Huberman Lab: Science-Based Mental Training & Visualization for Improved Learning

Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast,

where we discuss science and science-based tools

for everyday life.

I'm Andrew Huberman,

and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology

at Stanford School of Medicine.

Today we are discussing mental training and visualization.

Mental training and visualization is a fascinating process

that has been shown over and over again

in now hundreds of studies

to improve our ability to learn anything.

When I say anything, I mean the ability to learn music,

the ability to learn and perform mathematics,

the ability to learn and perform motor skills in sport,

in dance, across essentially all domains.

The other incredible thing

about mental training and visualization

is that you'll soon see when you go into the literature,

that is the scientific studies

on mental training and visualization,

you quickly realize that it does not take a lot

of mental training and visualization

in order to get better at anything.

However, that mental training and visualization

has to be performed in a very specific way.

And today we will discuss exactly how to do

mental training and visualization

in the specific ways that allow it to complement

the actual performance of a motor or cognitive skill

to allow you to learn more quickly

and to consolidate that is to keep that information

in mind and body so that you can perform those cognitive task,

music task, motor tasks, et cetera,

for long periods of time

without ever forgetting how to do them.

All of mental training and visualization

relies on what I consider really the holy grail

of our brain and nervous system.

And that's neuroplasticity.

Neuroplasticity is our nervous system,

which of course includes the brain, the spinal cord

and all the connections between the brain and spinal cord

and the organs and tissues of the body

and then all the neural connections back

from the organs and tissues of the body

to the brain and spinal cord.

So the whole thing in both directions

has the ability to change in response to experience

in ways that are adaptive.

That is, that allows us to do things

that we could not do before.

And by doing those things

or by being able to perform those mental operations,

we can do better in the world that we live in.

We can perform new tasks, we can think new thoughts,

we can come up with novel solutions

to preexisting problems that before really vexed us

and that we couldn't overcome.

All of that is considered neuroplasticity.

So today what I'm going to cover

is a brief summary of what neuroplasticity is,

that is how it occurs in the brain and body.

This is extremely important to understand

if you're going to use mental training and visualization.

Then I'm going to talk about what happens

in our brain and body

when we do mental visualization in a dedicated way.

Many people have heard perhaps

that when you imagine something happening

that your brain doesn't know the difference

between that imagination of the thing happening

and the real thing happening.

Turns out that is not true.

It is simply not true.

However, there is somewhat of an equivalence

between a real experience and an imagined experience.

And we'll talk about the difference between those

and how that can be leveraged

in order to get the most out of mental training

and visualization.

Then I will cover exactly which types

of mental training and visualization work best

across all domains,

meaning for music learning, mathematics,

solving puzzles, motor learning, sports performance,

et cetera, et cetera,

to really allow you a template

in which you can plug in

or designate what you're going to do each day

for a brief period of time

in order to accelerate your learning

in whatever you choose.

And then I'm going to go into a bit of what happens

in the brains of different types of people.

These different types of people that I'm referring to

are people who have more or less of a natural ability

to imagine things and visualize them.

Because it turns out that we vary tremendously

from one individual to the next

in terms of our ability to mentally visualize

and imagine things

and our ability to get better at that over time.

And the good news is anyone can get better

at mental training and visualization

in ways that can serve them well.

I'll also briefly touch on the fact that certain people,

in particular people on the autism spectrum,

as well as people with synesthesias,

which is the combining of different perceptual experiences.

So you may be one of these people

or you may have heard of people that for instance,

when they think of a number,

they also just naturally,

spontaneously think of a color and vice versa.

We'll talk about how that relates to mental imagery

and visualization and the creative process

and problem solving in general.

And then finally, what I'll do

is I'll recap mental training and visualization

from the standpoint of how best to apply

mental training and visualization

according to specific challenges.

Things like challenges with public speaking

or challenges with sports performance

or challenges with test taking performance,

challenges with essentially anything

that will allow you to build

specific mental training and visualization practices

that are brief, that are supported by neuroscience studies

and that are highly effective.

Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize

that this podcast is separate

from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.

It is however, part of my desire and effort

to bring zero cost to consumer information

about science and science related tools

to the general public.

In keeping with that theme,

I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast.

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Let's talk about mental training and visualization.

Now, perhaps surprisingly,

mental training and visualization has been studied

since the late 1800s.

There's actually a paper published in 1880 by Galton

called The Statistics of Mental Imagery.

So long ago, people were quantifying

and trying to understand how is it

that people come up with mental images

and how they can apply that

to learning things more quickly

and more stably over time.

Now, as I mentioned earlier,

mental training and visualization

relies on a process that we call neuroplasticity.

Neuroplasticity is a term that many people have heard

and encompasses many different things.

So broadly speaking,

neuroplasticity includes developmental plasticity,

which is the sort of plasticity that occurs

between about birth and age 25.

And that can be summarized very easily

as passive plasticity.

In other words, the sorts of changes

that happen in one's nervous system

simply by engaging in the world

and experiencing life as a child,

as a young adult, as an adolescent,

and as a 22, 23, 24 year old, et cetera.

Now, of course, of course, of course,

it is not the case that on your 25th birthday,

you close out passive developmental plasticity

and start engaging in the other type of neuroplasticity,

which is adult neuroplasticity.

It's a gradual tapering off of developmental plasticity

that occurs between age zero and 25.

And for some people might occur somewhere around 26,

for other people around 23.

When we say 25,

we're really just talking about the average age

in which passive plasticity tapers off.

However, starting fairly early in adolescence

and extending all the way out into one's 80s or 90s

or hundreds, should one live that long,

is the other form of neuroplasticity,

which is adult neuroplasticity.

Adult neuroplasticity is very different

than developmental plasticity

because it is the sort of plasticity

that one can direct

towards one's own specific desired learning.

So if we wanted to get a little bit technical here

for sake of clarity, not for sake of confusion,

we would say adult plasticity is really

about self-directed adaptive plasticity.

And the reason we call it that

as opposed to something else,

where simply adult plasticity

is that there are many different forms of neuroplasticity.

There is, for instance,

maladaptive neuroplasticity that occurs

if one gets a really hard head hit and concussion,

there will be changes to the brain and nervous system,

but those changes to the brain and nervous system

do not allow it to perform better.

In fact, it often impairs the brain

and nervous system's ability to function

and therefore is maladaptive.

So I don't want to get overly wordy

with a number of different terms here,

but I do think it's important to understand

that we have developmental plasticity,

again, in which the brain and nervous system changes

simply in response to experiencing specific things

for better or worse.

And there's adult self-directed adaptive plasticity

in which one can direct specific changes

in terms of learning things cognitively

or learning things in terms of motor function,

so sport, dance, et cetera, or a combination of the two.

Now, just to really clarify what I mean

by developmental versus self-directed adaptive plasticity,

I mentioned that self-directed adaptive plasticity

actually can start in adolescence, right?

Even though there's ongoing developmental plasticity,

I mean, let's be really direct.

The brain of a 14-year-old is very different

than the brain of that same individual

when that person is 21

because there's ongoing developmental plasticity.

However, starting at about adolescence,

we can all start to decide what it is that we want to learn

and engage in self-directed adaptive plasticity.

Now, the way to engage self-directed adaptive plasticity,

regardless of whether or not you're a 13-year-old,

14-year-old, or you're a 90-year-old,

or anywhere in between, is that it requires two things.

The first thing it requires is focused,

dedicated attention to the thing that you're trying to learn.

That's the first step.

And that actually triggers a number of different chemical

and electrical processes in the brain

that are often associated with agitation and frustration.

Believe it or not, the agitation and frustration

is a reflection of the release of specific chemicals,

in particular, norepinephrine and epinephrine,

also called noradrenaline and adrenaline

in the brain and body, that creates this discomfort

and this heightened level of alertness and attention

that many of us don't like and tend to back away from,

but it is exactly that chemical,

or I should say neurochemical milieu,

which signals to the neurons, the nerve cells,

in the brain and elsewhere in the body

that something needs to change.

Because if you think about it,

if you can do something perfectly,

or if you try and do something

and it doesn't cause any neurochemical change

in your brain and body,

well, then there's no reason for your brain

and its connections with the body

to change in any particular way.

Okay, so you need focused, dedicated attention

to the thing that you're trying to learn.

It's often accompanied by agitation, frustration, et cetera.

So that's perfectly normal.

In fact, that's a signal that things are going right,

meaning they're headed towards learning,

but there's a second component that's really required

for self-directed adaptive plasticity

and that's periods of deep rest,

in particular, a good night's sleep,

in particular, on the night that follows

that focused attention to the thing you're trying to learn.

There are now hundreds of studies

in both animal models and in humans,

showing that it is really during sleep

and other states of deep relaxation,

things like meditation and non-sleep deep rest,

which I've talked about before on this podcast,

but really during our main night of sleep,

that the rewiring of neural connections,

that is the actual neuroplasticity takes place.

So the verb neuroplasticity,

the rearrangement of connections between neurons,

really occurs during sleep,

in particular, on the first night,

following an attempt to learn something

through this focused attention.

Now, developmental plasticity, which is passive,

also requires good sleep.

It's slightly different, or frankly, it's a lot different

in terms of the underlying mechanisms

than self-directed adaptive plasticity,

but because today we're mainly talking about

how to learn faster through mental training

and visualization, and that really maps more closely

onto self-directed adaptive plasticity,

just really want to emphasize this two-step process.

There has to be focused, dedicated attention,

and then there needs to be sleep,

and in particular, sleep on the first night

following that training.

Now, should you have the unfortunate experience

of getting woken up in the middle of the night,

following, trying to learn something,

or should you simply not be able to sleep

for whatever reason on the night

following a bout of learning, or an attempt to learn?

Do not despair, because it turns out

that there are what are called

second and third night effects also.

Once you sleep, you will learn those neuroplastic events,

the reordering of connections that we call synapses,

and the changes that occur in neural circuits

that reflects what we call

self-directed adaptive plasticity.

That still will occur, but ideally,

you got a great night's sleep on the first night

following, trying to learn, and the second night,

and the third, and so on, and so on.

Now, there are a few other things

that are critical to understand

about self-directed adaptive plasticity

that will become especially important

when thinking about protocols for developing

the ideal mental training and visualization process for you.

And that is that there are different forms of plasticity

that occur between neurons, although the two main forms

are what are called long-term potentiation

and long-term depression.

I just want to queue up right now

that the word depression is a very loaded word,

because the moment people hear the word depression,

they think, oh no, that's bad.

But in the case of neuroplasticity, long-term depression

is simply a change in the connections between neurons

and the excitability between neurons

that in many ways can be excellent

for learning things, in particular motor skills.

And we'll get into this in more detail in a little bit,

but it turns out that a lot of our ability

to get better at some sort of motor skill

involves this thing that we call long-term depression.

And that's because much of what is happening

when we learn a new motor skill

is that we are depressing or suppressing specific actions

in order to generate a very specific coordinated action.

Some of the best examples of long-term depression

can actually be borrowed from developmental plasticity.

So for instance, if you've ever sat across from an infant

who is trying to eat their meal,

so imagine a one and a half-year-old or a two-year-old

trying to eat some noodles or some soup

or any kind of baby-suitable food with a spoon

and they're holding the spoon

or they're trying to hold the spoon,

what you'll notice is that their motor movements

are terribly uncoordinated.

They often will take that spoon to their cheek

or to their eye or to their head.

We've all seen these very amusing photos of babies

with bowls of food on their head

or with food all over their face or just everywhere.

It appears that they're basically getting the food everywhere

except where it's supposed to go, which is in their mouth.

And that's because their motor movements

are not very well-coordinated at that age

and they're not very well-coordinated

not because they lack sufficient numbers

of neural connections synapses between neurons,

but rather because they have too many connections

between too many different neurons.

The neural circuits that control very dedicated,

coordinated movement are not there yet.

Instead, too many neurons are connected

to too many other neurons

and so they can't generate the precise movements

that are required in order to get that spoon to their mouth.

Now, over time, they get better

at moving the utensil to their mouth

such that hopefully by about age five or six,

they are eating in a relatively cleaner way

and hopefully by time they're 10 or 11 or 12,

they're getting the food into their mouth

and not all over their face.

People learn this to varying degrees.

All you have to do is go to a restaurant

and watch how people eat.

And you will see a vast variation

in people's coordinated movements with utensils,

but in general, there's a theme.

The younger the person,

the more uncoordinated their movement of utensils

and as they get older, the more coordinated.

Now, of course, in people that are very old,

they have challenges moving objects and their limbs

in very smooth ways.

And that has to do with a topic that we'll get into

when we talk about age-related cognitive decline

and motor-related dementias.

But for sake of today's discussion,

if you just want to think about what happens

with long-term depression and the development of a motor skill,

both as a baby, as an adolescent and as an adult,

when you're trying to learn a new motor skill,

is that you are eliminating incorrect movements.

And when you are eliminating incorrect movements

to arrive at only the correct movements

in a very reflexive and repeated way.

So think your golf swing, your tennis serve,

think serving a volleyball,

think a child learning to crawl and then walk,

think a child learning to eat with utensils,

an example I gave before.

What's happening in all of those cases

is that, yes, certain connections in the brain

are being strengthened or what we call potentiated.

They are undergoing long-term potentiation,

the so-called quote-unquote fire together,

mantra that was popularized by the great neurobiologist,

Dr. Carla Schatz, my colleague at Stanford.

But in addition to that long-term depression,

the quieting or the silencing of specific synapses,

that is connections between neurons,

is absolutely critical for motor skill learning.

So we have LTP, long-term potentiation,

and LTD, long-term depression,

is every bit as important as LTP, long-term potentiation,

for getting better at some sort of motor skill

and indeed at getting better at some sort of cognitive skill.

Now as we hear this, this should be intuitive to all of us.

If you look at somebody's attempt

to learn a particular dance step

or at somebody's attempt to do a tennis serve the first time,

it's all over the place.

Now it's not perhaps all over the place

in that they're doing a jumping jack

while trying to serve the tennis ball,

but they're generally arching the racket too widely

on one trial and then they're arching it too close

to their body on the next trial.

So if we were to draw a line over each one of those trials,

we would see that there were lines everywhere over time.

Whereas once they quote unquote perfect the tennis serve,

it's going to be line drawn directly over line,

drawn directly over line,

meaning the arc of that tennis serve

is going to be very restricted.

And that without question has reflected the removal

or the quieting of particular synapses,

connections between neurons in the brain and body

to allow that very narrow coordinated

and directed movement.

The same is true for learning anything

in the cognitive domain,

meaning if you are to learn a language,

it is not of course the case

that you know every word in that language

and then you simply remove certain words

and arrive at the correct sentence structure

that you're trying to achieve.

But rather you have to suppress your native language

or if you're a young child,

you have to suppress the generation

of just kind of random babbling sounds,

turns out babbling isn't random at all.

But the point is that you have to suppress

the enunciation of particular sounds

and direct the pronunciation of other sounds

in order to generate that new language

or your ability to speak at all.

Okay, so we can really think about neuroplasticity

as both a building up process

in which you increase connection,

so-called long-term potentiation

and a sculpting down or a removal of connections process

that we're going to call long-term depression.

Now I have to acknowledge that of course

there are other forms of neuroplasticity too.

I know there are probably some aficionados

listening to this who will be perhaps shouting back

at whatever device my voice is coming out of.

Wait, what about spike timing dependent plasticity

or what about paired pulse facilitation?

Yes, yes, and yes, there are multiple forms

of communication between neurons

that can strengthen those connections

or weaken those connections.

But for today's discussion,

we just broadly want to think about

long-term potentiation and long-term depression

because it captures the two most important themes

related to mental training and visualization,

which is that when we perform a given cognitive

or physical task in the real world,

so we actually try the dance step or the tennis serve,

or when we actually try a math problem

or we try and learn some specific knowledge

and write it down and remember it,

that is engaging particular neurons, right?

They're firing, they're releasing chemicals,

but it is also actively suppressing

the activity of other neurons.

And we are always completely unaware

of the ways in which our brain

is suppressing certain activity, okay?

So today we have to keep in mind

that where there is strengthening of connections,

there is also weakening of connections.

And when it comes to mental training and visualization,

and here's the really key point,

with mental training and visualization,

you are capturing both processes,

both the potentiation that is the building up

and strengthening of connections

and the weakening of the connections

that are inappropriate for the thing you're trying to learn.

And there are different aspects

of mental training and visualization protocols

that really harness the potentiation

versus the depression aspect.

And today we will cover mental training

and visualization protocols

that capture both the potentiation

and the depression aspect of neuroplasticity.

And in that way serve as an augment,

that is a compliment to the actual real world,

cognitive and physical training that you're doing,

because I'll just give this away right now.

Turns out that mental training and visualization

is not a replacement for real world cognitive

or motor behavior.

Again, mental training and visualization

cannot replace real world execution of cognitive tasks

or of motor tasks if you want to learn.

However, mental training and visualization

can and has been shown to be effective

for greatly enhancing the speed at which you learn

and the stability of that learning over time.

Okay, so let's take a second

and really think about what's happening

in the brain and body

when we do mental training or visualization.

In fact, we can do a little experiment right now

that is not unlike many of the classic experiments

looking at what's happening in the brain and body

through mental training and visualization

in which I just ask you to close your eyes

and imagine a yellow cube, okay?

And next to that yellow cube is a red rose.

And perhaps I also ask you to float

or fly up above the cube and the rose

and look at them from the top, top down.

And then I tell you to fly back around

and land behind those and look at them

from the perspective of behind that yellow cube

and that red rose, okay?

Now, what the data tell us is that most people

will be able to do that.

Most of you will be able to do that

to some degree or another.

Regardless of your attention span,

whether or not you have ADHD or not,

most of you will be able to do that

to some degree or another.

We also know from neuroimaging studies

in which people are placed

into a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner

that during the sort of visualization you just did

or that I described,

that your visual cortex and associated areas

quote unquote, light up, they become very active

in similar but not identical ways

to how they would light up and be activated

were you to actually look at a yellow cube

and a red rose on a screen

and perhaps fly above them virtually of course

and land behind them virtually of course

or if you were to actually look at a yellow cube

and red rose in the real world,

right in front of you on a table,

then get up on your tippy toes

and look down at them from the top

and then walk around the table

and look at them from the other side.

So there is some degree of what we call

perceptual equivalence between real world experiences,

digital experiences and imagined,

meaning with our eyes closed,

just in our mind's eye experiences.

This is true not just of vision

and what we call the visual domain

but also the auditory domain, okay?

So for instance, I could play for you a short motif

of a song, let's just pick something

that I think most people know, goodness,

I'm a terrible musician and even worse singer,

but let's just take the opening

to ACDC's Back in Black, right?

I think I can do that when it's like

dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, okay, got it.

That's the actual sound,

although admittedly a dreadful version

of the great ACDC song Back in Black.

But now I ask you to close your eyes

or you could keep them open

and just imagine that dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, okay?

Or for instance, I place you in a quiet room

so you could close your eyes

and ask you to imagine the opening

to ACDC's Black in Black

but ask you to pause it halfway through.

What you would find again is that most people,

somewhere between 90 and 95% of people

would be able to do all the sorts of things

that I described, right?

Cube and Rose, ACDC Back in Black.

Even a somatosensory task.

I imagine what it's like to touch felt

or to touch chinchilla hair or something like that.

A chinchilla's hair, ideally a live chinchilla sitting still.

Those little critters move really, really fast

but they have very, very soft hair.

High hair density, so soft.

Okay, most people can do that.

About five to 15% of people are less able to do that

and there's a small percentage of people

in that five to 15%

that simply cannot do it at all,

that just cannot visualize well.

We'll talk later about these people.

They have what's called aphantasia

and an ability to mentally visualize

but most people are actually pretty good

at visualizing things when they are told what to visualize

and this is a really key point

and if what they are told to visualize is very simple

and the whole visualization is quite brief.

Lasting on the order of about 15 seconds

to generate the visualization in the auditory

or in the visual aspect of one's mind's eye or ear,

if you will, and if it's repeated over and over.

What's far harder for everybody to do

and in fact what most people simply cannot do

is imagine long extended scenes and stories in their mind

that go on for minutes and minutes

that involve a lot of different sensory stimuli.

This is a really key point.

In fact, as we start to home in

on ideal mental training and visualization protocols,

I'd like to establish this as the first principle

of mental training and visualization

which is that if you are going to use

mental training and visualization to its best effect

in order to engage neuroplasticity and learning,

you need to keep those visualizations quite brief,

really on the order of about 15 to 20 seconds or so

and pretty darn sparse, meaning not including

a lot of elaborate visualization,

not including a lot of sequences of motor steps.

What I mean are motor sequences,

if you're trying to learn something

in terms of physical movement

or visual sequences or auditory sequences,

if you're trying to learn things in terms of music

or dance, et cetera,

that can be completed and repeated in 15 seconds or less.

Now, later I'll give you a couple of specific examples

but if you want to use mental training and visualization,

understand this is the key first principle.

They have to be very short visualizations

that you can repeat over and over and over again

with a high degree of accuracy.

So you don't want to embark

on a mental training and visualization paradigm

in which it involves a lot of elaborate stimuli

and you have to think really hard and work really hard

even if you're in that category of people

who can do mental visualization pretty naturally and easily.

Now, if you're somebody who can't do mental visualization,

in fact, if you're somebody who has full blown

aphantasia or the inability to mentally visualize,

well, then it's especially important

that you make those mental trainings and visualizations

really brief and very, very simple.

I'd like to take a quick break

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Now, in order to develop

the best mental training and visualization protocols for you,

let's go a little bit deeper into what the research says

about mental visualization.

Now, the classic work on mental visualization

really hinges on a number of different researchers

and their work, but in particular, Roger Shepard,

who did this work at Stanford,

and Stephen Costlin, who's now at Harvard.

Of course, others in the field,

but it's really the work of Shepard and Costlin

to lay the foundation for our understanding

of what happens in the brain

when we mentally visualize something.

Shepard did these incredible experiments

in which he had students mentally visualize simple objects

like a square, like a triangle.

And he measured how long it took them to do that.

Now, of course, at the time when he did these experiments,

there were no sophisticated brain imaging devices

and machines like fMRI.

However, everything I'm about to describe

has been later confirmed using things like fMRI.

What Shepard did and what he found is that

if people were told to visualize very simple objects,

they did it pretty quickly.

However, if they were told to visualize more complex objects,

or importantly, to rotate those objects in their mind's eye,

well, then it took longer

for them to perform those mental visualizations.

Now, many of you might think, duh,

if I have to just imagine a triangle or a cube,

that's going to be very easy and very fast,

whereas if I have to rotate that triangle or a cube

in my mind's eye, that's going to take more time.

And indeed, that is somewhat of a duh, except,

and this is so very important,

except that what Shepard and his colleagues found

is that how long it takes somebody to generate

and rotate a given visual image scales directly

with the complexity of that image.

In fact, Kozlin did some experiments,

I think illustrate this even better.

And here's the experiment.

I love this experiment.

I think you'll love it too,

because it illustrates something so fundamentally important

about how our brains work,

not just for sake of mental training and visualization,

but just how our brains work at all.

He showed people a picture of a map.

So a map drawn on a piece of paper.

This was a map of an island.

It included things like a loading dock for some boats.

It had a location for getting food on the island,

it had some trees,

it had some other small landmarks drawn out.

And people looked at this and memorized it.

Or in other experiments,

they just had people imagine this island

and the location of these different landmarks on the island.

So it didn't really matter which.

But then he had people imagine moving or walking

from one location on the island to another.

So they'd say, okay, you're at the loading dock,

now move to the restaurant.

Okay, you're at the restaurant,

now move to the palm tree.

You're on the North Shore of the island,

now go around the side of the island clockwise

to arrive at the bay on the Southwest corner,

this sort of thing.

What Coslin found was absolutely incredible.

What he found was that the amount of time

that it takes people to move from one location on the map

to another, scaled linearly, directly

with the actual physical location

between those objects on the map.

So for those of you that can understand

or into the importance of what Shepard and Coslin showed,

great.

I'm guessing, however, that for most people out there,

you're still grasping it like, okay, interesting,

how things happen in the real world,

dictates how they happen in our mind's eye.

But I wanna make sure that I really nail home

the importance of this for everybody.

The importance of this is that when we look

at something in the real world,

so if I look at the pen in front of me,

I'm holding up my pen, for those of you that are listening,

I'm just holding up my pen in front of me.

I move it to the right and back and forth.

What's happening is I'm activating

or I'm triggering the electrical activity of neurons,

which we can think of kind of as pixels in my eye, okay?

So it's, you know, leftward to rightward motion

for me and back and forth.

And those are getting activated

and they're sending signals up to my visual cortex.

And that information is processed at a given speed.

What the visualization experiments

that Shepard and Coslin and others did show

is that the processing speed of imagined experiences

is exactly the same as the processing speed

of real experiences.

And the spatial relationship between imagined

and real experiences is exactly the same as well.

Put simply, when we imagine something in our mind's eye

or mind's ear, we are imagining the real thing happening.

And when I say the real thing,

it's not the obvious real thing.

Of course, if you're imagining something,

that's the thing you're imagining.

What I mean is that your brain at the level of neurons

is behaving exactly the same way.

And this needn't have been the case, okay?

There could have been a result, for instance,

that if people were asked to visualize a cube

and rotate it from, you know, flip it from top to bottom,

okay, so put the top that's upward on a table,

now down on the table and so forth,

or to migrate around the island, you know,

counterclockwise going from, you know,

the northern coast all the way down to the southern coast,

clockwise and then back up to the northern coast,

that they could have just done it really quickly,

like all in one second, but that's not what happens.

They always match the speed at which they do things

in their mind's eye to the same speed

that they do them in the real world.

So in telling you this, what I'm saying is that

mental visualization at the neural level

is identical to real world events.

So when you've heard that when we imagine something,

it's identical in terms of our brain's experience of it

and our body's experience of it,

as when we actually experience something,

that is true at the neural level.

However, when it comes to learning and improving performance

in the cognitive or physical domain, they are not equivalent.

So this is the second principle

of mental training and visualization.

As you recall, the first principle

of mental training and visualization

was that in order to make it effective,

it needs to be very brief and very simple

and repeated over and over again.

The second principle of mental training and visualization

is that while yes, mental training and visualization

recaptures the same patterns of neural firing

in the exact same ways as real world behavior and thinking,

it is not as effective as real world behavior and thinking.

In other words, if you want to learn something,

the ideal situation is to combine real training

in the physical world with mental training.

And I'll talk about exactly how to do that

and in what ratios a little bit later.

Now, there's a really incredible set of experiments

that illustrate why it is that mental training

and visualization can be extremely effective,

but that it's always going to be most effective

when combined with real world training and experiences.

The experiments that I'm talking about

involve the use of what are called

bistable images or impossible figures.

Now, some of you are probably familiar

with impossible figures.

These are figures or objects that when you look at them,

they have these odd features,

like you're not sure where they stop

and where they start or where they end.

One good example would be the so-called mobius strip.

The mobius strip is literally a strip or a line

that is contiguous, it goes up and it loops around

and then it curves around and then it goes back

and it just continues and continues.

And when you look at it,

you can never really tell where it starts

and where it stops because it doesn't have any

of the features that allow you to see what's the front

and what's the back in any kind of stable way.

Another example of an impossible figure

would be a little set of cubes

that look like they're coming out toward you,

maybe with a little bend in them,

going up at a right angle, perhaps.

But then if you look at it a little bit longer,

that little piece that's facing up looks like it's in front

and you can't really tell what's in front and what's in back.

And so it's called an impossible figure

because you don't really know how to frame it in your mind

to tell what's closer to you and what's further apart.

Bistable images are somewhat similar,

although different in the sense

that they typically are simple silhouettes.

So for instance, the faces, vases by stable image

is perhaps the most famous of these

where you look at this image, it's very simple

and it looks like two vases.

But then you look at it a little bit longer

and you realize that you're looking at the side angle

or the profile of two faces looking at one another.

And when you see those two faces looking at one another,

you can't see the vases at the same time.

But then if you decide to see the vases again,

you can see the vases again, but the faces disappear.

So it's by stable meaning that you can't see the faces

and vases at the same time.

And impossible figures and by stable images

are capturing the fact that your visual cortex

and some of the associated areas

that compute visual scenes in your world

are essentially trying to recreate

whatever it is that's out in front of them.

And that's effectively what your visual system does.

It's very good at recreating visual images

in your brain, in your mind's eye.

So if you think about it, even with your eyes open,

your brain is just creating an abstract representation

of what it thinks is out there,

but that when it comes to assigning an identity

to something like, oh, that's a face or oh, that's a vase,

that is constrained by different neural circuits,

by different areas of the brain.

And somehow those circuits can't be coactive.

We cannot see the faces and the vases

at exactly the same time.

We can switch back and forth really quickly,

just as we can switch back and forth really quickly.

When we're looking at the impossible figure

and think, okay, that's the front of it, that's the back.

No, wait, that's the back, that's the front.

And it's going back and forth,

but we can't see them both at the same time.

No one can see them both at the same time.

We know this from brain imaging studies.

Now, impossible figures in bistable images can be seen.

You could look them up right now on your phone or computer,

or I could show you pictures of them

on paper right in front of you.

And you can do these sorts of perceptual experiments

of telling people, look at the face, look at the vase,

look at the front of the cube,

and I'll make it at the back of the cube.

And they can do this somewhat deliberately.

However, and this is, I think, so very interesting

to understanding how mental training and visualization

does and does not support real world learning.

If you try to imagine a bistable image, you can't do it.

In fact, no one can do it until they do something else.

Okay, so for those of you that are saying, wait,

I can do it, I can do faces, vases in my mind's eye.

I promise you that the neuroimaging

disputes your belief, okay?

And supports the idea that we can see real world

bistable images, we can see real world impossible figures,

but when we try and imagine those in our mind's eye,

we simply can't do it.

We can't do the perceptual shift in our mind's eye.

We can't switch back and forth between faces and vases.

However, and I just have to chuckle

because I think these experiments are so clever.

If I have you trace or draw

with a pen, on a piece of paper, an impossible figure,

or the faces, vases, bistable image,

and then I ask you to imagine that bistable image

or impossible figure and to switch back and forth,

you are able to do it.

So what that illustrates is that it's the combination

of imagined and real world experiences,

real motor movements, real perceptual experiences

combined with motor movements, combined with what you imagine

in your mind's eye, that really gives you the most depth

and flexibility over your mental visualization.

And in doing so, we can really stamp down

a third principle of mental training and visualization,

which is that your mental training

and visualization will be far more effective

if you are performing the exact same or very similar

mental and physical tasks in the real world, okay?

So first principle is mental training

and visualization needs to be simple and brief and repeated.

Second is that mental training and visualization

is not a replacement for real world motor training

or cognitive training, it's an augment,

it's an addition that can really help.

And the third principle of mental training

and visualization is that you need to combine

mental training and visualization with real world behaviors

and experiences that are very, very similar.

Now as a brief, but I think really relevant aside,

one of the things that also makes mental training

and visualization more effective is when we assign

cognitive labels to what's going on when we visualize.

So what I mean is that people are much better

at manipulating faces and vases in their mind's eye,

of course, only once they've drawn them out physically

with their hand, as I mentioned before.

Then they are manipulating abstract objects

like impossible figures, in part because

by labeling them faces and vases,

people are able to capture a lot of other neural machinery

that's related to faces and vases.

In fact, we have entire brain areas on both sides

of the brain devoted to the processing of faces,

they're called fusiform face area.

We have other areas in our brain that are involved

in processing of 3D objects,

but faces are of particular value.

There's a value to understanding what a face is

as opposed to a non-face,

and there's a value to understanding

what a particular face is.

In fact, the simplest way to put this

is that the human brain is, in many ways,

a face recognition and expression

of faces recognition machine.

Of course, there's other things,

but it is exceptionally good at that.

Unless you're in a profession

in which the relationships between 3D objects

and your ability to manipulate them

is exceedingly important,

you're not going to have a lot of neural real estate

specifically devoted to that.

Some people will be better at it, some people will be worse,

but when it comes to faces,

unless you have a condition like propethicgnosia,

which is an inability to recognize, say, famous faces

and distinguish them from non-famous faces,

or if you have some sort of face recognition deficit,

which about anywhere from one,

perhaps to 3% of people out there have,

because they're just terrible at recognizing faces.

And by the way, there's about half a percent of people

out there that are what are called super recognizers

that can recognize faces in a large crowd.

They can recognize specific faces

even from just partial profiles.

By the way, these people are extremely valuable

to security agencies and security agencies

are very good at finding these people.

Machines are quickly getting better

or at least as good as super recognizers,

but the best super recognizers are still better

than the best AI and machine algorithms out there.

But the point is that in your mind's eye,

you are better able to manipulate specific objects

or to see things more clearly and with more specificity

when it has a label that you recognize

from your real world experience,

as opposed to abstract or fictional labels.

Again, stamping home the idea

that what you experience in the real world

really serves to support your mental imagery

and therefore the key importance of experiencing

and doing things in the real world

and supporting that with mental training and visualization

and not just relying on mental training and visualization.

And the tangent here that's a little bit of fun,

and I don't think we've ever talked about before

on this podcast is that of UFOs, unidentified flying objects.

You know, there's a lot of people out there

who think that they've seen UFOs.

I guess technically they have

because a UFO is an identified flying object.

And if it's unidentified, at least to them,

then it is indeed a UFO.

I guess the question is whether or not,

or the dispute rather, is whether or not

those UFOs are actually flown by aliens

or controlled by aliens.

I think that's where the dispute lies.

But you can imagine how if somebody sees an object

in their environment and decides, ah, that's a UFO, okay?

Remember these faces, vases, or these impossible figures?

If they say, oh, that thing is a UFO

as opposed to something else.

They see, in other words, the face, not the vase.

Well, that stamps it down as a memory

in their visual system and related systems.

And then in their mind's eye, they are seeing the UFO.

They're not seeing the other thing

that it could possibly be, okay?

So it stamped down a very specific memory.

So the point here is that mental training

and visualization relies on not just the physical contours

and the exact spatial profiles and the speed of movement

of particular things that we experience in the real world.

It also heavily depends on the cognitive labels

and the decisions we make about the things that we see.

And this will become very important as we build up

toward our fourth principle of mental training

and visualization, which is that our cognitive labels,

that is what we decide is happening

when we do mental training and visualization,

turns out to be very important.

Now, this is not simply to say that you can decide,

okay, I want to learn how to play piano.

And so I'm going to tell myself

that a particular chord I imagine in my mind's eye

is identical to the real world chord

just because I decide it is.

The brain doesn't work that way.

It's not possible to just lie to yourself

and learn better as a consequence of the lies

you tell yourself.

However, what this tells us is that it is very, very important

that your mental training and visualization

accurately recapitulate the real world training

that you're doing.

So we are going to stamp down a fourth principle

of effective mental training and visualization

based on what we know from the scientific literature

is that your mental training and visualization

should assign labels to what you're doing

that can be matched to real world training and experiences.

Now, these can be somewhat abstract.

So for instance, if you're trying to learn

a particular aspect of the golf swing, okay?

So let's say that you're working on your golf swing.

Seems to be there are a lot of people out there

working on their golf swing

and you're going to do some mental training

and visualization in order to improve your golf swing.

We already know, again, let's just march through them

that your mental training and visualization

needs to be brief and simple.

It needs to be the same or in fact, it will be,

we can say the same as your real world golf swing.

In other words, it will take you exactly the same amount

of time to perform that golf swing in your mind's eye

as it would in the real world.

Incredible, right?

Again, something that maybe is taking a little bit of time

to sink in, but once it does, you're gonna be like,

wow, the brain is really an incredible machine.

And that third principle that you still have to do

golf swings in the real world

in addition to the mental training of golf swings.

And fourth, that if you want that mental training

and visualization to really improve your golf swing,

you're going to have to name or apply an identity

to the specific golf swing or aspect of the golf swing

that you're practicing.

So this could be abstract.

You could call it mental training and visualization

of golf swing 1A and you could imagine in your mind's eye,

you know, the perfect golf swing over and over

and over and over.

But then when you're in the real world,

you're also going to have to call that either out loud

or just to yourself golf swing 1A, okay?

As opposed to a putt, which might be 1B.

So naming and giving an identity to a real world skill

and applying the same name or identity

to the mental version of that, the visualization of that,

can enhance the mental training and visualization

in significant ways.

So when we apply identities or names

to these mental trainings and visualizations,

and again, provide that they are brief and repeated

and so on, we greatly enhance the amount of neural machinery

in the brain and body that we are able to recruit

when we go to perform those real world golf swings

and golf putts and here just replace golf swing

and golf putt with anything that you're trying to learn,

you're able to recruit a lot more neural machinery

and greatly increase the probability of proper execution.

So before we go any further,

I wanna share with you a couple of incredible aspects

of mental visualization that really can be harnessed

and applied toward mental training and visualization.

Some of these were done by Roger Shepard

and his graduate students in postdocs,

some were done by Steve Costlin and by others.

What these experiments really show

is that mental training and visualization

is capturing many, many of the exact same features

of real world behavior and perceptions,

not all of them, but many of them.

So for instance, if I tell you to close your eyes

and imagine a ceiling that has tiles

that are black and white checkered tiles,

one black tile, one white tile, for instance,

we know based on experiments

where we measure eye movements behind closed eyelids

that people tend to move their eyes up

when they are imagining things above them,

such as a ceiling.

Whereas if I tell you to imagine things down on the floor

like you're taking a hike

and you're looking for rattlesnakes,

actually just recently I experienced

because it's spring here in California,

rattlesnake along a hiking trail,

it's really quite beautiful,

although I have to confess I enjoyed keeping my distance.

I don't like snakes very much.

I don't dislike snakes,

but I prefer not to interact with them unless I have to.

If I have you imagine that rattlesnake,

depending on your relationship or thoughts about rattlesnakes,

number of things will happen in your brain, of course,

activation of the limbic system or not, for instance.

But what I know is that regardless of how you feel

about snakes, most of you will move your eyes down

when imagining a snake.

It might be subtle, it might be fast,

but statistically that result shows up

as opposed to when I imagine

where I ask you to imagine something above you,

tend to move your eyes up.

In addition to that, if I tell you, for instance,

to imagine an elephant and a mouse next to one another,

you presumably have some real world understanding

about the relative sizes of elephants versus mice.

Elephants generally are bigger than mice.

Thank goodness.

Mice are smaller than elephants.

If I ask you to tell me about the details

of that mouse's face,

so for instance, can you see its whiskers?

The processing time required for you to do that

is much longer than the processing time required

if I say, tell me what the position

of that elephant's trunk is.

Now, why would that be so, okay?

The position of the elephant's trunk

wasn't something that I told you.

It wasn't dictated by me.

It's in your mind's eye.

Maybe you don't even know

and you have to go searching for it.

But what we do know is that if I tell you to look

at a small object in your mind's eye

versus a larger object,

so for instance, the mouse versus the elephant,

it takes longer for you to do that.

In other words, just as with the map experiment,

the distance between things on a map

is conserved in your mind's eye

as a linear relationship.

It takes longer to go far distances

between things on a map in your mind

than it does to go shorter distances.

It's also the case that it takes you longer

to look at the details of a small object

versus a large object because why?

Because you are zooming in in your mind's eye.

Again, all of which speaks to the equivalence

of mental imagery with real world imagery and perception.

And as I mentioned earlier,

and as we'll see in a moment,

this also extends into the motor domain.

It takes you longer to perform complex motor sequences

in your mind's eye than it does simple motor sequences,

just as it would in the real world.

And if you're saying, of course, of course, of course,

well then great, then we've really underscored the point,

which is that when you imagine things,

it is not exactly the same,

but it is very, very much the same

as actually doing or perceiving those things

in the real world.

And the fifth principle

of effective mental training and visualization

is this notion of equivalence of mental imagery

versus real world perception and behavior.

These are the experiments, as you recall,

where if people are told to look for clouds

in their mental visualization, they tend to look up,

or if they're looking for something on the floor,

they tend to look down, even behind closed eyelids.

Now, this can be applied toward building

an especially effective mental training

and visualization protocol.

If you deliberately move your eyes in the direction

of the thing or things that you are trying

to recapitulate in your mind, in your visualization, that is.

You don't necessarily have to include this step,

but mental training and visualization

is going to be more effective if you do,

because with consciously generated eye movements,

again, even behind closed eyelids,

you are bringing about more of the neural circuitry

that one would experience if you were to perform

that particular cognitive task or motor task

in the real world, which, as I mentioned before,

in principle number three, you need to be doing anyway,

separately from your mental training and visualization.

So what we're talking about here is thus far,

five principles of mental training and visualization

that are well-established

from the scientific research literature.

In fact, I haven't mentioned this quite yet,

and I'll refer to some other references,

but there's a wonderful systematic review

of a large number of studies

that have looked at mental training and visualization,

what's effective, what's less effective,

across a bunch of different disciplines

that include education, medicine, music, psychology,

and sports.

We will provide a link to this paper

in the show 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.

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 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 golf 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, EPOCH 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.

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 two seconds.

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.

50 repetitions of something

and where you're trying to concentrate in your mind's eye

on getting something accomplished over and over

over again in exactly the same way might seem like a lot.

We know, based on the learning literature,

that your ability to successfully perform something

in the real world will lend itself

to better performance of that thing

in the imagined world within your mind's eye.

That's also one of these sort of does.

But if you're trying to get better at something

that you've never performed before,

you really should know that the mental training

and 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 and visualization can be effective,

however, at increasing the accuracy or the frequency

at which you can do that real world behavior.

So if normally you're only getting the correct swing

or you're only hitting the 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 wanna get more smooth

and 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 have misspoke there,

although I don't want to edit this out.

I misspoke in the sense that again,

I said for the thing that you're trying to learn,

remember mental training and visualization

is going to be most effective for building up

the number of accurate trials

or that 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.

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 and 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.

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Now, if you recall principle number three,

or what I'm calling principle number three

of effective mental training and visualization,

which was that you have to be able to perform

the thing that you're trying to get better at

through visualization and imagery in the real world.

That should raise the question of what is the ratio

of real-world training versus mental training

that's going to be most effective?

Well, here there's some really interesting data,

not just in the review that I mentioned,

but in a couple of the other papers

that we're gonna talk about in a few minutes.

But what I've done is I've synthesized the information

across those papers, and they really all point

to the fact that real-world training

is more effective than mental training,

and mental training is more effective than no training.

Now, the mental training more effective

than no training is kind of a duh,

except that there are people, for instance,

people who are injured, who are trying to maintain

or replenish some motor skill or ability

to move in a particular way,

or who have had traumatic brain injury

and are trying to recreate experiences

in a way that's safe for them

while in a somewhat restricted format.

So, for instance, if you've damaged a limb

or you're experiencing chronic pain,

and you need to take a layoff or some physical activity,

there are now many studies looking at stroke patients,

at patients that have been in accidents, TBI,

also people who are suffering

from more conventional limb and connective tissue injuries,

that if they do mental training,

it obviously is not going to put them at risk

of doing those same movements

as it would in the real world, right?

But that it can actually accelerate

or at least maintain skill performance.

So this is pretty exciting, if you think about it.

What this means, and the reason it underscores

this mental training is better than no training,

is that should you find yourself

in the unfortunate circumstance

of being injured or unable to perform a given behavior,

imagining the sequence of behavior

that you'd like to maintain or even build up over time,

provided you've done that motor sequence before

in the real world.

Well, the mental training and visualization

can really help keep that online

or even help you improve over time.

In fact, I have a colleague in the psychology department

at Stanford who told me an anecdote,

and admittedly it's just an anecdote of a student

who was recruited to Stanford,

both for their academic prowess,

but also for their abilities in tennis

and was injured in their first year,

and at first thought this was devastating,

but did a cognitive reframe around the idea

that what's called extended layoff from actual tennis

was going to afford them the ability

to do more mental training than they would otherwise,

even though they were quite sad

to not be able to do actual physical training for tennis.

And when they came back from that injury,

they did indeed manage to improve

beyond the initial non-injured state

they were in before the injury, which is pretty remarkable,

but as this colleague pointed out to me,

they were very careful to include

a lot of mental training and visualization

during that quote unquote layoff period.

So again, mental training better than no training,

physical training better than mental training,

but when we say physical training better

than mental training, what we're really talking about

is when you allocate a certain amount of training hours

for a given skill per week.

Okay, so how would this look?

What these studies have done is they've said,

okay, if people have the option

of doing the real world training for 10 hours a week,

versus mental training for 10 hours a week,

which group performs better?

It turns out it's the ones that do the physical training

for 10 hours per week.

However, we also know that combinations

of physical training and mental training

can bring about results that are greater

than either one of those alone.

How would that work?

Well, I wish I could tell you that if you did nine hours

of physical training per week, plus one hour of mental training,

that your performance would be better

than if you did 10 hours of physical training.

And that's not the case.

Okay, this is why we can reliably say

physical real world training,

and again, this could be in the cognitive domain,

is always going to be more effective

on an hour by hour basis compared to mental training.

So if you can do real world training,

and perhaps we should be calling it real world

as opposed to physical, but if you can do real world training

compared to purely mental training,

that's going to be the best use of your time.

This is really important.

It doesn't underscore everything that we're talking about

because here's the really cool thing.

If you do 10 hours per week of real world physical training,

again, could be running, could be music, could be math,

could be whatever it is you're trying to learn,

shooting basketballs, hitting golf balls,

and you add one hour or even half an hour of mental training

to that real world training,

well then the results are significantly greater

than you would experience with physical training alone.

And of course they would be greater

than you could achieve with mental training alone

because we already established

that real world training is more powerful

in learning skills and retaining skills

than is mental training.

Okay, if any of that was confusing,

let me just say it one more time just to be ultra clear.

If you have the option to do real world training

for a cognitive and or motor skill versus mental training,

always go with real world training.

However, if you can add to a maximum amount

of real world training by doing some mental training

and you follow the principles that we've been discussing here

which are gleaned from the scientific literature,

well then you are going to get significantly greater results

in terms of speed, accuracy, and consistency of performance

of those real world behaviors and cognitive abilities.

And of course, if you are unable to do physical training

for whatever reason, injury, travel,

whatever the case may be,

well then doing mental training is still far

significantly greater than doing no training at all.

Okay, so total layoffs it turns out are a bad thing

if you want to get better at something

and indeed if you want to retain certain skills

both cognitive and motor.

Now a couple of other things to keep in mind

as you're thinking about how to build up skills

through a combination of physical and mental training.

Well, remember back to the beginning of the episode

where we talked about neuroplasticity

and the fact that self-directed adaptive plasticity

which is really what we're talking about here

in this entire episode,

things that you're trying to learn in a deliberate way.

That is as you recall a two-part process

requires focused attention,

both when you're doing it in the real world

and when you're doing mental training

and it requires rest and sleep.

And in fact, you would be very wise

to try and get a good night's sleep

both on the days when you do physical training,

again also called real world training

and mental training.

You may also be asking,

can you do them on the same day?

And this gets into some nuance in the literature

but by my read of the literature,

here's the takeaway.

If you are doing the maximum amount of physical training

that you can do according to your schedule,

preventing injury and all those sorts

of important constraints

and you're going to add mental training and imagery,

it doesn't really matter when you do it.

You could do it immediately after your physical training,

you could do it on a separate day

but you do wanna place it at a time

in which you can try and get good sleep that night.

So for instance, believe it or not,

studies have been done where people are doing mental training

at times when they should be sleeping,

that is going to offset some of the degradation

and performance that you would normally see

but it's generally a bad idea.

You should do your real world training

and your mental training whenever it is that you can

and then you should try and get as much quality sleep

as you possibly can on the night

following that physical and or mental training.

This is true of pretty much every night of your life.

If I had my way, that is if I had a magic wand

which obviously I don't,

I would ensure that I and everyone else in the world

get sufficient amounts of quality sleep every single night

but that's just not realistic.

There are going to be times

where that's simply not gonna happen for whatever reason

and I always say if you're not going to get

sufficient amounts of quality sleep for whatever reason,

try and make it for a fun reason or a good reason

but I think getting sufficient amounts of quality sleep

80% of the nights of your life is a reasonable goal

and one that's worth striving toward

and we have lots of episodes now

or three really on mastering sleep,

on perfecting your sleep and episode,

a guest episode with the great Matthew Walker

who wrote the book, Why We Sleep,

an incredibly important book.

All of those as well as our toolkit for sleep

describe ways to improve your sleep.

So you can refer to those episodes

if you're having challenges with sleep

and want to improve on sleep

and things like non-sleep deep breaths

which can support your ability to sleep

and your ability to learn.

So sleep is still vitally important

not just for ensuring neuroplasticity occurs

following real world training

but also following mental training

and again when you place that mental training

is not so critical.

At least it doesn't appear to be based on the literature.

So if anyone out there has knowledge

of any peer reviewed studies

stating that mental training should be done

either before or after or some hours away

from real world training, please send that to me

or put it in the comments on YouTube

and I'll see it there

because I do read all the comments

but I'm not aware of any such data or analysis.

And by the way, if you are interested

in understanding the relationship

between motor skill acquisition and retention

and this first night phenomenon

of sleep the first night after training

versus sleep on the second night, et cetera.

There's a really wonderful paper

that was published by none other

than the great Matthew Walker

when I believe he was a graduate student.

Maybe he was a postdoc when he did this

in Robert Stickgold's lab at Harvard.

The title of the paper is Sleep and Time Course

of Motor Skill Learning.

This is a paper published in 2003.

Still an incredibly important paper.

I will provide a link to it in the show note captions.

It really highlights some of the key aspects

of when people sleep and how critical sleep is

on the night following and the nights following

that training in order to really consolidate

certain types of learning

and what phases of sleep relate

to the consolidation of motor learning, et cetera.

A really wonderful paper and of course

but just one of Matthew and Robert Stickgold's

incredible papers on sleep and learning.

Remember at the beginning of the episode

when I mentioned that many people are good

at mental training and visualization

but some people are not.

Well, sex differences have been explored

and age related differences have been explored

in terms of people's ability to mentally visualize

and train up specific skills.

And while initially there were some sex differences

identified, really the bulk of the subsequent literature

that is the majority of quality peer reviewed studies

on this aspect of mental training and visualization

pointed to the fact that there are no significant differences

between males and females in terms of their ability

to mentally visualize, nor their ability

to use that mental visualization

toward improving cognitive or motor skills.

That point was covered in some detail

in the review I mentioned earlier.

Best practice for motor imagery,

a systematic literature review on motor energy,

training elements in five different disciplines.

This review also looked at age related effects

and perhaps the only thing that really popped out

from this literature review

in terms of age dependent differences

that point to changes in protocols that you might make

is that for individuals 65 or older,

a combination of physical and mental training

may actually allow them to gain

and consolidate skills better

than were they to do physical training alone.

Now, whether or not that's due to some lower upper limit

of physical training that they can do because of their age

or whether or not that's something specific to do

with older versus younger neural circuits isn't clear,

but what this review also makes clear

is that for the vast majority of people out there,

so teens, people in their 20s and their 40s and so on,

physical training more effective than mental training,

we said that before,

combination of physical and mental training more effective

than physical training alone provided the mental training

is on top of the maximum amount of physical training

that one could do and of course mental training

more effective than no training at all.

Okay, so we talked about sets and reps.

We talked about five to 15 second epochs

with about 15 second breaks in between

or rest between sets if you will,

repeated for 50 to 75 trials,

done three to five times per week.

Some of the conditions of keeping it really simple,

the importance of being able to actually perform

those sequences in the real world and so on.

What we haven't discussed is first person versus third person

and eyes open versus eyes closed.

What are we really talking about here?

Well, first person, mental training and visualization

would be where you are imagining doing something

and you are seeing yourself doing something

from the inside out as opposed from the outside in.

Imagine for instance wearing a head cam or a body cam

and doing something with your hands

or being in virtual reality and having the sense

that whatever you see in front of you

and that's moving and that you're doing, that's you.

So what I mean by this is a mental training

or visualization protocol.

For instance, if you were at the piano or at a guitar

where you're actually looking down at

or sensing the feeling of your hands

but you're not actually moving your hands, okay?

As opposed to seeing yourself from outside of your body.

So looking at yourself, say standing next to you

or from across the room, you're looking at yourself

playing the piano or playing a guitar

or swinging a golf club or doing a tennis serve, okay?

First person versus third person.

And what the data tell us is that first person,

mental training and visualization

is generally more effective than third person,

mental training and visualization,

which perhaps raises another chorus of does out there.

But it needn't have been the case, right?

I mean, you could imagine that seeing yourself doing something

and doing it perfectly,

because you've done it perfectly once before, hopefully,

would allow you to build up that skill more quickly

because you have that third person perspective

where you can really see every aspect

and every element of what you're trying to perform.

Well, it turns out that the first person,

mental training and visualization

is significantly more effective

than that third person mental training and visualization.

So if what you're trying to learn lends itself well

to this first person mental experiencing of self

as you perform the cognitive and or motor skill,

I suggest you do that as opposed to the third person version.

Now, what if what you're trying to learn

doesn't lend itself well to first person visualization?

For instance, what if you're trying to learn

specific cognitive skill

that doesn't involve any overt motor behavior to be observed?

Well, in that case, it's very clear

that closing your eyes ideally

and trying to perform that specific cognitive task

or the statement or the uttering of a particular sentence

in another language or doing some sort of computation

or problem solving of some sort in your head.

Well, that itself of course is first person

because it's inside your own body as opposed to

and I don't know that anyone would actually do this

but looking at yourself from a third person perspective

in your mind's eye and seeing yourself

perform that cognitive challenge,

whatever that challenge may happen to be.

Okay, now we have to address eyes open versus eyes closed.

And this is where the literature gets pretty interesting.

I always thought for some reason, I don't know why

but I presumed that mental training and visualization

should always be done eyes closed.

But it turns out that's not how a lot of studies

of mental training and visualization have been done.

And in fact, many of them have arrived

at really impressive protocols

which are essentially the protocols

that I've distilled out

and I'm listing out during today's episode.

Having people either watch videos of themselves

performing a given skill

and imagining themselves in that role

and again, it's them.

So again, during the mental training and visualization

they're watching a movie of themselves.

So they're somewhat in the third person perspective.

I guess we could technically say

they are in the third person perspective

but they're watching themself.

So in doing that, we know based on neuroimaging studies

that when we watch videos of ourselves doing things

we experience that more from a first person perspective

than if we watch videos of other people doing things.

Use your imagination here folks.

So if you're somebody for instance

who's trying to get better at a particular skill

this could be not just sport but also public speaking

watching videos of yourself doing that can be very effective

but of course we have to come back

to the first principle

of effective mental training and visualization

which is that whatever it is that we're trying to build up

or consolidate as a skill needs to be brief and repeated.

So what we're really talking about here

is watching a video of ourselves on loop

or listening to a audio or audio video recording

of ourselves on loop for whatever aspect

that we're trying to build up or improve upon.

Now for people that for instance are trying to get better

at dealing with public speaking

and there isn't a particular skill

or utterance of particular sentences

or words that they're trying to accomplish

but rather they're trying to learn to be more relaxed

or to articulate better in the public speaking scenario.

There would be one of the few instances

in which I suggest more general theme

and not exact recapitulation of some specific words

that you're going to say.

Perhaps it could be a sequence of you walking out

onto stage toward the podium or out from the podium

and facing the audience and looking in multiple directions

up and down to see people in every corner of the room

and just repeating that on loop in your mind's eye

or watching yourself do that on video

and making yourself calm in your internal state

as you're doing that.

This is more of mental autonomic training

because what you're really trying to do

is control your autonomic nervous system,

the nervous system aspect that controls how alert

or calm you are as opposed to a specific skill.

However, you could also translate this to dance steps

or to motor sequences for playing an instrument and so on.

So the point here is that it's not as if there is zero

utility to third person mental training and visualization.

There can be, but first person mental training

and visualization is going to be more effective

as I mentioned before.

And if you're going to use third person

mental training and visualization,

ideally you would be looking at yourself either on video

or listening to yourself and audio and or video.

That is going to be more effective than closing your eyes

and trying to imagine yourself from a third person

perspective in your mind's eye.

Okay, so just to make it really simple,

first person better than third person visualization,

if you're going to go with third person visualization,

try and go with real third person visualization

where you're actually seeing and or hearing yourself

on a screen.

And again, this was somewhat of a surprise to me.

I always thought that mental training and visualization

was done with eyes closed.

I thought, okay, close your eyes.

You imagine this, you imagine that.

That's actually not the case for many, many studies,

some of which are considered real hallmark studies

within the field of mental training and visualization

and the different neural circuits that it recruits.

And along those lines is a really interesting study.

It came out not that long ago.

This was just a summer of 2022.

I'd like to discuss in a little bit of detail

because it really hammers home a number of the principles

that we've talked about.

The title of the article is mental practice modulates

functional connectivity between the cerebellum

and the primary motor cortex.

Going to tell you the essential features of this study.

First of all, primary motor cortex,

sometimes called M1 is a relatively small

but vitally important strip of neurons

in or near the front of your brain.

The neurons there are called upper motor neurons.

They communicate through a set of neural connections

with what are called lower motor neurons.

The lower motor neurons sit

in what's called the ventral horn of the spinal cord.

So along the spinal cord, you have sensory inputs

coming from skin and muscle

and what's called proprioceptive feedback

that tells you where your limbs are

in relation to each other and to yourself and so on.

You also have motor neurons that live in the spinal cord.

They're actually the ones that send little wires

that we call axons out to the muscles,

release the acetylcholine onto those muscles

and allow those muscles to contract.

Lower motor neurons are the ones

that actually generate movement.

However, they are largely responsible

for reflexive movements or already learned movements

and they require some input

from things like central pattern generators

and some other circuits

within the spinal cord and brainstem.

But it's those M1 primary motor cortex neurons

that are called upper motor neurons

because they control lower motor neurons

through directed action, okay?

So when I say primary motor cortex,

I'm really talking about those upper motor neurons, M1.

The cerebellum is an area in the back of your brain.

If you were to look at a brain,

you'd see two lobes back there that are highly foliated.

Foliated means that lots of folds

and lots of bumps and grooves back there

and actually means mini brain.

It looks like a kind of a mini brain

stuffed in the back of the brain.

In certain animals, the cerebellum is much larger

than the rest of the brain in humans.

The cerebellum is relatively small

compared to the rest of the so-called neocortex,

the outer shell, the human brain.

The cerebellum is involved in balance.

It's also involved in eye movements.

It's also involved in timing and motor learning.

And the key thing to understand

is that the cerebellum communicates

with the primary motor cortex

and it can do so through what's called inhibition.

It has outputs that inhibit the activity of neurons

in the motor cortex and elsewhere

and that has a profound influence

on the execution of motor behavior

and the learning of particular motor behaviors.

Now, I don't wanna get into too much detail around all this

but what you need to know is that

the cerebellum communicates with M1 primary motor cortex.

M1 is primary motor cortex.

Those are the upper motor neurons that control

the lower motor neurons and are going to control

physical behavior and execution of physical movements.

The communication between cerebellum

and primary motor cortex is inhibitory

although it can activate motor cortex too.

And this gets into a little bit of technical detail

but there can be inhibition of inhibition.

So if you take something that's a break

and you inhibit that break,

what you end up with is more excitation, okay?

So the takeaway here that's key

and everyone should be able to understand

even though you may or may not be following

this whole cerebellum primary motor cortex thing

is that when we gain a new skill

or we get more proficient at a skill,

so faster and more accurate,

there tends to be more net excitation

of the cerebellum to motor cortex communication.

And that is accomplished by reducing inhibition.

So that's where it gets a little bit confusing to some

but in this paper, what they did

is they explored people's ability to improve

on a very specific but very simple motor sequence.

It's one that you're already familiar with.

It's that tapping sequence that I talked about before

where the thumb is digit one, index finger number two,

middle finger number three,

ring finger number four and pinky finger number five

and it's a one, two, one, three, one, four, one, five,

one, two, one, three, one, four, one, five.

And they had people actually perform this

and they measured their speed and accuracy

and then they had them do a practice session

that was either an intentional task.

So one group just looked at an attentional cue

and had to maintain focus on that attentional cue

and another group did mental practice.

They basically did 50 imagined trials.

So just in their mind's eye of this one, two, one, three,

one, four, one, five on repeat, 50 trials,

much in the same way as what I referenced

as the ideal protocol earlier, 50 rounds of that.

Then they got tested again on the motor task in the real world

and there were also recordings of the cerebellar

to primary motor cortex communication.

So there were a bunch of different results in the study

I think are interesting but the ones that are most important

are that, quote, we found that mental practice

enhanced both the speed and accuracy

of this one, two, one, three, one, four, one, five

performance in the real world

when people did these 50 imagined trials.

There are many results out there, different papers

that parallel and essentially say the same thing

as what is said in this paper.

And remember, there've been studies of mental training

dating back to the 1880s.

But what this paper really does,

it looks at the neural machinery

and the changes in the neural machinery.

And what they found using transcranial magnetic stimulation

both in the context of stimulating

but also recording activity and connectivity

between cerebellum and primary motor cortex

is that mental training enhanced the net excitation

of cerebellum to motor cortex communication.

That is it reduced the inhibition in a way

that allowed motor cortex to generate these movements

with more accuracy and more speed.

What's also interesting about this paper

is that it showed that the improvement

in performance of this task was not related

to activation of the motor pathways themselves.

So it's not the case that the cerebellum activation

or inhibition changed the patterns of excitation

going directly to the spinal cord

because those pathways actually exist

through a couple of intermediate stations.

What it really showed is that when people do mental training

and here you could say, okay, 50 trials,

that's a lot of trials,

it's not actually that many trials.

It's pretty fast learning if you think about

do a task in the real world,

do 50 trials of the imagined task,

do the trial in the real world again,

significant improvement in speed and accuracy

through now what are becoming

to be established neural circuit connections

between cerebellum and primary motor cortex.

So this study is one of several

but not a tremendous number of studies out there

that are starting to really pinpoint

the underlying neural circuits

that allow mental training and visualization

to really improve motor skill performance.

But again, and please hear me on this in this study

and in the vast majority of other studies

that have shown significant improvement

in motor performance in the real world

by use of mental training and visualization,

there was an ability of each and everyone in the study

to perform the specific motor sequence in the real world

that then they were able to enhance

with mental training and visualization.

Now thus far we've been talking mostly

about performance of motor sequences

and one of the things to really understand

about performance of motor sequences

both in the real world and in the imagined context

is that it involves the doing

is what we call a go action

and not doing certain things.

What do I mean by not doing?

Well, for many tasks out there,

even ones as simple as the one, two, one, three, one, four,

one, five tasks that we talked about a moment ago,

there is the need not just to tap those fingers

in the correct sequence as quickly as possible

but also to be accurate about it to not do one, three, one, four

or one, three and four at the same time.

So there's both a go component, an action component

and a withhold action component.

And the ability to withhold action

is strongly constrained by the time domain.

In other words, the faster that we need

to perform a given motor sequence,

the more likely we are to perform incorrect components

of the motor sequence as well, okay?

So one of the key things

about mental training and visualization

that's really remarkable is that it can also be used

and has been shown to improve not just go aspects

of motor performance and cognitive performance

but also no go aspects of motor performance

and skill learning.

Now the go no go thing is something I've discussed before

on this podcast in reference to the so-called basal ganglia.

Basal ganglia are subcortical.

So they're below that bumpy surface of the human brain

that we're most accustomed to seeing

when we look at it from the outside.

And the basal ganglia are strongly involved

in go versus no go type tasks and learning.

Now, there are only a few studies

that have really looked at the learning

and the improvement of no go components of motor learning

but these no go components are really, really important.

In fact, if we were to look at what's involved

at improvement in a golf swing or shooting free throws

or getting better at piano or getting better at math

or language speaking, I think it's fair to say

that at least half and probably as much as 75%

of motor learning is about restricting

inappropriate movements or utterances or thoughts

if what you're trying to learn is purely cognitive.

I think that's an important point

that brings us back to our initial learning

when we come into this world, that developmental plasticity

which as you recall, we have a lot of interconnected aspects

of our brain and nervous system early in life.

Remember the example of the kid trying to eat

and getting a spoon of food and bowl on their head, et cetera.

And then over time getting more accurate

at bringing food to their mouth and eating in a clean way,

things that most but not all people accomplish

at some point in the course of their lifetime.

Well, there haven't been many

but there have been a few very interesting studies

looking at how mental training and visualization

can improve the no go aspect of motor learning.

And I think this is important to highlight

because it really mirrors what's done in the real world

as opposed to just the finger tapping type things

which are mostly go tasks.

Again, there's a little bit of a no go component there

but there are specific tasks

that people have developed for the laboratory

that really closely mimic action learning

and cognitive learning in the real world.

And one of the more important of those

is what's called the stop signal task.

Now the stop signal task is something

that I'll explain to you.

I'll also provide a link in the show note caption

so you can try it.

It's actually a lot of fun to try this

because it really gives you a sense

of just how challenging some of these laboratory tasks are.

Let me just describe it for a moment.

The stop signal task was really developed

and popularized by Gordon Logan and William Cowan.

Gordon Logan is at Vanderbilt University

and has done a lot of really important work.

But one of the important aspects of his work

is looking at motor performance and skill acquisition

and the development of the stop signal task.

I'll describe the stop signal task for you now

in broad contour.

You or another research subject

would sit in front of a screen.

There are two keys on that keyboard

or two keys among the other keys on that keyboard.

One which is designated left.

The other which is designated right.

And then on the screen, you'd be presented for instance

with a left facing or a right facing arrow.

So in the initial trial, what would happen is

that arrow would pop up on the screen

and your job is to press the left key

when the right facing arrow is presented,

you press the right key.

Okay, pretty straightforward.

But there's a limited amount of time

in which you can do this.

And the idea is that you're going to need to do this

within approximately 500 milliseconds

of the presentation of that arrow

or else it's going to tell you that you missed that trial.

Now, of course, if you press the wrong key,

so if the arrow goes left and you press the right key,

then you would be told you got that one wrong, okay?

So this is a reaction time test

and not one that's particularly novel.

What's novel and what Logan and Cowan developed

was that in the stop signal task,

every once in a while, not every trial,

but every once in a while, that arrow is presented.

And then with some delay ranging from anywhere

from 100 milliseconds to maybe 350 milliseconds,

there would be a red circle

or a red X also presented, which is a stop signal.

And your job is to not press the key

that corresponds to the direction of arrow,

in fact, not press any key at all.

Now, you can imagine how if the stop signal shows up

with a longer delay after the presentation of the arrow,

there's a higher probability

that you will have already generated

the key pressing movement, okay?

So at the link that we provided in the show note caption,

you can actually do these two tasks.

And what you'll find is that you and most people

will be able to do this arrow to reaction time pressing

of the left to right key somewhere in the neighborhood

between 300 milliseconds

and maybe as long as 500 millisecond delay,

you'll get an average of how quickly you respond.

And then of course, if you choose to,

and I would hope you would choose to go on

and do the stop signal task,

you will be told trial by trial,

whether or not you are hitting the right keys,

because if you are, you'll be allowed to progress

to the next trial.

Or if you are told to stop,

that is you get the stop signal and you press the key anyway,

you'll be told that you made an error

because you did not stop.

Now, again, with very short delays

between the presentation of the arrow and the stop signal,

you are going to be much better at inhibiting

or preventing yourself from the behavior

at the no go aspect of motor execution that is.

What you will find is that if the stop signal

is presented very shortly after,

let's say 100 milliseconds,

which is a very, very brief amount of time,

after the presentation of the arrow,

there's a good chance that you're going to be able

to withhold the key pressing behavior.

However, if the delay is anywhere from 200 to 350 milliseconds

after the presentation of the arrow,

chances are that you're going to press the button

even when you shouldn't have on at least some of those trials.

And if you try and game the system

and wait a certain amount of time

after the presentation of each arrow,

there will also be times in which the stop signal

does not appear and you fail to hit the button

in the appropriate amount of time.

So it's a fun little task, it doesn't cost anything

or set maybe a couple of minutes of your time.

And if you do have time to go to it,

I think it will give you a much deeper flavor

for the sorts of experiments that we're talking about here

and that you'll find that these stop signals

are actually pretty hard to generate

when you're trying to learn some new motor behavior.

And that actually illustrates a bigger point here.

If today you sense that we've been talking about studies

of tapping fingers and stopping button presses

and that those examples are highly artificial

and don't really translate to the real world,

well, keep in mind that the tasks

that are used in these studies really target

the specific neural circuits,

that is the same neural circuits

that you would use for the performance

of essentially any motor task.

Now, of course, other motor tasks

like ones where you involve your feet or cognitive tasks

where you have to think really hard

about specific information and search for that information

and assemble it in particular ways,

of course, involve other neurons and neural circuits

that we haven't discussed today.

But the core components of these go and no go task

or the stop signal task really capture

the core elements of most all of cognitive

and or motor learning in some way

that's fundamentally important, okay?

So they have real world relevance.

The paper that I'd like to just briefly describe to you

is entitled Motor Imagery Combined with Physical Training

Improves Response and Abition in the Stop Signal Task, okay?

So that title is a little bit wordy,

but now you know what the stop signal task is.

And what this paper essentially found was that

if people did physical training,

so the sort of experiment that I just described

versus mental training where they sat eyes open

and imagine their responses to those arrows

and stop signals,

but they didn't actually generate any key presses

versus a combination of the physical training.

So the actual pressing of the buttons

or withholding pressing of the buttons

as the case may be, plus mental training

over the course of about five days,

using the contour described of the key principles

of mental training and performance that we've talked about.

I'll get to the specifics in a moment,

but it really obeyed most all of what we've talked about,

if not all of it.

So repetition, simple, repeated over about five days

and so on and so forth.

What they found was that the mental training

and physical training groups,

so mental and real world training groups

perform significantly better

in the stop signal reaction time.

That is they were able to withhold action

when they needed to withhold action.

More frequently and with more accuracy

vended either the physical training

or mental training groups alone.

So this actually spits in the face of what we said earlier,

which is that physical training is always better

than mental training

and mental training is always better than no training.

And it's important to point out here

that both the physical training

and the mental training groups

experience significant improvements

in their reaction time and accuracy

at the stop signal task.

But in the case of this study,

which is exploring the withholding

of inappropriate behaviors,

the combination of mental training and physical training

outperformed either physical or mental training alone.

So while earlier we said

that if you have a certain amount of time

in order to train something up,

physical training is always going to be better

than mental training.

Well, here we have somewhat of an exception

where if the thing you're trying to learn

involves withholding mistakes

as opposed to trying to generate the right behaviors per se,

well, then you are probably better off

doing a combination of mental training

and physical training.

Let me state that a little bit differently.

If you're finding that you're screwing up something,

not because you can't initiate

that particular motor behavior,

but you're doing the wrong thing at the wrong time,

you're not able to withhold a particular action,

well, then in that case,

mental training in combination with physical training

becomes especially important.

So for you coaches, for you students out there,

keep that in mind.

When trying to learn how to withhold

particular action sequences

because they're not serving you well in the real world,

using a combination of real world training

and physical training is actually better for you

on an hour per hour basis than is physical training alone.

A couple of key details about this study

should you decide to implement these protocols.

In this study, they did approximately 30 trials

of the thing that they were trying to get better at.

Now they did those in the real world.

So in this case, the stop signal task

involved actually pressing those buttons,

and then they had a test phase of about 144 go trials

and about 48 stop trials.

So this is important.

If you are a coach or you're a student

or you're just gonna self-direct this kind of learning

in your self-directed adaptive plasticity,

it's important that you mix in both go and no go trials.

It wasn't always the case

that there was a stop signal generated.

The other thing that was really impressive about the study

is that the changes occurred very quickly.

So the training was performed five times over five days.

So once a day for five days,

again, back to this three to five times per week principle.

And the improvements were really significant in some cases.

In fact, if you decide to peruse this paper,

you can go to table two,

you can see in some cases a near doubling

in the reduction in reaction time

through a combination of mental and physical training

compared to physical training alone

or mental training alone.

Again, however, both physical training

and mental training groups alone

saw significant improvements,

but the combination of mental training

and physical training was far greater

than you saw with either one of those alone.

So that's all nicely quantified for you in this paper.

So again, I really like this paper.

Despite it not involving a huge number of subjects,

I think it is a key paper

because it really points to such an important element

of motor learning and training,

which is this action withholding component,

this no-go component that here is captured so nicely

in the stop signal task.

So before we round up our discussion

about motor training and visualization,

I wanted to just briefly touch on some of the studies

that have explored why certain individuals

are better or worse at motor training and visualization

and what that might correlate with.

At the beginning of today's episode,

I briefly mentioned affentasia,

which is this phenomenon where some people just simply

can't or seem to have extreme challenge

generating visual imagery.

In a number of studies exploring how affentagics,

as they're sometimes called, although nowadays

it's not considered polite, if you will,

to refer to people according to their condition.

So for instance, propasagnosia is a condition

in which people are unable to recognize particular faces.

And in the past, these people were referred to

as propasagnosics, as if their condition defined them.

Nowadays, it's not considered polite to do that.

Rather, we say the person has propasagnosia

or suffers from propasagnosia,

although the word suffer then also

has become a little bit touchy.

I'm going to do my best to just try

and be as clear as possible here

and explain that people who have affentasia

can have affentasia to varying degrees

so they can either have a complete absence of ability

to generate mental imagery,

or they have a poor or kind of rudimentary ability

to generate visual imagery in their mind's eye.

It was thought that people who have affentasia

are not capable of what's called synesthesia.

Synesthesias are when people have perceptual blending,

and this is not while under the influence

of any kind of psychedelic or other kind of drug,

perceptual blending of an atypical kind or rare kind.

I actually have some friends,

two friends that have different forms of synesthesia.

One associates different keys on the piano

or musical notes with specific colors

in a very, very one-to-one specific way.

So they'll tell you that E-flat on the piano

is a particular tone in their mind of amber hue, okay?

And that I forget what other key is associated

with a particular shade of red and so on and so forth.

Are these people better at piano?

Are they more perceptive of colors in their environment?

Not necessarily so.

This is just a perceptual blending.

It doesn't necessarily lend itself to any improved ability.

Now you could imagine why people would hypothesize

that people who have affentasia,

especially its extreme form,

would not be capable of or have synesthesias.

It turns out that's not the case.

There are a couple of really interesting papers.

Again, we will link these in the show note captions.

One is entitled,

What is the relationship between affentasia,

synesthesia, and autism?

And the other one is affentasia,

the science of visual imagery extremes.

And I really like to review affentasia,

the science of visual imagery extremes

for those of you that are interested

in understanding affentasia with more depth.

The study addressing the relationship

between affentasia, synesthesia, and autism

found that affentasia is indeed linked

to weak visual imagery,

but that affentasia can also be synesthesics.

And vice versa.

What was also interesting about this study

is they addressed the question of whether or not

people who have affentasia,

that is a challenge or inability to generate

mental or visual imagery,

tend to have features associated with autism

or residing somewhere on the autism spectrum.

And I'm not trying to use ambiguous language here,

but the whole set of language and nomenclature

around autism and autism spectrum

is also undergoing revision now,

because we are now coming to understand

that autism and nowadays,

it's generally not considered correct

to call people autistics in that sense,

but autism is considered one set

of positions along a spectrum

that includes things like aspirators, et cetera,

but that may also include other aspects

of cognition and even personality.

So these are starting to be viewed

not just as a spectrum or one continuum

ranging from non-autistic to autistic,

but a lot of variation and subtlety in between

and even crossing over with other aspects

of personality, psychology, and neuroscience.

So I'm not trying to be vague here.

I'm trying to be accurate,

rather by saying the whole description

and categorization of autistic, non-autistic, et cetera,

is undergoing vast revision right now.

But the important point I think from this paper

is that indeed it was found that people who have affentasia

tend to exhibit more of the features

that are associated with the autism spectrum.

Now, how those things relate to one another

in terms of their clinical relevance isn't clear.

And of course, it is entirely unclear

as to what's the chicken and what's the egg there.

So you could imagine, no pun intended, for instance,

that people that are on the autism spectrum

might be less proficient at generating visual imagery

because they are exceedingly proficient at other things.

You could also imagine that people are placed

on to the autism spectrum as it's sometimes referred to

or are associated with particular features

on the autism spectrum because in a causal way

of the affentasia, and of course,

it's extremely important to highlight

that not all people that consider themselves

or that people consider autistic

or that are on the autism spectrum

or Asperger's or any variation thereof

necessarily have affentasia.

Just as it is that not all people

that are on the autism spectrum

completely lack or even lack what's called theory of mind,

which is the ability to sort of empathize

and as describe feelings and motivations of others

when viewing the actions and perceived feelings of others.

So what I just described,

hopefully doesn't come across as just a bunch of word soup.

What I'm trying to pinpoint is that there does seem

to be a relationship between one's ability

to generate visual imagery and certain constellations

of cognitive and emotional perception and behavior

and vice versa, okay?

In a future episode, I promise to cover synesthesia

and autism and some of the related cognitive

and motor aspects of autism and things like Asperger's.

I'm going to feature an expert guest

or actually several expert guests in this area

because it is a rapidly evolving

and somewhat controversial field.

Meanwhile, I think it's important to at least consider

how mental training and visualization might relate

to certain aspects of cognition

and our ability to visualize things,

not just in terms of other people's behavior,

which is one of the common ways that people probe

for autism and Asperger's versus non-autistic

and non-Asperger's and so on,

the so-called theory of mind task

and in fact, asking whether or not children or adults

can really get in the mind of others.

That's a typical task developed by Simon Baron Cohen,

but also whether or not children and adults

are capable of generating mental imagery

in a really vivid way

or whether or not they have minor

or even extreme challenge in doing so.

And perhaps the most direct way to explain

why I included this aspect of the discussion

of mental training and visualization

as it relates to different cognitive phenotypes

or neurocognitive phenotypes,

such as autism, Asperger's, et cetera,

is because if you think about motor skill execution

or cognitive skill execution

and the relationship between mental training

and visualization and motor skills or cognitive skills,

that's all pretty straightforward

when you're talking about finger tapping

and go-no-go tasks and learning piano

and things of that sort.

But in many, many ways, our learning of social cognition,

our learning of how to behave in certain circumstances,

what's considered normal or atypical,

neurotypical and neuroatypical, if you will.

A lot of that is not just generated from the inside out,

but it also involves observation and visualization

of what are considered appropriate and inappropriate,

definitely placed in quotes, by the way, folks.

I'm not placing judgment, I'm just saying appropriate

and inappropriate for a given context behavior.

In other words, social learning and social cognition

is every bit as much a learned behavior

and pattern of cognitive and motor patterns,

as is tapping fingers or withholding key presses

in a go-no-go task.

It's just that it transmits into a domain

that involves smiling versus frowning,

versus asking a question, versus staying silent,

versus sitting still, versus fidgeting what's appropriate

and when, what's inappropriate and when.

All of that is what we call social cognition

and it has direct parallels

to everything we've been talking about up until this point.

So today we did a deep dive,

which is often the case on this podcast,

into mental training and visualization.

During the course of the episode,

I tried to lay down one by one the key components

of an effective mental training and visualization practice,

everything ranging from making sure

that the practice involve brief epochs,

repeats of specific sequences of motor

and or cognitive behavior,

that those be relatively simple so that you can imagine them,

even if you're somebody who is not good

at doing mental training and visualization.

And I should mention that if you do mental training

and visualization repeatedly over time,

you get better at mental training and visualization.

There's a, what's called meta-plasticity here.

So it's not just about engaging neuroplasticity

of particular circuits,

it's also about getting better at engaging plasticity.

So plasticity of plasticity.

I also described the key importance

of being able to actually execute specific movements

and cognitive tasks in the real world,

if you want the mental training and visualization

to be especially effective.

And we talked about the importance of naming things,

we talked about the importance of creating,

not just one, but many parallels

between real world training

and mental training and visualization.

And really on the whole, what we established was

that cognitive and or motor learning

really is something that you should do in the real world

as much as possible,

but if you can't do to injury or whatever conditions,

using mental training is a reasonable substitute,

but not a complete substitute.

And if you can't do real world training

for whatever reason, injury or otherwise,

that mental training is going to be better

than no training at all.

And of course, we established that at least for

withholding action in order to get better at a skill,

a combination of physical training

and mental training is going to be best,

but that if you're trying to learn a new skill

and you're having challenges with performing that skill

because of an inability to do the skill in the first place

or on a consistent basis,

well then on an hour by hour basis,

you're best off investing your time

into the physical training,

only incorporating mental training and visualization

if you are able to do that on top of the maximum amount

of real world training that you're capable of doing.

And of course, we talked about the actual neural circuits

and a bit about how the actual neuroplasticity occurs.

Early in the episode, I mentioned long-term depression.

Well, in describing the improvements in no-go tasks,

those stop signal tasks,

a lot of what's observed during those tasks is improvement

or rather an increase in long-term depression

of specific neural connections.

So my hope is that in learning about those basic neural

circuits and plasticity mechanisms,

and in learning about the critical importance of focus

and attention during learning, both real world and imagined,

as well as the importance of sleep and deep rest

for really consolidating learning

and the different tools, the various steps or principles

of effective mental training and visualization

that you now have a fairly coherent

or maybe even a very coherent picture

of how to develop the best mental training

and visualization protocols for you.

I realize that everyone has different goals,

everyone has different time constraints.

If you are somebody that's interested in developing

a mental training and visualization protocol,

so if you're a coach or teacher or simply a learner

or you're trying to self-direct your own adaptive plasticity,

I wanna emphasize that the key components

that we discussed today are essential to include,

but I wouldn't obsess about whether or not

a given epoch is 15 or 20 seconds or even 25 seconds.

I wouldn't obsess over whether or not

you got 30 repetitions in and then your mind drifted

or whether or not you could do the full 50 to 75

or whether or not even in your mind's eye

you made some errors.

What's been shown over and over again in this literature

is that performing mental training and visualization

repeatedly and in a very restricted way

that makes it easier to perform those trials

over and over and over again

and with a high degree of accuracy.

Almost always, really we can fairly say

in essentially every study where it's been explored

has led to improvements in real world performance

of both cognitive and or physical tasks.

So if you're trying to learn anything at all,

I do encourage you to explore motor training

and visualization because basically all the studies out there,

in fact, I couldn't find one exception

where some degree of improvement wasn't observed

when people use motor training and visualization

on a consistent basis,

even just the three to five times per week,

these simple repeats over and over.

So I don't want to over complicate

or make it sound like mental training and visualization

has to be performed in a very precise way

or that it has to be done perfectly each and every time

quite to the contrary.

What is clear is that mental training and visualization

is a very effective way to improve real world performance.

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Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.