There's a wonderful systematic review of a large number of studies that have looked at mental training and visualization, what's effective, what's less effective across a bunch of different disciplines that include education, medicine, music, psychology, and sports. We will provide a link to this paper in the show note captions, but the title of the paper is "Best Practice for Motor Imagery, a Systematic Literature Review on Motor Imagery Training Elements in Five Different Disciplines." As the title suggests, it's mainly for motor imagery training, but it extends into music, which of course involves motor training and execution, but as well as education.

This review establishes a number of different important things. I'm going to read off some of the key or highlight takeaways. For instance, I described principle one of effective mental training and visualization, which is that the visualization be brief and it be simple and it be repeated. You may ask how many times that very brief five to 15 second exercise of going through some routine should be repeated.

Well, different studies have used different ranges of let's call them repetitions in a given training session, but the number that seems to be most effective is somewhere between 50 and 75 repeats per session. That brings about the question of how long one should rest between each repeat. This gets a little tricky depending on what you're trying to do.

Remember that we have this kind of threshold of about 15 seconds for completion of the entire motor sequence. Let's say what you're trying to do, like a golf swing takes you five seconds to imagine in your mind's eye from the point where you, let's just say, have the ball on the tee, you bring the golf club up, you might reposition your feet just a little bit, you know, that kind of little wiggle that golfers do, and then the swing.

If that whole thing takes five seconds in your mind's eye and roughly five seconds in the real world, well, then you'd be able to repeat it, of course, three times in 15 seconds. That would be one repetition, even though you're doing it three times. So it's one 15 second epoch, as it's sometimes called, E-P-O-C-H, epoch.

And then you would rest for an approximately equivalent amount of time, 15 seconds or so, and then repeat. And rest 15 seconds or so, and then repeat. Rest 15 seconds, and then repeat. Again, three golf swings within that 15 seconds, rest 15 seconds. Three golf swings within that 15 seconds, rest 15 seconds.

Truth told, these epochs and these rest periods do not need to be exact. You could imagine, for instance, that you get three repetitions of the swing within 14 seconds. Well, then do you do another one or do you wait until the end of that 15 seconds? I encourage you not to obsess too much about those sorts of points.

Rather, you want to do as many repeats as you can in about a 15 second epoch, and then rest for about 15 seconds, and then repeat for a total of 50 to 75 repetitions. Which might not sound like a lot to some of you, might sound like an awful lot to others of you.

To me, it sounds like a lot. You know, 50 repetitions of something and where you're trying to concentrate in your mind's eye on getting something accomplished over and over and over again in exactly the same way, might seem like a lot. We know, based on the learning literature, that your ability to successfully perform something in the real world will lend itself to better performance of that thing in the imagined world within your mind's eye.

That's also one of these sort of does. But if you're trying to get better at something that you've never performed before, you really should know that. The mental training visualization is probably not the best augment to that real world training until you're able to perform it successfully in the real world at least some of the time.

Mental training visualization can be effective, however, at increasing the accuracy or the frequency which you can do that real world behavior. So if normally you're only getting the correct swing or you're only hitting the golf ball correctly, say 10% of the time mental training and visualization can really help bring that number up.

But it is important that you are able to successfully complete that motor task in the real world. Similarly for performance of cognitive tasks. So say for instance, speaking a new language, you might ask, well, gosh, what in the landscape of speaking a new language can be restricted to five to 15 seconds where I could repeat it anywhere from one to three times in a given epoch and then rest and then keep repeating 50 to 75 times.

Well, there I would encourage you to pick something that you are able to do perhaps very slowly. So to speak a particular sentence, but with some challenge in getting the accent and the enunciation right, but you've completed it successfully before and you want to get more smooth or more fluid with it.

Likewise for playing piano or guitar. Again, you have to translate to the specific cognitive and or motor activity that you are seeking to improve at. But those epochs lasting five to 15 seconds are really the cornerstone of an effective mental training and visualization practice. And the repeated nature of it 50 to 75 repetitions in a given session is also another cornerstone of an effective mental training and visualization practice.

So says this review and some of the other papers that I'm going to get to in a few moments. Now, one of the other key components of a successful mental training and visualization practice is how often you perform that mental training and visualization practice. And again, a number of different studies have looked at this through a number of different lenses, meaning anywhere from two to eight times per week.

It does appear that performing these sessions anywhere from three to five times per week is going to be effective. We could perhaps even say most effective because most of the, let's just call it the strongest data really point to repeating these 50 to 75 trials of the same thing three to five times per week.

So you can come up with a number that's reasonable for you to do consistently. And you might ask, do you have to continue to perform the mental training and visualization forever? And the good news is the answer to that question is no. It does seem that once you have what's called consolidated the motor performance or the cognitive performance of something, it can be further supported or reinforced.

That is consolidated in the neural circuits that are responsible for performing that mental or physical task. So in other words, once you are performing that cognitive or motor task in a way that's satisfactory or perhaps just improved, perhaps you're not 100%, but it's improved in the real world, you don't need to continue to do mental training and visualization to maintain that real world performance.

So that's a good thing. In fact, the ideal situation would be then to pick a different sequence or thing that you're trying to learn and do mental training and visualization for that. I perhaps might've misspoke there, although I don't want to edit this out. I misspoke in the sense that, again, I said, for the thing that you're trying to learn, remember mental training and visualization is going to be most effective for building up the number of accurate trials or your ability to do something with a greater frequency of something that you're already capable of doing or have done at least once in the real world, okay?

This is not to say that mental training and visualization can't be used to acquire new skills. It can in principle, but it has been shown to be most effective for enhancing the speed and the accuracy of skills that one has already demonstrated some degree of proficiency at in the real world.

I think that's important to point out because we often hear mental training visualization and this equivalence of perceptual and motor experiences in our mind's eye to the real world. And we think, oh, all we have to do is imagine doing something and we will get better at it. And unfortunately, that's not the case.

The good news is, however, if you can do something once, even very slowly in the real world, and then you bring it to the mental imagery and visualization domain, you can get much faster at it in a way that really does translate back to the real world. (upbeat music)