.200 | psychology, and sports.

00:55:54.700 | We will provide a link to this paper

00:55:56.000 | in the show note captions, but the title of the paper

00:55:57.740 | is "Best Practice for Motor Imagery,"

00:55:59.560 | a systematic literature review on motor imagery training

00:56:02.500 | elements in five different disciplines.

00:56:04.420 | As the title suggests, it's mainly

00:56:06.060 | for motor imagery training, but it extends into music,

00:56:10.940 | which of course involves motor training and execution,

00:56:14.140 | but as well as education.

00:56:16.200 | This review establishes a number

00:56:17.540 | of different important things.

00:56:18.420 | I'm going to read off some of the key

00:56:20.940 | or highlight takeaways.

00:56:22.820 | For instance, I described principle one

00:56:25.220 | of effective mental training and visualization,

00:56:27.580 | which is that the visualization be brief

00:56:30.060 | and it be simple and it be repeated.

00:56:31.900 | May ask how many times that very brief five

00:56:34.900 | to 15 second exercise of going through some routine

00:56:39.140 | should be repeated.

00:56:40.640 | Well, different studies have used different ranges

00:56:43.100 | of let's call them repetitions in a given training session,

00:56:46.580 | but the number that seems to be most effective

00:56:49.440 | is somewhere between 50 and 75 repeats per session.

00:56:54.440 | That brings about the question of how long one should rest

00:56:57.480 | between each repeat.

00:56:59.460 | This gets a little tricky depending

00:57:00.760 | on what you're trying to do.

00:57:02.640 | Remember that we have this threshold of about 15 seconds

00:57:06.060 | for completion of the entire motor sequence.

00:57:08.120 | Let's say what you're trying to do,

00:57:09.360 | like a golf swing takes you five seconds to imagine

00:57:12.320 | in your mind's eye from the point where you,

00:57:15.400 | let's just say, have the ball on the tee,

00:57:16.960 | you bring the golf club up,

00:57:18.920 | you might reposition your feet just a little bit,

00:57:21.960 | kind of a little wiggle that golfers do, and then the swing.

00:57:24.920 | If that whole thing takes five seconds in your mind's eye

00:57:27.960 | and roughly five seconds in the real world,

00:57:30.260 | well, then you'd be able to repeat it, of course,

00:57:31.920 | three times in 15 seconds.

00:57:33.680 | That would be one repetition,

00:57:36.660 | even though you're doing it three times.

00:57:38.120 | So there's one 15 second epoch,

00:57:40.240 | as it's sometimes called, E-P-O-C-H, epoch.

00:57:43.080 | And then you would rest

00:57:44.520 | for an approximately equivalent amount of time,

00:57:47.840 | 15 seconds or so, and then repeat.

00:57:50.880 | And rest 15 seconds or so, and then repeat.

00:57:54.520 | Rest 15 seconds, and then repeat.

00:57:56.500 | Again, three golf swings within that 15 seconds,

00:57:59.080 | rest 15 seconds.

00:57:59.960 | Three golf swings within that 15 seconds, rest 15 seconds.

00:58:03.200 | Truth told, these epochs and these rest periods

00:58:06.300 | do not need to be exact.

00:58:08.800 | You could imagine, for instance,

00:58:10.440 | that you get three repetitions of the swing

00:58:13.600 | within 14 seconds.

00:58:15.160 | Well, then do you do another one,

00:58:16.320 | or do you wait until the end of that 15 seconds?

00:58:18.140 | I encourage you not to obsess too much

00:58:20.520 | about those sorts of points.

00:58:21.980 | Rather, you want to do as many repeats as you can

00:58:24.900 | in about a 15 second epoch,

00:58:28.480 | and then rest for about 15 seconds,

00:58:30.700 | and then repeat for a total of 50 to 75 repetitions.

00:58:34.660 | Which might not sound like a lot to some of you,

00:58:37.420 | might sound like an awful lot to others of you.

00:58:40.580 | To me, it sounds like a lot.

00:58:42.060 | 50 repetitions of something

00:58:43.420 | and where you're trying to concentrate in your mind's eye

00:58:45.440 | on getting something accomplished over and over,

00:58:48.180 | over again in exactly the same way, might seem like a lot.

00:58:51.060 | We know, based on the learning literature,

00:58:53.400 | that your ability to successfully perform something

00:58:57.040 | in the real world will lend itself to better performance

00:58:59.740 | of that thing in the imagined world within your mind's eye.

00:59:03.580 | That's also one of these sort of does.

00:59:05.540 | But if you're trying to get better at something

00:59:08.300 | that you've never performed before,

00:59:09.900 | you really should know that.

00:59:11.100 | The mental training visualization

00:59:12.740 | is probably not the best augment

00:59:15.300 | to that real world training

00:59:16.660 | until you're able to perform it successfully

00:59:19.420 | in the real world, at least some of the time.

00:59:22.520 | Mental training and visualization can be effective, however,

00:59:26.100 | at increasing the accuracy or the frequency

00:59:29.580 | at which you can do that real world behavior.

00:59:32.880 | So if normally you're only getting the correct swing

00:59:35.100 | or you're only hitting the golf ball correctly,

00:59:38.220 | say 10% of the time, mental training and visualization

00:59:40.380 | can really help bring that number up.

00:59:42.500 | But it is important that you are able

00:59:43.980 | to successfully complete that motor task in the real world.

00:59:46.780 | Similarly, for performance of cognitive tasks,

00:59:49.340 | so say, for instance, speaking a new language,

00:59:53.540 | you might ask, well, gosh, what in the landscape

00:59:56.220 | of speaking a new language can be restricted

00:59:58.440 | to five to 15 seconds where I could repeat it

01:00:00.540 | anywhere from one to three times in a given epoch

01:00:03.980 | and then rest and then keep repeating 50 to 75 times?

01:00:07.340 | Well, there, I would encourage you to pick something

01:00:09.580 | that you are able to do perhaps very slowly,

01:00:12.220 | so to speak a particular sentence but with some challenge

01:00:16.500 | in getting the accent and the annunciation right,

01:00:18.900 | but you've completed it successfully before

01:00:21.500 | and you want to get more smooth or more fluid with it.

01:00:24.100 | Likewise for playing piano or guitar,

01:00:27.060 | again, you have to translate to the specific cognitive

01:00:29.380 | and or motor activity that you are seeking to improve at.

01:00:33.900 | But those epochs lasting five to 15 seconds

01:00:37.740 | are really the cornerstone of an effective mental training

01:00:40.300 | and visualization practice and the repeated nature of it,

01:00:43.340 | 50 to 75 repetitions in a given session

01:00:46.220 | is also another cornerstone

01:00:48.080 | of an effective mental training and visualization practice.

01:00:50.980 | So says this review and some of the other papers

01:00:53.540 | that I'm going to get to in a few moments.

01:00:55.860 | Now, one of the other key components

01:00:58.720 | of a successful mental training and visualization practice

01:01:01.540 | is how often you perform that mental training

01:01:04.260 | and visualization practice.

01:01:05.700 | And again, a number of different studies have looked at this

01:01:09.780 | through a number of different lenses,

01:01:10.980 | meaning anywhere from two to eight times per week.

01:01:15.600 | It does appear that performing these sessions

01:01:18.700 | anywhere from three to five times per week

01:01:21.060 | is going to be effective.

01:01:22.720 | We could perhaps even say most effective

01:01:24.440 | because most of the, let's just call it the strongest data

01:01:28.420 | really point to repeating these 50 to 75 trials

01:01:31.860 | of the same thing, three to five times per week.

01:01:34.420 | So you can come up with a number

01:01:36.300 | that's reasonable for you to do consistently.

01:01:38.700 | And you might ask, do you have to continue

01:01:42.140 | to perform the mental training and visualization forever?

01:01:45.260 | And the good news is the answer to that question is no.

01:01:48.360 | It does seem that once you have

01:01:50.880 | what's called consolidated the motor performance

01:01:54.120 | or the cognitive performance of something,

01:01:55.700 | it can be further supported or reinforced,

01:01:59.060 | that is consolidated in the neural circuits

01:02:01.580 | that are responsible for performing

01:02:03.140 | that mental or physical task.

01:02:05.380 | So in other words, once you are performing

01:02:07.360 | that cognitive or motor task in a way that's satisfactory

01:02:11.340 | or perhaps just improved, perhaps you're not 100%,

01:02:14.380 | but it's improved in the real world,

01:02:16.200 | you don't need to continue to do mental training

01:02:18.380 | and visualization to maintain that real world performance.

01:02:22.400 | So that's a good thing.

01:02:23.240 | In fact, the ideal situation would be then

01:02:26.300 | to pick a different sequence

01:02:28.660 | or thing that you're trying to learn

01:02:29.780 | and do mental training and visualization for that.

01:02:32.440 | I perhaps might've misspoke there,

01:02:34.580 | although I don't want to edit this out.

01:02:36.500 | I misspoke in the sense that, again,

01:02:38.740 | I said for the thing that you're trying to learn,

01:02:41.460 | remember mental training and visualization

01:02:43.500 | is going to be most effective for building up

01:02:46.940 | the number of accurate trials

01:02:49.220 | or your ability to do something with a greater frequency

01:02:52.660 | of something that you're already capable of doing

01:02:55.740 | or have done at least once in the real world, okay?

01:02:59.240 | This is not to say that mental training and visualization

01:03:01.380 | can't be used to acquire new skills.

01:03:04.540 | It can in principle,

01:03:06.100 | but it has been shown to be most effective

01:03:08.300 | for enhancing the speed and the accuracy of skills

01:03:11.200 | that one has already demonstrated some degree

01:03:13.800 | of proficiency at in the real world.

01:03:16.180 | I think that's important to point out

01:03:18.020 | because we often hear mental training and visualization

01:03:20.700 | and this equivalence of perceptual and motor experiences

01:03:23.100 | in our mind's eye to the real world and we think,

01:03:24.940 | oh, all we have to do is imagine doing something

01:03:27.120 | and we will get better at it.

01:03:28.980 | And unfortunately, that's not the case.

01:03:30.700 | The good news is, however, if you can do something once,

01:03:33.280 | even very slowly in the real world,

01:03:35.300 | and then you bring it to the mental imagery

01:03:38.480 | and visualization domain,

01:03:39.660 | you can get much faster at it in a way

01:03:41.060 | that really does translate back to the real world.

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01:05:01.220 | Now, if you recall principle number three,

01:05:03.420 | or what I'm calling principle number three

01:05:05.300 | of effective mental training and visualization,

01:05:08.540 | which was that you have to be able to perform

01:05:11.240 | the thing that you're trying to get better at

01:05:12.600 | through visualization and imagery in the real world.

01:05:15.900 | That should raise the question of what is the ratio

01:05:20.260 | of real-world training versus mental training

01:05:22.500 | that's going to be most effective?

01:05:23.980 | Ah, well, here, there's some really interesting data,

01:05:26.860 | not just in the review that I mentioned,

01:05:28.220 | but in a couple of the other papers

01:05:29.680 | that we're going to talk about in a few minutes.

01:05:31.760 | But what I've done is I've synthesized the information

01:05:33.820 | across those papers, and they really all point to the fact

01:05:36.920 | that real-world training is more effective

01:05:39.840 | than mental training, and mental training

01:05:42.040 | is more effective than no training.

01:05:44.120 | Now, the mental training more effective than no training

01:05:46.200 | is kind of a duh, except that there are people,

01:05:49.840 | for instance, people who are injured,

01:05:52.280 | who are trying to maintain or replenish some motor skill

01:05:56.760 | or ability to move in a particular way,

01:05:59.100 | or who have had a traumatic brain injury

01:06:01.540 | and are trying to recreate experiences

01:06:04.720 | in a way that's safe for them while

01:06:06.900 | in a somewhat restricted format.

01:06:08.480 | So for instance, if you've damaged a limb

01:06:11.320 | or you're experiencing chronic pain

01:06:13.480 | and you need to take a layoff from some physical activity,

01:06:16.480 | there are now many studies looking at stroke patients,

01:06:19.880 | at patients that have been in accidents, TBI,

01:06:22.920 | also people who are suffering from more conventional limb

01:06:26.080 | and connective tissue injuries,

01:06:27.960 | that if they do mental training,

01:06:29.480 | it obviously is not going to put them at risk

01:06:32.800 | of doing those same movements

01:06:35.420 | as it would in the real world, right?

01:06:37.860 | But that it can actually accelerate

01:06:40.560 | or at least maintain skill performance.

01:06:43.440 | So this is pretty exciting if you think about it,

01:06:45.500 | what this means and the reason it underscores

01:06:47.940 | this mental training is better than no training is that

01:06:50.520 | should you find yourself in the unfortunate circumstance

01:06:53.160 | of being injured or unable to perform a given behavior,

01:06:56.080 | imagining the sequence of behavior

01:06:58.080 | that you'd like to maintain or even build up over time,

01:07:00.260 | provided you've done that motor sequence before

01:07:02.480 | in the real world.

01:07:03.560 | Well, the mental training and visualization

01:07:05.180 | can really help keep that online

01:07:06.560 | or even help you improve over time.

01:07:09.200 | In fact, I have a colleague in the psychology department

01:07:12.320 | at Stanford who told me an anecdote

01:07:14.520 | and admittedly it's just an anecdote

01:07:16.560 | of a student who was recruited to Stanford,

01:07:19.880 | both for their academic prowess,

01:07:21.160 | but also for their abilities in tennis

01:07:23.700 | and was injured in their first year

01:07:25.260 | and at first thought this was devastating,

01:07:27.400 | but did a cognitive reframe around the idea

01:07:31.000 | that that let's call it extended layoff from actual tennis

01:07:34.680 | was going to afford them the ability to do

01:07:36.840 | more mental training than they would otherwise,

01:07:38.800 | even though they were quite sad to not be able to do

01:07:41.900 | actual physical training for tennis.

01:07:43.760 | And when they came back from that injury,

01:07:45.900 | they did indeed manage to improve

01:07:48.200 | beyond the initial non-injured state they were in

01:07:52.880 | before the injury, which is pretty remarkable.

01:07:54.920 | But as this colleague pointed out to me,

01:07:57.100 | they were very careful to include

01:07:59.080 | a lot of mental training and visualization

01:08:00.840 | during that quote unquote layoff period.

01:08:02.680 | So again, mental training better than no training,

01:08:05.000 | physical training better than mental training,

01:08:07.840 | but when we say physical training

01:08:09.360 | better than mental training,

01:08:10.860 | what we're really talking about

01:08:12.280 | is when you allocate a certain amount of training hours

01:08:15.780 | for a given skill per week.

01:08:18.000 | Okay, so how would this look?

01:08:19.000 | What these studies have done is they've said,

01:08:20.620 | okay, if people have the option

01:08:22.900 | of doing the real world training for 10 hours a week

01:08:25.520 | versus mental training for 10 hours a week,

01:08:28.360 | which group performs better?

01:08:29.680 | It turns out it's the ones that do the physical training

01:08:31.760 | for 10 hours per week.

01:08:33.260 | However, we also know that combinations

01:08:36.100 | of physical training and mental training

01:08:38.600 | can bring about results that are greater

01:08:40.680 | than either one of those alone.

01:08:43.640 | How would that work?

01:08:44.540 | Well, I wish I could tell you

01:08:46.040 | that if you did nine hours of physical training per week

01:08:48.880 | plus one hour of mental training,

01:08:51.240 | that your performance would be better

01:08:53.000 | than if you did 10 hours of physical training.

01:08:55.840 | And that's not the case.

01:08:57.640 | Okay, this is why we can reliably say

01:08:59.480 | physical real world training,

01:09:01.760 | and again, this could be in the cognitive domain,

01:09:03.260 | is always going to be more effective

01:09:05.000 | on an hour by hour basis compared to mental training.

01:09:08.240 | So if you can do real world training,

01:09:10.320 | and perhaps we should be calling it real world

01:09:12.000 | as opposed to physical,

01:09:12.820 | but if you can do real world training

01:09:15.620 | compared to purely mental training,

01:09:18.280 | that's going to be the best use of your time.

01:09:20.340 | This is really important.

01:09:21.720 | And it doesn't underscore everything that we're talking about

01:09:23.960 | because here's the really cool thing.

01:09:27.340 | If you do 10 hours per week of real world physical training,

01:09:30.060 | again, could be running, could be music, could be math,

01:09:31.900 | could be whatever it is you're trying to learn,

01:09:33.980 | shooting basketballs, hitting golf balls,

01:09:36.600 | and you add one hour or even half an hour

01:09:41.380 | of mental training to that real world training,

01:09:45.740 | well, then the results are significantly greater

01:09:48.240 | than you would experience with physical training alone.

01:09:50.840 | And of course they would be greater

01:09:51.720 | than you could achieve with mental training alone

01:09:53.100 | because we already established

01:09:54.200 | that real world training is more powerful

01:09:56.900 | in learning skills and retaining skills

01:09:58.600 | than is mental training.

01:10:00.080 | Okay, if any of that was confusing,

01:10:02.480 | let me just say it one more time just to be ultra clear.

01:10:06.060 | If you have the option to do real world training

01:10:09.580 | for a cognitive and or motor skill versus mental training,

01:10:13.020 | always go with real world training.

01:10:14.900 | However, if you can add to a maximum amount

01:10:19.900 | of real world training by doing some mental training

01:10:23.620 | and you follow the principles

01:10:25.060 | that we've been discussing here,

01:10:26.660 | which are gleaned from the scientific literature,

01:10:29.820 | well, then you are going to get significantly greater results

01:10:33.760 | in terms of speed, accuracy, and consistency of performance

01:10:38.760 | of those real world behaviors and cognitive abilities.

01:10:42.820 | And of course, if you are unable to do physical training

01:10:47.180 | for whatever reason, injury, travel,

01:10:50.500 | whatever the case may be,

01:10:52.240 | well, then doing mental training

01:10:53.740 | is still far significantly greater

01:10:57.460 | than doing no training at all, okay?

01:10:59.300 | So total layoffs, it turns out, are a bad thing

01:11:02.340 | if you want to get better at something

01:11:04.580 | and indeed if you want to retain certain skills,

01:11:07.500 | both cognitive and motor.

01:11:09.140 | Now, a couple of other things to keep in mind

01:11:11.640 | as you're thinking about how to build up skills

01:11:14.060 | through a combination of physical and mental training.

01:11:17.900 | Well, remember back to the beginning of the episode

01:11:19.780 | where we talked about neuroplasticity

01:11:21.380 | and the fact that self-directed adaptive plasticity,

01:11:24.060 | which is really what we're talking about here

01:11:26.100 | in this entire episode,

01:11:27.620 | things that you're trying to learn in a deliberate way.

01:11:30.580 | That is, as you recall, a two-part process

01:11:33.280 | requires focused attention,

01:11:35.700 | both when you're doing it in the real world

01:11:37.420 | and when you're doing mental training,

01:11:40.200 | and it requires rest and sleep.

01:11:41.980 | And in fact, you would be very wise

01:11:44.900 | to try and get a good night's sleep

01:11:47.380 | both on the days when you do physical training,

01:11:50.820 | again, also called real world training and mental training.

01:11:54.580 | You may also be asking, can you do them on the same day?

01:11:57.580 | And this gets into some nuance in the literature,

01:12:00.900 | but by my read of the literature, here's the takeaway.

01:12:04.380 | If you are doing the maximum amount of physical training

01:12:07.900 | that you can do according to your schedule,

01:12:09.460 | preventing injury and all those sorts

01:12:11.380 | of important constraints,

01:12:13.040 | and you're going to add mental training and imagery,

01:12:15.500 | it doesn't really matter when you do it.

01:12:17.660 | You could do it immediately after your physical training,

01:12:19.660 | you could do it on a separate day,

01:12:21.580 | but you do want to place it at a time

01:12:23.660 | in which you can try and get good sleep that night.

01:12:27.220 | So for instance, believe it or not,

01:12:28.900 | studies have been done where people are doing mental training

01:12:30.940 | at times when they should be sleeping,

01:12:32.640 | that is going to offset some of the degradation

01:12:35.260 | and performance that you would normally see,

01:12:37.220 | but it's generally a bad idea.

01:12:39.600 | You should do your real world training

01:12:41.580 | and your mental training whenever it is that you can,

01:12:45.260 | and then you should try and get as much quality sleep

01:12:47.780 | as you possibly can on the night following

01:12:50.340 | that physical and or mental training, okay?

01:12:52.900 | This is true of pretty much every night of your life, right?

01:12:54.980 | If I had my way, that is if I had a magic wand,

01:12:57.440 | which obviously I don't,

01:12:58.940 | I would ensure that I and everyone else in the world

01:13:01.060 | get sufficient amounts of quality sleep every single night,

01:13:03.300 | but that's just not realistic.

01:13:04.340 | There are going to be times where that's simply

01:13:06.860 | not going to happen for whatever reason,

01:13:08.300 | and I always say, if you're not going to get

01:13:09.780 | sufficient amounts of quality sleep for whatever reason,

01:13:12.500 | try and make it for a fun reason or a good reason,

01:13:14.860 | but I think getting sufficient amounts of quality sleep,

01:13:17.380 | 80% of the nights of your life is a reasonable goal

01:13:21.140 | and one that's worth striving toward,

01:13:22.320 | and we have lots of episodes now,

01:13:24.100 | or three really, on mastering sleep,

01:13:26.460 | on perfecting your sleep,

01:13:27.780 | and guest episode with the great Matthew Walker,

01:13:31.900 | who wrote the book, "Why We Sleep,"

01:13:34.100 | incredibly important book.

01:13:36.640 | All of those, as well as our toolkit for sleep,

01:13:38.340 | describe ways to improve your sleep,

01:13:40.100 | so you can refer to those episodes

01:13:41.360 | if you're having challenges with sleep

01:13:42.940 | and want to improve on sleep,

01:13:44.780 | and things like non-sleep deep breaths,

01:13:46.080 | which can support your ability to sleep

01:13:47.480 | and your ability to learn.

01:13:48.680 | So sleep is still vitally important,

01:13:50.140 | not just for ensuring neuroplasticity occurs

01:13:52.580 | following real-world training,

01:13:54.180 | but also following mental training,

01:13:56.020 | and again, when you place that mental training

01:13:57.800 | is not so critical,

01:13:59.180 | or at least it doesn't appear to be based on the literature.

01:14:01.840 | So if anyone out there has knowledge

01:14:04.280 | of any peer-reviewed studies stating

01:14:06.140 | that mental training should be done either before or after

01:14:09.120 | or some hours away from real-world training,

01:14:11.220 | please send that to me or put it in the,

01:14:13.360 | excuse me, put it in the comments on YouTube,

01:14:15.280 | and I'll see it there 'cause I do read all the comments,

01:14:18.020 | but I'm not aware of any such data or analysis.

01:14:20.740 | And by the way, if you are interested in understanding

01:14:22.520 | the relationship between motor skill acquisition

01:14:25.180 | and retention and this first night phenomenon

01:14:28.460 | of sleep the first night after training

01:14:30.680 | versus sleep on the second night, et cetera,

01:14:32.160 | there's a really wonderful paper that was published

01:14:34.120 | by none other than the great Matthew Walker

01:14:36.840 | when I believe he was a graduate student,

01:14:38.360 | maybe he was a postdoc when he did this

01:14:39.640 | in Robert Stickgold's lab at Harvard.

01:14:42.240 | The title of the paper is "Sleep and Time Course

01:14:44.360 | of Motor Skill Learning."

01:14:46.160 | This is a paper published in 2003,

01:14:48.520 | still an incredibly important paper.

01:14:50.240 | I will provide a link to it in the show note captions.

01:14:52.160 | It really highlights some of the key aspects

01:14:55.040 | of when people sleep and how critical sleep is

01:14:58.240 | on the night following and the nights following

01:15:00.280 | that training in order to really consolidate

01:15:04.640 | certain types of learning and what phases of sleep

01:15:07.400 | relate to the consolidation of motor learning, et cetera.

01:15:09.740 | A really wonderful paper, and of course,

01:15:11.680 | but just one of Matthew and Robert Stickgold's

01:15:15.620 | incredible papers on sleep and learning.

01:15:17.560 | Remember at the beginning of the episode

01:15:19.080 | when I mentioned that many people are good

01:15:22.040 | at mental training and visualization,

01:15:24.600 | but some people are not?

01:15:26.040 | Well, sex differences have been explored

01:15:28.800 | and age-related differences have been explored

01:15:31.040 | in terms of people's ability to mentally visualize

01:15:34.480 | and train up specific skills.

01:15:37.000 | And while initially there were some sex differences

01:15:39.980 | identified, really the bulk of the subsequent literature,

01:15:44.160 | that is the majority of quality peer-reviewed studies

01:15:46.800 | on this aspect of mental training and visualization,

01:15:49.560 | point to the fact that there are no significant differences

01:15:52.320 | between males and females in terms of their ability

01:15:54.360 | to mentally visualize, nor their ability to use

01:15:56.980 | that mental visualization toward improving cognitive

01:16:00.120 | or motor skills.

01:16:01.520 | That point was covered in some detail

01:16:03.840 | in the review I mentioned earlier.

01:16:05.340 | Best practice for motor imagery,

01:16:06.640 | a systematic literature review on motor imagery,

01:16:08.600 | training elements in five different disciplines.

01:16:10.780 | This review also looked at age-related effects,

01:16:13.560 | and perhaps the only thing that really popped out

01:16:15.160 | from this literature review in terms of age-dependent

01:16:18.600 | differences that point to changes in protocols

01:16:20.820 | that you might make is that for individuals 65 or older,

01:16:24.600 | a combination of physical and mental training

01:16:26.500 | may actually allow them to gain and consolidate skills

01:16:31.500 | better than were they to do physical training alone.

01:16:34.920 | Now, whether or not that's due to some lower upper limit

01:16:38.860 | of physical training that they can do because of their age

01:16:41.200 | or whether or not that's something specific to do

01:16:42.920 | with older versus younger neural circuits isn't clear,

01:16:46.640 | but what this review also makes clear

01:16:48.720 | is that for the vast majority of people out there,

01:16:51.040 | so teens, people in their 20s and their 40s and so on,

01:16:55.100 | physical training more effective than mental training,

01:16:56.880 | we said that before,

01:16:57.840 | combination of physical and mental training more effective

01:17:01.000 | than physical training alone provided the mental training

01:17:03.600 | is on top of the maximum amount of physical training

01:17:05.840 | that one could do, and of course,

01:17:07.340 | mental training more effective than no training at all.

01:17:10.200 | Okay, so we talked about sets and reps.

01:17:12.440 | We talked about, you know, five to 15 second epochs

01:17:15.200 | with about 15 second breaks in between,

01:17:18.500 | or rest between sets, if you will,

01:17:20.200 | repeated for 50 to 75 trials,

01:17:22.620 | done three to five times per week,

01:17:25.080 | some of the conditions of keeping it really simple,

01:17:27.580 | the importance of being able to actually perform

01:17:29.500 | those sequences in the real world, and so on.

01:17:32.340 | What we haven't discussed is first person versus third person

01:17:36.080 | and eyes open versus eyes closed.

01:17:38.260 | What are we really talking about here?

01:17:39.500 | Well, first person mental training and visualization

01:17:43.220 | would be where you are imagining doing something

01:17:47.000 | and you are seeing yourself doing something

01:17:49.500 | from the inside out, as opposed from the outside in.

01:17:53.420 | Imagine, for instance, wearing a head cam, okay,

01:17:55.760 | or a body cam, and doing something with your hands,

01:17:58.600 | or being in virtual reality and having the sense

01:18:00.960 | that whatever you see in front of you

01:18:02.860 | and that's moving and that you're doing, that's you.

01:18:05.440 | So what I mean by this is a mental training

01:18:07.100 | or visualization protocol, for instance,

01:18:08.740 | if you were at the piano or at a guitar,

01:18:10.840 | where you're actually looking down at

01:18:13.160 | or sensing the feeling of your hands,

01:18:16.380 | but you're not actually moving your hands, okay,

01:18:19.080 | as opposed to seeing yourself from outside of your body,

01:18:23.440 | so looking at yourself, say, standing next to you

01:18:25.920 | or from across the room, you're looking at yourself

01:18:28.240 | playing the piano or playing a guitar

01:18:30.180 | or swinging a golf club or doing a tennis serve, okay?

01:18:33.820 | First person versus third person.

01:18:36.100 | And what the data tell us is that first person

01:18:38.980 | mental training and visualization

01:18:40.820 | is generally more effective than third person

01:18:43.620 | mental training and visualization,

01:18:45.160 | which perhaps raises another chorus of does out there,

01:18:48.740 | but it needn't have been the case, right?

01:18:51.600 | I mean, you could imagine that seeing yourself

01:18:53.220 | doing something and doing it perfectly,

01:18:56.000 | because you've done it perfectly once before, hopefully,

01:18:58.560 | would allow you to build up that skill more quickly

01:19:01.240 | because you have that third person perspective

01:19:03.080 | where you can really see every aspect and every element

01:19:06.360 | of what you're trying to perform.

01:19:08.720 | Well, it turns out that the first person

01:19:11.140 | mental training and visualization

01:19:12.740 | is significantly more effective than that third person

01:19:15.800 | mental training and visualization.

01:19:17.480 | So if what you're trying to learn lends itself well

01:19:20.160 | to this first person mental experiencing of self

01:19:24.040 | as you perform the cognitive and or motor skill,

01:19:26.520 | I suggest you do that as opposed to the third person version.

01:19:30.020 | Now, what if what you're trying to learn

01:19:31.320 | doesn't lend itself well to first person visualization?

01:19:35.040 | For instance, what if you're trying to learn

01:19:37.140 | a specific cognitive skill that doesn't involve

01:19:39.780 | any overt motor behavior to be observed?

01:19:42.960 | Well, in that case, it's very clear

01:19:45.760 | that closing your eyes, ideally,

01:19:48.680 | and trying to perform that specific cognitive task

01:19:51.600 | or the statement or the uttering of a particular sentence

01:19:56.440 | in another language or doing some sort of computation

01:20:00.960 | or problem solving of some sort in your head,

01:20:03.680 | well, that itself, of course, is first person

01:20:05.520 | because it's inside your own body as opposed to,

01:20:08.040 | and I don't know that anyone would actually do this,

01:20:09.880 | but looking at yourself from a third person perspective

01:20:12.520 | in your mind's eye and seeing yourself perform

01:20:15.380 | that cognitive challenge,

01:20:17.380 | whatever that challenge may happen to be, okay?

01:20:20.080 | Now, we have to address eyes open versus eyes closed.

01:20:22.920 | And this is where the literature gets pretty interesting.

01:20:25.120 | I always thought, for some reason, I don't know why,

01:20:28.040 | but I presumed that mental training and visualization

01:20:31.460 | should always be done eyes closed.

01:20:34.040 | But it turns out that's not how a lot of studies

01:20:35.780 | of mental training and visualization have been done.

01:20:37.440 | And in fact, many of them have arrived

01:20:39.160 | at really impressive protocols,

01:20:41.200 | which are essentially the protocols that I've distilled out

01:20:43.600 | and I'm listing out during today's episode,

01:20:46.160 | having people either watch videos of themselves

01:20:49.520 | performing a given skill and imagining themselves

01:20:53.720 | in that role, and again, it's them.

01:20:57.200 | So again, during the mental training and visualization,

01:21:00.000 | they're watching a movie of themselves,

01:21:01.480 | so they're somewhat in the third person perspective.

01:21:04.080 | I guess we could technically say

01:21:05.240 | they are in the third person perspective,

01:21:07.000 | but they're watching themselves.

01:21:08.720 | So in doing that, we know, based on neuroimaging studies,

01:21:11.720 | that when we watch videos of ourselves doing things,

01:21:14.460 | we experience that more from a first person perspective

01:21:17.580 | than if we watch videos of other people doing things.

01:21:20.280 | Use your imagination here, folks.

01:21:22.200 | So if you're somebody, for instance,

01:21:24.600 | who's trying to get better at a particular skill,

01:21:27.300 | this could be not just sport, but also public speaking,

01:21:29.780 | watching videos of yourself doing that

01:21:32.440 | can be very effective, but of course,

01:21:34.240 | we have to come back to the first principle

01:21:35.760 | of effective mental training and visualization,

01:21:38.120 | which is that whatever it is that we're trying to build up

01:21:41.680 | or consolidate as a skill needs to be brief and repeated.

01:21:44.760 | So what we're really talking about here

01:21:45.940 | is watching a video of ourselves on loop

01:21:49.160 | or listening to a audio or audio video recording

01:21:53.340 | of ourselves on loop for whatever aspect

01:21:56.240 | that we're trying to build up or improve upon.

01:21:58.520 | Now, for people that, for instance,

01:21:59.640 | are trying to get better at dealing with public speaking

01:22:03.120 | and there isn't a particular skill

01:22:05.560 | or utterance of particular sentences

01:22:08.540 | or words that they're trying to accomplish,

01:22:10.000 | but rather they're trying to learn to be more relaxed

01:22:13.000 | or to articulate better in the public speaking scenario,

01:22:16.560 | there would be one of the few instances

01:22:19.000 | in which I'd suggest more general theme

01:22:21.200 | and not exact recapitulation of some specific words

01:22:24.360 | that you're going to say.

01:22:25.260 | Perhaps it could be a sequence of you walking out onto stage

01:22:30.080 | toward the podium or out from the podium

01:22:32.040 | and facing the audience and looking in multiple directions

01:22:35.520 | up and down to see people in every corner of the room

01:22:37.880 | and just repeating that on loop in your mind's eye

01:22:40.920 | or watching yourself do that on video

01:22:42.940 | and making yourself calm in your internal state

01:22:45.620 | as you're doing that.

01:22:46.880 | This is more of mental autonomic training

01:22:49.760 | because what you're really trying to do

01:22:50.920 | is control your autonomic nervous system,

01:22:53.180 | the nervous system aspect that controls how alert

01:22:55.340 | or calm you are, as opposed to a specific skill.

01:22:58.780 | However, you could also translate this to dance steps

01:23:02.140 | or to motor sequences for playing an instrument and so on.

01:23:06.160 | So the point here is that it's not as if there is

01:23:09.800 | zero utility to third-person mental training

01:23:13.620 | and visualization.

01:23:14.740 | There can be, but first-person mental training

01:23:18.540 | and visualization is going to be more effective,

01:23:20.780 | as I mentioned before.

01:23:21.820 | And if you are going to use

01:23:23.540 | the third-person mental training and visualization,

01:23:26.620 | ideally you would be looking at yourself either on video

01:23:30.820 | or listening to yourself in audio and/or video.

01:23:34.660 | That is going to be more effective than closing your eyes

01:23:37.740 | and trying to imagine yourself

01:23:39.180 | from a third-person perspective in your mind's eye.

01:23:41.840 | Okay, so just to make it really simple,

01:23:43.020 | first-person better than third-person visualization,

01:23:45.060 | if you're going to go with third-person visualization,

01:23:47.240 | try and go with real third-person visualization

01:23:49.760 | where you're actually seeing and/or hearing yourself

01:23:52.120 | on a screen.

01:23:53.020 | And again, this was somewhat of a surprise to me.

01:23:54.940 | I always thought that mental training and visualization

01:23:56.700 | was done with eyes closed.

01:23:57.980 | I thought, okay, could you close your eyes?

01:23:59.120 | You imagine this, you imagine that.

01:24:01.020 | That's actually not the case for many, many studies,

01:24:03.740 | some of which are considered real hallmark studies

01:24:06.440 | within the field of mental training and visualization

01:24:09.120 | and the different neural circuits that it recruits.

01:24:11.660 | And along those lines, there's a really interesting study.

01:24:15.000 | It came out not that long ago.

01:24:16.320 | This was just the summer of 2022.

01:24:18.820 | I'd like to discuss in a little bit of detail

01:24:21.140 | because it really hammers home

01:24:22.740 | a number of the principles that we've talked about.

01:24:24.140 | The title of the article is "Mental Practice Modulates

01:24:26.820 | "Functional Connectivity Between the Cerebellum

01:24:28.900 | "and the Primary Motor Cortex."

01:24:30.700 | Going to tell you the essential features of this study.

01:24:33.700 | First of all, primary motor cortex, sometimes called M1,

01:24:38.280 | is a relatively small but vitally important strip of neurons

01:24:42.360 | in or near the front of your brain.

01:24:44.520 | The neurons there are called upper motor neurons.

01:24:48.520 | They communicate through a set of neural connections

01:24:50.780 | with what are called lower motor neurons.

01:24:52.480 | The lower motor neurons sit in what's called

01:24:54.400 | the ventral horn of the spinal cord.

01:24:56.800 | So along the spinal cord, you have sensory inputs

01:24:58.880 | coming from skin and muscle

01:25:00.280 | and what's called proprioceptive feedback

01:25:02.040 | that tells you where your limbs are

01:25:03.240 | in relation to each other and to yourself and so on.

01:25:06.180 | You also have motor neurons that live in the spinal cord.

01:25:08.180 | They're actually the ones that send little wires

01:25:09.880 | that we call axons out to the muscles,

01:25:11.320 | release acetylcholine onto those muscles

01:25:12.800 | and allow those muscles to contract.

01:25:14.560 | Lower motor neurons are the ones

01:25:15.920 | that actually generate movement.

01:25:18.360 | However, they are largely responsible

01:25:21.240 | for reflexive movements or already learned movements,

01:25:24.920 | and they require some input

01:25:26.340 | from things like central pattern generators

01:25:28.140 | and some other circuits

01:25:28.980 | within the spinal cord and brainstem.

01:25:30.680 | But it's those M1, primary motor cortex neurons

01:25:33.860 | that are called upper motor neurons

01:25:35.300 | because they control lower motor neurons

01:25:38.680 | through directed action, okay?

01:25:40.560 | So when I say primary motor cortex,

01:25:43.880 | I'm really talking about those upper motor neurons, M1.

01:25:46.520 | The cerebellum is an area in the back of your brain.

01:25:49.000 | If you were to look at a brain,

01:25:49.840 | you'd see two little lobes back there

01:25:51.060 | that are highly foliated.

01:25:52.160 | Foliated means that lots of folds

01:25:54.480 | and lots of bumps and grooves back there,

01:25:56.440 | and actually means mini brain.

01:25:57.680 | It looks like a kind of a mini brain

01:25:58.760 | stuffed in the back of the brain.

01:26:01.100 | In certain animals, the cerebellum is much larger

01:26:04.480 | than the rest of the brain.

01:26:05.580 | In humans, the cerebellum is relatively small

01:26:07.900 | compared to the rest of the so-called neocortex,

01:26:09.860 | the outer shell, the human brain.

01:26:11.560 | The cerebellum is involved in balance.

01:26:13.260 | It's also involved in eye movements.

01:26:15.160 | It's also involved in timing and motor learning.

01:26:17.880 | And the key thing to understand

01:26:19.380 | is that the cerebellum communicates

01:26:21.380 | with the primary motor cortex,

01:26:23.400 | and it can do so through what's called inhibition.

01:26:26.360 | It has outputs that inhibit the activity of neurons

01:26:30.600 | in the motor cortex and elsewhere,

01:26:32.460 | and that has a profound influence on the execution

01:26:35.100 | of motor behavior and the learning

01:26:36.480 | of particular motor behaviors.

01:26:38.540 | Now, I don't want to get into too much detail

01:26:40.640 | around all this, but what you need to know

01:26:43.160 | is that the cerebellum communicates

01:26:45.020 | with M1, primary motor cortex.

01:26:47.180 | M1 is primary motor cortex.

01:26:48.700 | Those are the upper motor neurons

01:26:49.700 | that are going to control the lower motor neurons

01:26:52.000 | and are going to control physical behavior

01:26:54.220 | and execution of physical movements.

01:26:56.440 | The communication between cerebellum

01:26:59.820 | and primary motor cortex is inhibitory,

01:27:03.580 | although it can activate motor cortex too.

01:27:06.320 | And this gets into a little bit of technical detail,

01:27:08.480 | but there can be inhibition of inhibition.

01:27:10.280 | So if you take something that's a break

01:27:11.760 | and you inhibit that break,

01:27:12.960 | what you end up with is more excitation, okay?

01:27:15.080 | So the takeaway here that's key

01:27:17.280 | and everyone should be able to understand,

01:27:18.680 | even though you may or may not be following

01:27:20.700 | this whole cerebellum primary motor cortex thing,

01:27:23.080 | is that when we gain a new skill

01:27:25.920 | or we get more proficient at a skill,

01:27:28.100 | so faster and more accurate,

01:27:30.240 | there tends to be more net excitation

01:27:34.360 | of the cerebellum to motor cortex communication.

01:27:39.040 | And that is accomplished by reducing inhibition.

01:27:41.920 | So that's where it gets a little bit confusing to some.

01:27:44.640 | But in this paper, what they did is they explored

01:27:47.820 | people's ability to improve on a very specific

01:27:50.560 | but very simple motor sequence.

01:27:51.880 | It's one that you're already familiar with.

01:27:53.420 | It's that tapping sequence that I talked about before

01:27:55.940 | where the thumb is digit one, index finger number two,

01:27:58.280 | middle finger number three, ring finger number four,

01:28:01.000 | and pinky finger number five.

01:28:02.380 | And it's a one, two, one, three, one, four, one, five.

01:28:05.880 | One, two, one, three, one, four, one, five.

01:28:07.880 | And they had people actually perform this

01:28:09.920 | and they measured their speed and accuracy.

01:28:12.900 | And then they had them do a practice session

01:28:16.600 | that was either an intentional task,

01:28:18.800 | so one group just looked at an attentional cue

01:28:21.380 | and had to maintain focus on that attentional cue.

01:28:24.280 | And another group did mental practice.

01:28:26.300 | They basically did 50 imagined trials.

01:28:29.000 | So just in their mind's eye of this one, two, one, three,

01:28:31.560 | one, four, one, five on repeat.

01:28:33.740 | Okay, 50 trials, much in the same way

01:28:36.600 | as what I referenced as the ideal protocol earlier.

01:28:39.580 | Okay, 50 rounds of that.

01:28:41.500 | Then they got tested again on the motor task

01:28:44.500 | in the real world.

01:28:46.080 | And there were also recordings of the cerebellar

01:28:49.280 | to primary motor cortex communication.

01:28:51.580 | So there were a bunch of different results in this study

01:28:53.680 | I think are interesting,

01:28:54.600 | but the ones that are most important are that, quote,

01:28:57.240 | we found that mental practice enhanced both the speed

01:29:00.280 | and accuracy of this one, two, one, three, one, four,

01:29:04.060 | one, five performance in the real world

01:29:06.380 | when people did these 50 imagined trials.

01:29:09.460 | There are many results out there,

01:29:10.720 | different papers that parallel

01:29:14.080 | and essentially say the same thing

01:29:16.020 | as what is said in this paper.

01:29:17.200 | And remember, there've been studies of mental training

01:29:19.360 | dating back to the 1880s.

01:29:20.760 | But what this paper really does,

01:29:23.420 | it looks at the neural machinery

01:29:24.620 | and the changes in the neural machinery.

01:29:26.360 | And what they found using transcranial magnetic stimulation,

01:29:30.680 | both in the context of stimulating,

01:29:32.940 | but also recording activity and connectivity

01:29:34.860 | between cerebellum and primary motor cortex,

01:29:37.220 | is that mental training enhanced the net excitation

01:29:42.220 | of cerebellum to motor cortex communication.

01:29:45.720 | That is, it reduced the inhibition in a way

01:29:48.520 | that allowed motor cortex to generate these movements

01:29:51.680 | with more accuracy and more speed.

01:29:53.660 | What's also interesting about this paper

01:29:54.980 | is that it showed that the improvement

01:29:56.540 | in performance of this task was not related to activation

01:30:01.140 | of the motor pathways themselves.

01:30:03.180 | So it's not the case that the cerebellum activation

01:30:05.400 | or inhibition changed the patterns of excitation

01:30:08.960 | going directly to the spinal cord

01:30:11.920 | because those pathways actually exist

01:30:13.660 | through a couple of intermediate stations.

01:30:16.160 | What it really showed is that

01:30:17.920 | when people do mental training,

01:30:19.800 | and here you could say, okay, 50 trials,

01:30:21.400 | that's a lot of trials,

01:30:22.240 | but it's not actually that many trials.

01:30:23.980 | It's pretty fast learning if you think about it.

01:30:26.180 | Do a task in the real world,

01:30:28.300 | do 50 trials of the imagined task,

01:30:30.220 | do the trial in the real world again,

01:30:32.280 | significant improvement in speed and accuracy

01:30:34.900 | through now what are becoming

01:30:37.480 | to be established neural circuit connections

01:30:39.580 | between cerebellum and primary motor cortex.

01:30:41.780 | Okay, so this study is one of several,

01:30:44.140 | but not a tremendous number of studies out there

01:30:46.260 | that are starting to really pinpoint

01:30:47.760 | the underlying neural circuits

01:30:49.060 | that allow mental training and visualization

01:30:51.260 | to really improve motor skill performance.

01:30:53.500 | But again, and please hear me on this,

01:30:56.120 | in this study and in the vast majority of other studies

01:30:59.160 | that have shown significant improvement

01:31:01.460 | in motor performance in the real world

01:31:03.900 | by use of mental training and visualization,

01:31:05.980 | there was an ability of each and every one in the study

01:31:08.700 | to perform the specific motor sequence in the real world

01:31:11.980 | that then they were able to enhance

01:31:13.660 | with mental training and visualization.

01:31:15.440 | Now, thus far, we've been talking mostly about performance

01:31:17.740 | of motor sequences.

01:31:18.800 | And one of the things to really understand

01:31:20.440 | about performance of motor sequences,

01:31:22.920 | both in the real world and in the imagined context

01:31:25.340 | is that it involves the doing,

01:31:27.680 | that's what we call a go action

01:31:30.580 | and not doing certain things.

01:31:32.720 | What do I mean by not doing?

01:31:33.780 | Well, for many tasks out there,

01:31:35.260 | even ones as simple as the one, two, one, three, one, four,

01:31:37.580 | one, five tasks that we talked about a moment ago,

01:31:40.740 | there is the need not just to tap those fingers

01:31:43.460 | in the correct sequence as quickly as possible,

01:31:46.060 | but also to be accurate about it,

01:31:47.420 | to not do one, three, one, four or one, three and four

01:31:50.760 | at the same time.

01:31:51.580 | So there's both a go component, an action component

01:31:53.680 | and a withhold action component.

01:31:56.240 | And the ability to withhold action

01:31:58.480 | is strongly constrained by the time domain.

01:32:00.480 | In other words, the faster that we need

01:32:02.380 | to perform a given motor sequence,

01:32:04.660 | the more likely we are to perform incorrect components

01:32:08.180 | of the motor sequence as well, okay?

01:32:10.360 | So one of the key things about mental training

01:32:13.240 | and visualization that's really remarkable

01:32:15.740 | is that it can also be used and has been shown

01:32:18.760 | to improve not just go aspects of motor performance

01:32:22.420 | and cognitive performance,

01:32:23.340 | but also no go aspects of motor performance

01:32:27.180 | and skill learning.

01:32:28.340 | Now, the go, no go thing is something I've discussed before

01:32:32.620 | on this podcast in reference to the so-called basal ganglia.

01:32:35.500 | Basal ganglia are subcortical,

01:32:37.940 | so they're below that bumpy surface of the human brain

01:32:41.100 | that we're most accustomed to seeing

01:32:43.020 | when we look at it from the outside.

01:32:45.020 | And the basal ganglia are strongly involved

01:32:47.740 | in go versus no go type tasks and learning.

01:32:51.780 | Now, there are only a few studies

01:32:54.620 | that have really looked at the learning

01:32:56.920 | and the improvement of no go components of motor learning,

01:33:00.980 | but these no go components are really, really important.

01:33:04.580 | In fact, if we were to look at what's involved

01:33:07.680 | at improvement in a golf swing or shooting free throws

01:33:11.220 | or getting better at piano or getting better at math

01:33:13.320 | or language speaking,

01:33:15.460 | I think it's fair to say that at least half

01:33:17.520 | and probably as much as 75% of motor learning

01:33:21.220 | is about restricting inappropriate movements or utterances

01:33:25.900 | or thoughts if what you're trying to learn

01:33:28.520 | is purely cognitive.

01:33:30.460 | I think that's an important point

01:33:32.380 | that brings us back to our initial learning

01:33:35.460 | when we come into this world, that developmental plasticity,

01:33:37.700 | which as you recall, we have a lot of interconnected aspects

01:33:42.460 | of our brain and nervous system early in life.

01:33:44.260 | Remember the example of the kid trying to eat

01:33:46.160 | and getting the spoon of food

01:33:47.280 | and bowl on their head, et cetera.

01:33:49.400 | And then over time, getting more accurate

01:33:50.860 | at bringing food to their mouth and eating in a clean way,

01:33:53.480 | things that most, but not all people accomplish

01:33:56.140 | at some point in the course of their lifetime.

01:33:58.300 | Well, there haven't been many,

01:33:59.180 | but there've been a few very interesting studies

01:34:01.540 | looking at how mental training and visualization

01:34:03.900 | can improve the no go aspect of motor learning.

01:34:06.700 | And I think this is important to highlight

01:34:08.260 | because it really mirrors what's done in the real world,

01:34:12.700 | as opposed to just the finger tapping type things,

01:34:15.180 | which are mostly go tasks.

01:34:16.600 | Again, there's a little bit of a no go component there,

01:34:18.820 | but there are specific tasks

01:34:19.940 | that people have developed for the laboratory

01:34:21.980 | that really closely mimic action learning

01:34:25.020 | and cognitive learning in the real world.

01:34:26.760 | And one of the more important of those

01:34:30.320 | is what's called the stop signal task.

01:34:32.840 | Now the stop signal task is something

01:34:34.220 | that I'll explain to you.

01:34:35.500 | I'll also provide a link in the show note caption

01:34:38.340 | so you can try it.

01:34:39.180 | It's actually a lot of fun to try this

01:34:41.200 | because it really gives you a sense

01:34:42.260 | of just how challenging some of these laboratory tasks are.

01:34:45.420 | Let me just describe it for a moment.

01:34:47.400 | The stop signal task was really developed and popularized

01:34:50.420 | by Gordon Logan and William Cowen.

01:34:53.220 | Gordon Logan is at Vanderbilt University

01:34:55.420 | and has done a lot of really important work.

01:34:58.060 | But one of the important aspects of his work

01:35:00.360 | is looking at motor performance and skill acquisition

01:35:03.120 | and the development of the stop signal task.

01:35:05.720 | I'll describe the stop signal task for you now

01:35:07.520 | in broad contour.

01:35:09.120 | You or another research subject

01:35:11.300 | would sit in front of a screen.

01:35:13.040 | There are two keys on that keyboard

01:35:14.760 | or two keys among the other keys on that keyboard,

01:35:17.420 | one which is designated left,

01:35:19.640 | the other which is designated right.

01:35:21.800 | And then on the screen, you'll be presented, for instance,

01:35:24.560 | with a left facing or a right facing arrow.

01:35:28.240 | So in the initial trial, what would happen is

01:35:30.340 | that arrow would pop up on the screen

01:35:31.500 | and your job is to press the left key.

01:35:34.460 | When the right facing arrow is presented,

01:35:36.620 | you press the right key.

01:35:37.580 | Okay, pretty straightforward.

01:35:38.900 | But there's a limited amount of time

01:35:40.460 | in which you can do this.

01:35:41.760 | And the idea is that you're going to need to do this

01:35:44.320 | within approximately 500 milliseconds

01:35:46.520 | of the presentation of that arrow

01:35:48.440 | or else it's going to tell you that you missed that trial.

01:35:51.220 | Now, of course, if you press the wrong key,

01:35:52.940 | so if the arrow goes left and you press the right key,

01:35:55.860 | then you would be told you got that one wrong, okay?

01:35:58.520 | So this is a reaction time test

01:36:00.620 | and not one that's particularly novel.

01:36:03.060 | What's novel and what Logan and Cowan developed

01:36:06.380 | was that in the stop signal task,

01:36:09.660 | every once in a while, not every trial,

01:36:11.420 | but every once in a while, that arrow is presented.

01:36:14.580 | And then with some delay ranging from anywhere

01:36:17.600 | from 100 milliseconds to maybe 350 milliseconds,

01:36:20.880 | there would be a red circle or a red X also presented,

01:36:24.620 | which is a stop signal.

01:36:26.080 | And your job is to not press the key

01:36:29.920 | that corresponds to the direction of arrow.

01:36:31.520 | In fact, not press any key at all.

01:36:34.160 | Now, you can imagine how if the stop signal shows up

01:36:37.680 | with a longer delay after the presentation of the arrow,

01:36:41.020 | there's a higher probability

01:36:42.020 | that you will have already generated

01:36:44.020 | the key pressing movement, okay?

01:36:45.860 | So at the link that we provide in the show note caption,

01:36:49.380 | you can actually do these two tasks.

01:36:51.020 | And what you'll find is that you and most people

01:36:54.640 | will be able to do this arrow to reaction time

01:36:58.080 | pressing of the left to right key,

01:36:59.700 | somewhere in the neighborhood between 300 milliseconds

01:37:02.340 | and maybe as long as 500 millisecond delay.

01:37:04.040 | You'll get an average of how quickly you respond.

01:37:06.140 | And then of course, if you choose to,

01:37:09.380 | and I would hope you would choose to,

01:37:10.600 | go on and do the stop signal task,

01:37:13.060 | you will be told trial by trial

01:37:15.280 | whether or not you are hitting the right keys,

01:37:17.200 | because if you are,

01:37:18.140 | you'll be allowed to progress to the next trial.

01:37:20.860 | Or if you are told to stop,

01:37:22.940 | that is you get the stop signal

01:37:24.980 | and you press the key anyway,

01:37:26.100 | you'll be told that you made an error

01:37:27.600 | because you did not stop.

01:37:28.740 | Now, again, with very short delays

01:37:30.620 | between the presentation of the arrow and the stop signal,

01:37:33.200 | you are going to be much better at inhibiting

01:37:35.340 | or preventing yourself from the behavior

01:37:37.240 | at the no-go aspect of motor execution, that is.

01:37:42.180 | What you will find is that if the stop signal

01:37:44.860 | is presented very shortly after,

01:37:46.820 | let's say 100 milliseconds,

01:37:48.020 | which is a very, very brief amount of time,

01:37:50.220 | after the presentation of the arrow,

01:37:51.740 | there's a good chance that you're going to be able

01:37:53.880 | to withhold the key pressing behavior.

01:37:56.620 | However, if the delay is anywhere from 200 to 350 milliseconds

01:38:00.740 | after the presentation of the arrow,

01:38:02.920 | chances are that you're going to press the button

01:38:05.640 | even when you shouldn't have

01:38:07.140 | on at least some of those trials, okay?

01:38:09.320 | And if you try and game the system

01:38:11.360 | and wait a certain amount of time

01:38:13.600 | after the presentation of each arrow,

01:38:15.500 | there will also be times in which the stop signal

01:38:17.680 | does not appear and you fail to hit the button

01:38:19.720 | in the appropriate amount of time.

01:38:21.440 | So it's a fun little task.

01:38:22.420 | It doesn't cost anything

01:38:23.780 | except maybe a couple of minutes of your time.

01:38:26.100 | And if you do have time to go to it,

01:38:27.680 | I think it will give you a much deeper flavor

01:38:30.620 | for the sorts of experiments that we're talking about here

01:38:33.220 | and that you'll find that these stop signals

01:38:36.820 | are actually pretty hard to generate

01:38:38.080 | when you're trying to learn some new motor behavior.

01:38:39.980 | And that actually illustrates a bigger point here.

01:38:42.660 | If today you sense that we've been talking about studies

01:38:45.220 | of tapping fingers and stopping button presses

01:38:48.580 | and that those examples are highly artificial

01:38:51.860 | and don't really translate to the real world,

01:38:54.220 | well, keep in mind that the tasks that are used

01:38:56.860 | in these studies really target the specific neural circuits,

01:39:00.240 | that is the same neural circuits

01:39:01.840 | that you would use for the performance

01:39:03.100 | of essentially any motor task.

01:39:05.760 | Now, of course, other motor tasks,

01:39:07.240 | like ones where you involve your feet or cognitive tasks

01:39:09.480 | where you have to think really hard

01:39:11.160 | about specific information and search for that information

01:39:13.780 | and assemble it in particular ways,

01:39:14.860 | of course, involve other neurons and neural circuits

01:39:17.440 | that we haven't discussed today.

01:39:18.900 | But the core components of these go and no-go task

01:39:21.860 | or the stop signal tasks

01:39:22.980 | really capture the core elements

01:39:25.120 | of most all of cognitive and or motor learning in some way

01:39:29.060 | that's fundamentally important, okay?

01:39:30.540 | So they have real world relevance.

01:39:32.420 | The paper that I'd like to just briefly describe to you

01:39:35.820 | is entitled "Motor Imagery Combined with Physical Training

01:39:38.280 | Improves Response Inhibition in the Stop Signal Task," okay?

01:39:41.700 | So that title is a little bit wordy,

01:39:43.420 | but now you know what the stop signal task is.

01:39:46.200 | And what this paper essentially found

01:39:48.900 | was that if people did physical training,

01:39:52.060 | so the sort of experiment that I just described,

01:39:54.640 | versus mental training where they sat eyes open

01:39:57.380 | and imagine their responses to those arrows and stop signals,

01:40:01.080 | but they didn't actually generate any key presses,

01:40:03.860 | versus a combination of the physical training,

01:40:07.740 | so the actual pressing of the buttons

01:40:09.320 | or withholding pressing of the buttons as the case may be,

01:40:12.300 | plus mental training,

01:40:13.780 | over the course of about five days,

01:40:17.520 | using the contour described of the key principles

01:40:21.980 | of mental training and performance that we've talked about.

01:40:23.940 | I'll get to the specifics in a moment,

01:40:25.040 | but it really obeyed most all of what we've talked about,

01:40:27.900 | if not all of it.

01:40:28.740 | So repetition, simple, repeated,

01:40:30.860 | over about five days and so on and so forth.

01:40:33.100 | What they found was that the mental training

01:40:34.960 | and physical training groups,

01:40:36.180 | so mental and real-world training groups,

01:40:38.980 | performed significantly better

01:40:40.900 | in the stop signal reaction time.

01:40:43.060 | That is, they were able to withhold action

01:40:45.940 | when they needed to withhold action.

01:40:47.780 | More frequently and with more accuracy

01:40:51.060 | vended either the physical training

01:40:52.700 | or mental training groups alone.

01:40:54.220 | So this actually spits in the face of what we said earlier,

01:40:57.860 | which is that physical training

01:40:59.080 | is always better than mental training,

01:41:00.640 | and mental training is always better than no training.

01:41:02.820 | And it's important to point out here

01:41:04.540 | that both the physical training

01:41:06.520 | and the mental training groups

01:41:07.940 | experience significant improvements

01:41:10.660 | in their reaction time and accuracy at the stop signal task.

01:41:14.340 | But in the case of this study,

01:41:15.940 | which is exploring the withholding

01:41:17.860 | of inappropriate behaviors,

01:41:21.020 | the combination of mental training and physical training

01:41:23.740 | outperformed either physical or mental training alone.

01:41:26.900 | So while earlier we said

01:41:28.620 | that if you have a certain amount of time

01:41:30.900 | in order to train something up,

01:41:32.560 | physical training is always going to be better

01:41:34.740 | than mental training.

01:41:35.580 | Well, here we have somewhat of an exception

01:41:37.620 | where if the thing you're trying to learn

01:41:40.300 | involves withholding mistakes

01:41:43.500 | as opposed to trying to generate

01:41:45.280 | the right behaviors per se,

01:41:47.060 | well, then you are probably better off doing a combination

01:41:51.140 | of mental training and physical training.

01:41:53.020 | Let me state that a little bit differently.

01:41:54.700 | If you're finding that you're screwing up something,

01:41:57.740 | not because you can't initiate

01:41:59.740 | that particular mode of behavior,

01:42:01.180 | but you're doing the wrong thing at the wrong time,

01:42:04.020 | you're not able to withhold a particular action,

01:42:06.860 | well, then in that case,

01:42:08.360 | mental training in combination with physical training

01:42:10.900 | becomes especially important.

01:42:12.900 | So for you coaches, for you students out there,

01:42:15.140 | keep that in mind when trying to learn

01:42:17.320 | how to withhold particular action sequences,

01:42:19.880 | because they're not serving you well in the real world,

01:42:22.300 | using a combination of real world training

01:42:25.500 | and physical training is actually better for you

01:42:27.580 | on an hour per hour basis than is physical training alone.

01:42:31.740 | A couple of key details about this study

01:42:33.580 | should you decide to implement these protocols.

01:42:36.060 | In this study, they did approximately 30 trials

01:42:39.860 | of the thing that they were trying to get better at.

01:42:42.420 | Now they did those in the real world.

01:42:44.040 | So in this case, the stop signal task

01:42:46.200 | involved actually pressing those buttons.

01:42:47.820 | And then they had a test phase of about 144 GO trials

01:42:52.820 | and about 48 STOP trials, okay?

01:42:56.860 | So this is important.

01:42:58.380 | If you are a coach or you're a student,

01:43:00.020 | or you're just going to self-direct this kind of learning

01:43:02.420 | in your self-directed adaptive plasticity,

01:43:04.900 | it's important that you mix in both GO and no-GO trials, okay?

01:43:08.100 | It wasn't always the case

01:43:09.380 | that there was a stop signal generated.

01:43:12.540 | The other thing that was really impressive about the study

01:43:14.580 | is that the changes occurred very quickly.

01:43:16.700 | So the training was performed five times over five days.

01:43:21.180 | So once a day for five days,

01:43:22.380 | again, back to this three to five times per week principle.

01:43:25.400 | And the improvements were really significant in some cases.

01:43:30.020 | In fact, if you decide to peruse this paper,

01:43:32.840 | you can go to table two and you can see,

01:43:37.100 | in some cases, a near doubling in the reduction

01:43:40.700 | in reaction time through a combination of mental

01:43:43.180 | and physical training compared to physical training alone

01:43:45.820 | or mental training alone.

01:43:46.900 | Again, however, both physical training

01:43:49.840 | and mental training groups alone

01:43:52.620 | saw significant improvements,

01:43:54.100 | but the combination of mental training

01:43:55.380 | and physical training was far greater

01:43:57.340 | than you saw with either one of those alone.

01:43:59.400 | So that's all nicely quantified for you in this paper.

01:44:01.540 | So again, I really like this paper.

01:44:03.160 | Despite it not involving a huge number of subjects,

01:44:05.860 | I think it is a key paper because it really points

01:44:08.540 | to such an important element of motor learning and training,

01:44:13.200 | which is this action withholding component,

01:44:15.720 | this no-go component that here is captured so nicely

01:44:18.580 | in the stop signal task.

01:44:19.860 | So before we round up our discussion

01:44:21.940 | about motor training and visualization,

01:44:24.380 | I want to just briefly touch on some of the studies

01:44:26.220 | that have explored why certain individuals

01:44:28.500 | are better or worse at motor training and visualization

01:44:32.380 | and what that might correlate with.

01:44:34.220 | At the beginning of today's episode,

01:44:35.540 | I briefly mentioned aphantasia,

01:44:37.580 | which is this phenomenon where some people just simply can't

01:44:42.180 | or seem to have extreme challenge generating visual imagery.

01:44:46.100 | Been a number of studies exploring how aphantasics,

01:44:49.000 | as they're sometimes called,

01:44:49.840 | although nowadays it's not considered polite, if you will,

01:44:54.840 | to refer to people according to their condition.

01:44:58.500 | So for instance, propasagnosia is a condition

01:45:01.680 | in which people are unable to recognize particular faces.

01:45:06.500 | And in the past,

01:45:07.780 | these people were referred to as propasagnosics, okay?

01:45:11.060 | As if their condition defined them, right?

01:45:14.640 | Nowadays, it's not considered polite to do that.

01:45:17.580 | Rather, we say the person has propasagnosia

01:45:20.340 | or suffers from propasagnosia.

01:45:22.260 | Although the word suffer then also

01:45:23.840 | has become a little bit touchy.

01:45:25.300 | I'm going to do my best to just try

01:45:26.620 | and be as clear as possible here

01:45:27.900 | and explain that people who have aphantasia

01:45:31.300 | can have aphantasia to varying degrees.

01:45:33.500 | So they can either have a complete absence of ability

01:45:36.780 | to generate mental imagery,

01:45:38.580 | or they have a poor or kind of rudimentary ability

01:45:42.460 | to generate visual imagery in their mind's eye.

01:45:44.820 | It was thought that people who have aphantasia

01:45:49.600 | are not capable of what's called synesthesia.

01:45:51.980 | Synesthesia's are when people have perceptual blending,

01:45:56.440 | and this is not well under the influence

01:45:58.540 | of any kind of psychedelic or other kind of drug,

01:46:01.740 | perceptual blending of an atypical kind or rare kind.

01:46:04.940 | I actually have some friends,

01:46:06.220 | I have two friends that have different forms of synesthesia.

01:46:08.660 | One associates different keys on the piano or musical notes

01:46:12.980 | with specific colors in a very, very one-to-one

01:46:16.140 | specific way.

01:46:16.980 | So they'll tell you that E-flat on the piano

01:46:19.780 | is a particular tone in their mind of amber hue, okay?

01:46:24.780 | And that I forget what other key is associated

01:46:28.300 | with a particular shade of red and so on and so forth.

01:46:31.620 | Are these people better at piano?

01:46:34.180 | Are they more perceptive of colors in their environment?

01:46:37.300 | Not necessarily so.

01:46:38.340 | This is just a perceptual blending.

01:46:39.820 | It doesn't necessarily lend itself to any improved ability.

01:46:43.580 | Now you could imagine why people would hypothesize

01:46:46.220 | that people who have aphantasia,

01:46:47.660 | especially its extreme form,

01:46:49.780 | would not be capable of or have synesthesia's.

01:46:54.500 | It turns out that's not the case.

01:46:56.020 | There are a couple of really interesting papers.

01:46:58.240 | Again, we will link these in the show note captions.

01:47:01.840 | One is entitled, "What is the relationship

01:47:04.080 | between aphantasia, synesthesia, and autism?"

01:47:07.260 | And the other one is "Aphantasia,

01:47:08.900 | the Science of Visual Imagery Extremes."

01:47:11.260 | And I really like to review aphantasia,

01:47:13.400 | the science of visual imagery extremes,

01:47:14.980 | for those of you that are interested

01:47:16.160 | in understanding aphantasia with more depth.

01:47:18.800 | The study addressing the relationship

01:47:20.420 | between aphantasia, synesthesia, and autism

01:47:22.820 | found that aphantasia is indeed linked

01:47:26.080 | to weak visual imagery,

01:47:27.860 | but that aphantasia can also be synesthesia's and vice versa.

01:47:32.860 | What was also interesting about this study

01:47:36.280 | is they address the question

01:47:37.260 | of whether or not people who have aphantasia,

01:47:40.540 | that is a challenge or inability

01:47:42.520 | to generate mental or visual imagery,

01:47:45.340 | tend to have features associated with autism

01:47:47.880 | or residing somewhere on the autism spectrum.

01:47:50.800 | And I'm not trying to use ambiguous language here,

01:47:53.420 | but the whole set of language and nomenclature

01:47:55.980 | around autism and autism spectrum

01:47:57.760 | is also undergoing revision now,

01:47:59.620 | because we are now coming to understand that autism,

01:48:04.080 | and nowadays it's generally not considered correct

01:48:07.600 | to call people autistics in that sense,

01:48:10.020 | but autism is considered one set of positions

01:48:15.020 | along a spectrum that includes things

01:48:17.660 | like Asperger's, et cetera,

01:48:19.500 | but that may also include other aspects of cognition

01:48:22.360 | and even personality.

01:48:23.680 | So these are starting to be viewed

01:48:25.140 | not just as a spectrum or one continuum

01:48:27.500 | ranging from non-autistic to autistic,

01:48:30.860 | but a lot of variation and subtlety in between,

01:48:33.340 | and even crossing over with other aspects

01:48:35.920 | of personality, psychology, and neuroscience.

01:48:38.700 | So I'm not trying to be vague here,

01:48:40.200 | I'm trying to be accurate rather by saying

01:48:42.640 | the whole description and categorization

01:48:45.300 | of autistic, non-autistic, et cetera

01:48:46.940 | is undergoing vast revision right now.

01:48:49.000 | But the important point I think from this paper

01:48:51.540 | is that indeed it was found that people

01:48:54.260 | who have aphantasia tend to exhibit more of the features

01:48:58.340 | that are associated with the autism spectrum.

01:49:01.620 | Now, how those things relate to one another

01:49:03.060 | in terms of their clinical relevance isn't clear,

01:49:05.580 | and of course it is entirely unclear

01:49:07.820 | as to what's the chicken and what's the egg there.

01:49:09.700 | So you could imagine, no pun intended for instance,

01:49:12.480 | that people that are on the autism spectrum

01:49:15.120 | might be less proficient at generating visual imagery

01:49:20.460 | because they are exceedingly proficient at other things.

01:49:24.580 | You could also imagine that people are placed

01:49:27.240 | onto the autism spectrum as it's sometimes referred to,

01:49:30.240 | or are associated with particular features

01:49:32.500 | on the autism spectrum because in a causal way

01:49:35.940 | of the aphantasia, and of course it's extremely important

01:49:38.780 | to highlight that not all people that consider themselves

01:49:43.360 | or that people consider autistic

01:49:45.280 | or that are on the autism spectrum or Asperger's

01:49:47.660 | or any variation thereof necessarily have aphantasia.

01:49:51.660 | Just as it is that not all people

01:49:54.100 | that are on the autism spectrum completely lack

01:49:57.120 | or even lack what's called theory of mind,

01:49:58.900 | which is the ability to sort of empathize

01:50:01.460 | and ascribe feelings and motivations of others

01:50:05.620 | when viewing the actions and perceived feelings of others.

01:50:09.880 | So what I just described hopefully doesn't come across

01:50:12.260 | as just a bunch of word soup.

01:50:14.060 | What I'm trying to pinpoint is that there does seem

01:50:16.060 | to be a relationship between one's ability

01:50:18.500 | to generate visual imagery and certain constellations

01:50:21.740 | of cognitive and emotional perception

01:50:24.460 | and behavior and vice versa, okay?

01:50:27.180 | In a future episode, I promise to cover synesthesia

01:50:32.000 | and autism and some of the related cognitive

01:50:35.900 | and motor aspects of autism and things like Asperger's.

01:50:39.260 | I'm going to feature an expert guests

01:50:40.840 | or actually several expert guests in this area

01:50:43.040 | because it is a rapidly evolving

01:50:45.100 | and somewhat controversial field.

01:50:46.780 | Meanwhile, I think it's important to at least consider

01:50:49.260 | how mental training and visualization might relate

01:50:52.540 | to certain aspects of cognition and our ability

01:50:55.160 | to visualize things, not just in terms

01:50:57.140 | of other people's behavior, which is one of the common ways

01:50:59.660 | that people probe for autism and Asperger's

01:51:02.420 | versus non-autistic and non-Asperger's and so on,

01:51:05.260 | the so-called theory of mind task.

01:51:06.920 | In effect, asking whether or not children or adults

01:51:09.740 | can really get in the mind of others.

01:51:12.220 | That's a typical task developed by Simon Baron Cohen,

01:51:16.220 | but also whether or not children and adults are capable

01:51:21.220 | of generating mental imagery in a really vivid way

01:51:24.240 | or whether or not they have minor

01:51:26.520 | or even extreme challenge in doing so.

01:51:29.040 | And perhaps the most direct way to explain

01:51:30.760 | why I included this aspect of the discussion

01:51:33.280 | of mental training and visualization

01:51:34.900 | as it relates to different cognitive phenotypes

01:51:37.740 | or neurocognitive phenotypes,

01:51:39.600 | such as autism, Asperger's, et cetera,

01:51:42.020 | is because if you think about motor skill execution

01:51:45.100 | or cognitive skill execution and the relationship

01:51:47.340 | between mental training and visualization

01:51:49.020 | and motor skills or cognitive skills,

01:51:51.260 | that's all pretty straightforward

01:51:52.420 | when you're talking about finger tapping and go-no-go tasks

01:51:55.080 | and learning piano and things of that sort.

01:51:57.380 | But in many, many ways, our learning of social cognition,

01:52:01.740 | our learning of how to behave in certain circumstances,

01:52:04.020 | what's considered normal or atypical,

01:52:06.900 | neurotypical and neuroatypical, if you will,

01:52:09.500 | a lot of that is not just generated from the inside out,

01:52:12.980 | but it also involves observation and visualization

01:52:16.440 | of what are considered appropriate and inappropriate,

01:52:19.580 | definitely placed in quotes, by the way, folks,

01:52:21.340 | I'm not placing judgment, I'm just saying appropriate

01:52:23.760 | and inappropriate for a given context behavior.

01:52:26.720 | In other words, social learning and social cognition

01:52:29.760 | is every bit as much a learned behavior

01:52:32.300 | and pattern of cognitive and motor patterns

01:52:35.200 | as is tapping fingers or withholding key presses

01:52:38.860 | in a go-no-go task, it's just that it transmits

01:52:41.400 | into a domain that involves smiling versus frowning

01:52:44.880 | versus asking a question versus staying silent

01:52:47.280 | versus sitting still versus fidgeting,

01:52:49.180 | what's appropriate and when, what's inappropriate and when,

01:52:52.860 | all of that is what we call social cognition

01:52:54.780 | and has direct parallels to everything

01:52:56.740 | we've been talking about up until this point.

01:52:58.560 | So today we did a deep dive,

01:53:00.060 | which is often the case on this podcast,

01:53:02.080 | into mental training and visualization.

01:53:04.240 | During the course of the episode,

01:53:06.660 | I tried to lay down one by one the key components

01:53:09.980 | of an effective mental training and visualization practice,

01:53:12.540 | everything ranging from making sure that the practice

01:53:15.280 | involve brief epochs, repeats of specific sequences

01:53:19.180 | of motor and/or cognitive behavior,

01:53:21.200 | that those be relatively simple so that you can imagine them

01:53:24.000 | even if you're somebody who is not good

01:53:25.500 | at doing mental training and visualization.

01:53:27.400 | And I should mention that if you do mental training

01:53:29.400 | and visualization repeatedly over time,

01:53:32.120 | you get better at mental training and visualization.

01:53:34.660 | There's a, what's called metaplasticity here.

01:53:36.880 | So it's not just about engaging neuroplasticity

01:53:38.900 | of particular circuits,

01:53:40.100 | it's also about getting better at engaging plasticity.

01:53:42.860 | So plasticity of plasticity.

01:53:44.880 | I also described the key importance

01:53:47.900 | of being able to actually execute specific movements

01:53:51.380 | and cognitive tasks in the real world

01:53:53.580 | if you want the mental training and visualization

01:53:55.900 | to be especially effective.

01:53:57.660 | And we talked about the importance of naming things,

01:53:59.540 | we talked about the importance of creating not just one,

01:54:03.200 | but many parallels between real world training

01:54:06.360 | and mental training and visualization.

01:54:08.380 | And really on the whole, what we established was

01:54:10.640 | that cognitive and/or motor learning really is something

01:54:14.060 | that you should do in the real world as much as possible.

01:54:16.500 | But if you can't, due to injury or whatever conditions,

01:54:20.060 | using mental training is a reasonable substitute,

01:54:22.460 | but not a complete substitute.

01:54:24.100 | And if you can't do real world training

01:54:25.980 | for whatever reason, injury or otherwise,

01:54:28.640 | that mental training is going to be better

01:54:30.860 | than no training at all.

01:54:33.100 | And of course, we established that at least

01:54:35.040 | for withholding action in order to get better at a skill,

01:54:39.280 | a combination of physical training

01:54:40.660 | and mental training is going to be best,

01:54:42.480 | but that if you're trying to learn a new skill

01:54:45.400 | and you're having challenges with performing that skill

01:54:48.080 | because of an inability to do the skill in the first place

01:54:50.680 | or on a consistent basis,

01:54:52.360 | well then on an hour by hour basis,

01:54:55.040 | you're best off investing your time

01:54:57.280 | into the physical training,

01:54:58.800 | only incorporating mental training and visualization

01:55:01.680 | if you are able to do that on top of the maximum amount

01:55:04.840 | of real world training that you're capable of doing.

01:55:07.320 | And of course, we talked about the actual neural circuits

01:55:09.620 | and a bit about how the actual neuroplasticity occurs.

01:55:12.420 | Early in the episode, I mentioned long-term depression.

01:55:15.100 | Well, in describing the improvements in no-go tasks,

01:55:18.380 | those stop signal tasks,

01:55:20.060 | a lot of what's observed during those tasks is improvement

01:55:22.920 | or rather an increase in long-term depression

01:55:25.700 | of specific neural connections.

01:55:27.780 | So my hope is that in learning

01:55:28.900 | about those basic neural circuits and plasticity mechanisms

01:55:32.300 | and in learning about the critical importance

01:55:34.460 | of focus and attention during learning,

01:55:36.820 | both real world and imagined,

01:55:39.020 | as well as the importance of sleep and deep rest

01:55:42.140 | for really consolidating learning and the different tools,

01:55:45.660 | the various steps or principles

01:55:48.140 | of effective mental training and visualization,

01:55:50.520 | that you now have a fairly coherent

01:55:52.500 | or maybe even a very coherent picture

01:55:54.720 | of how to develop the best mental training

01:55:56.560 | and visualization protocols for you.

01:55:58.740 | I realize that everyone has different goals.

01:56:00.300 | Everyone has different time constraints.

01:56:02.300 | If you are somebody that's interested

01:56:03.680 | in developing a mental training and visualization protocol,

01:56:06.160 | so if you're a coach or teacher or simply a learner,

01:56:09.080 | or you're trying to self-direct

01:56:10.740 | your own adaptive plasticity,

01:56:12.820 | I want to emphasize that the key components

01:56:14.940 | that we discussed today are essential to include,

01:56:17.420 | but I wouldn't obsess about whether or not

01:56:19.780 | a given epoch is 15 or 20 seconds or even 25 seconds.

01:56:23.440 | I wouldn't obsess over whether or not

01:56:24.660 | you got 30 repetitions in and then your mind drifted

01:56:27.300 | or whether or not you could do the full 50 to 75

01:56:29.780 | or whether or not even in your mind's eye,

01:56:31.260 | you made some errors.

01:56:33.020 | What's been shown over and over again in this literature

01:56:35.480 | is that performing mental training and visualization

01:56:38.260 | repeatedly and in a very restricted way

01:56:41.120 | that makes it easier to perform those trials

01:56:44.220 | over and over and over again

01:56:45.880 | and with a high degree of accuracy almost always.

01:56:49.400 | Really, we can fairly say in essentially every study

01:56:53.100 | where it's been explored has led to improvements

01:56:55.500 | in real-world performance of both cognitive

01:56:57.460 | and or physical tasks.

01:56:59.340 | So if you're trying to learn anything at all,

01:57:01.120 | I do encourage you to explore motor training

01:57:03.160 | and visualization

01:57:04.780 | because basically all the studies out there,

01:57:08.100 | in fact, I couldn't find one exception

01:57:09.800 | where some degree of improvement wasn't observed

01:57:12.860 | when people use motor training and visualization

01:57:15.380 | on a consistent basis,

01:57:16.580 | even just the three to five times per week,

01:57:18.500 | these simple repeats over and over.

01:57:20.060 | So I don't want to over-complicate

01:57:21.660 | or make it sound like mental training and visualization

01:57:23.780 | has to be performed in a very precise way

01:57:26.580 | or that it has to be done perfectly each and every time,

01:57:29.320 | quite to the contrary.

01:57:30.620 | What is clear is that mental training and visualization

01:57:33.140 | is a very effective way to improve real-world performance.

01:57:36.320 | If you're learning from and/or enjoying this podcast,

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01:58:05.820 | Not so much on today's episode,

01:58:07.300 | but on many previous episodes of the Huberman Lab Podcast,

01:58:10.100 | we discuss supplements.

01:58:11.300 | While supplements aren't necessary for everybody,

01:58:13.140 | many people derive tremendous benefit from them

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01:58:48.500 | So again, it's Huberman Lab on all social media platforms.

01:58:51.780 | Also, I know many of you are interested

01:58:53.220 | in summaries of podcasts and what we call toolkits,

01:58:56.820 | which describe ideal toolkits and protocols for sleep,

01:59:00.060 | or ideal toolkit and protocols for neuroplasticity,

01:59:02.860 | or for deliberate cold exposure, et cetera.

01:59:05.000 | For that reason, we've established

01:59:06.220 | what's called the Neural Network Newsletter.

01:59:07.860 | This is a completely zero-cost newsletter

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01:59:12.480 | go to the menu, scroll down to newsletter,

01:59:15.520 | and you sign up by providing your email.

01:59:16.940 | We do not share your email with anybody,

01:59:18.980 | and there are also some sample PDFs

01:59:20.820 | of existing Huberman Lab Podcast protocols,

01:59:23.620 | again, ranging from neuroplasticity to sleep

01:59:25.980 | and other topics that we've covered

01:59:27.580 | in brief one- to three-page summaries.

01:59:29.700 | Thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion,

01:59:32.340 | all about the science and effective implementation

01:59:35.340 | of mental training and visualization.

01:59:37.780 | And last, but certainly not least,

01:59:39.940 | thank you for your interest in science.

01:59:41.700 | [upbeat music]

01:59:44.280 | (upbeat music)

Science-Based Mental Training & Visualization for Improved Learning | Huberman Lab Podcast

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