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Science-Based Mental Training & Visualization for Improved Learning

2023/4/24
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Andrew Huberman
是一位专注于神经科学、学习和健康的斯坦福大学教授和播客主持人。
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Andrew Huberman: 本期节目探讨了心理想象的科学原理及其在学习运动和认知技能方面的应用。节目中,Huberman教授讨论了基于神经可塑性的技能发展,以及专注、睡眠、运动限制和兴奋在其中的作用。他还介绍了五个提高学习速度、准确性和一致性的心理想象关键原则,并提供了具体的方案示例,包括重复次数、休息时间和训练频率,以及如何在受伤或中断传统训练时调整这些方法。Huberman教授在整个节目中都引用了支持这些概念的科学研究。本期节目旨在帮助任何人都能通过心理想象和训练来更有效地学习或教学。 Huberman教授首先介绍了神经可塑性,即大脑和神经系统根据经验发生变化的能力。他解释说,神经可塑性包括发育可塑性和成人可塑性两种形式。发育可塑性是一种被动过程,发生在出生到25岁之间;成人可塑性则是一种主动过程,可以通过有意识的努力来引导。Huberman教授强调,成人可塑性需要专注的注意力和充足的睡眠,尤其是在学习后的第一个晚上。 接下来,Huberman教授讨论了神经元之间可塑性的两种主要形式:长期增强(LTP)和长期抑制(LTD)。他解释说,LTD在学习新技能,特别是运动技能方面起着关键作用,因为它涉及抑制不正确的动作以产生精确的动作。 Huberman教授接着介绍了五个提高学习速度、准确性和一致性的心理想象关键原则:1. 心理训练和想象应该简短、简单并重复进行;2. 心理训练和想象不能替代现实世界的认知或运动训练,但可以提高学习速度和稳定性;3. 心理训练和想象的有效性可以通过结合现实世界的行为和经验来提高;4. 心理训练和想象需要将心理训练和想象中的标签与现实世界的训练和经验相匹配;5. 心理意象与现实世界的感知和行为之间存在等效性。 Huberman教授还讨论了心理训练和想象的具体方案,包括重复次数、休息时间和训练频率,以及如何在受伤或中断传统训练时调整这些方法。他还讨论了第一人称视角和第三人称视角的心理训练和想象,以及睁眼和闭眼训练的区别。 最后,Huberman教授总结了本期节目的内容,并强调了专注、睡眠和重复练习的重要性。他还讨论了想象能力的个体差异,以及心理训练和想象在社会认知学习中的应用。

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Neuroplasticity, the brain's ability to change, is key to mental visualization's effectiveness. It involves developmental plasticity (birth-25) and adult neuroplasticity, which is self-directed and adaptive. Understanding these processes is crucial for leveraging mental training.
  • Neuroplasticity encompasses developmental and adult forms.
  • Adult neuroplasticity is self-directed and adaptive.
  • Focused attention and sleep are crucial for neuroplasticity.

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Welcome to the huberman lab podcast, where we discuss science and science space tools for everyday life. I'm dw huberman and i'm a professor of neutral logy and optimal gy at stanford school of medicine. Today we are discussing mental training and visualization. Mental training 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 visualization is that I would still soon see when you go into the literature, that is, the scientific studies on mental training socialization, you quickly realize that IT does not take a lot of mental training visualization in order to get Better at anything. However, that mental training visualization has to be performed in a very specific way, and today we will discuss exactly how to do mental training visualization in the specific ways that allow IT to compliment the actual performance of a motor or cognitive scale, 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, seta for long periods of time without ever forgetting how to do them. All of mental training and visualization realize on what I considered really the holy grail of our brain and nervous system.

And that's a 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 issues of the body to the brain and final cord. So the whole thing in both actions 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 were 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 vex us and that we can 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. 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, is simply not true. However, there is somewhat of an equivalence between a real experience and an imagined experience, and will talk about the difference between those and how that can be leverage in order to get the most out of mental training visualization.

Then I will cover exactly which types of mental training visualization work best across all domains, meaning for music learning, mathematics solving puzzles, motor learning, sports performance at sea, to really allow you a template in which you can plug in or design 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 are 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 sympathetic sia, which is the combining of different perceptual experiences. So you may be one of these people, or you may heard of people that, for instance, when they think of a number, they also just naturally, spontaneously think of a color and vice versa.

Talk about how that relates to mental imagery, visualization and the creative process and problem solving in general. And then finally, what i'll do is our recap mental training visualization from the standard point of how best to apply mental training visualization according to specific chAllenges, things like chAllenges with public speaking or chAllenges with sports performance or chAllenges with test taking performance, chAllenges of the essentially anything that allow you to build specific mental training visualization practices that are brief, that are supported by neuroscience studies and that are highly effective. Before we begin, i'd like emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research erles at stanford.

IT is, however, part of my desired 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 sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is element. Element is an electronic light drink with everything you need and nothing you don't.

That means plenty of salt, magnesium in patache, the so called electorate, and no sugar, salt, magnesium and potash are critical to the function of all the cells in your body, in particular to the function of your nerve cells, also called neurons. In fact, in order for your neurons to function properly, all three electrical lights need to be present in the proper ratio. And we now know that even slight reductions in electronic light concentrations or dehydration of the body can lead to deficits.

And cognitive and physical performance element contains a science back electronic light ratio of one thousand milligrams, that one gram of sodium, two hundred milligrams of potassium and sixty milligrams of magnesium. I typically drink element first thing in the morning when I wake up in order to hydrates my body and make sure I have enough electrical lites. And while I do any kind of physical training, and after physical training as well, especially if i've been sweating a lot, if you'd like to try element, you can go to drink element, that element t dot com slash huberman to clam a free element sample pack with your purchase.

Again, that drink element L M N T dot com slash huberman. Today's episode is also brought to us by waking up, waking up as a meditation APP that includes hundreds of meditation programs, mindfulness trainings, yoga eja, recessions and n sdr non sleep depressed protocols. I started using the waking up up a few years ago because even though i've been doing regular meditation since my teens, and I start doing yoga edra about a decade ago, my dad mentioned to me that he had found an APP turned out to be the waking up APP, which could teach you meditations of different durations, and that had a lot of different types of meditations to place the bringing body into different states, and that he liked IT very much.

So I gave the waking up up a try, and I too found IT to be extremely useful, because sometimes I only have few minutes to meditate, other times have longer to meditate. And indeed, I love the fact that I can explore different types of meditation to bring about different levels of understanding about consciousness, but also to place my brain body into lots of different kinds of states, depending on which meditation I do. I also love that the waking up up has lots of different types of yoga media sessions.

Those who you don't know, yogananda is a process of lying very still, but keeping an active mind. It's very different than most meditations. And there is excEllent scientific data to show that yoga ea, and something similar to IT called non sleep deep breath or nsd r, can greatly restore levels of cognitive and physical energy even, which is to a short ten minute session.

If you'd like to try the waking up, you can go to waking up dot com slash huberman and access a free thirty day trial. Again, that's waking up dot com slash huberman to access a free thirty day trial. Let's talk about mental training and visualization.

Now, perhaps surprisingly, mental training visualization has been studied since the late eighteen hundreds. Actually, a paper published in eighty and eighty by goldin 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 stability over time.

Now, as I mentioned earlier, mental training and visualization relies on a process that we call neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity is determined that many people have heard and encompasses many different things. So broadly speaking, neuroplasticity include developmental plasticity, which is the sort of plastic occurs between about birth in age twenty five. 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 at lesson and as a twenty two, twenty three, twenty four year old etta.

Now, of course, of course, of course, this is not the case that on your twenty fifth birthday, you close out passive developmental plasticity and start engaging in the other type of a neuroplasticity, which is adult neural antics is a gradual tapering off of developmental plastics that occurs between age zero and twenty five. And for some people, might occur somewhere around twenty six. Rather, people around twenty three, when we say twenty five, are 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 eighties or nineties or hundreds, should one live that long, is the other form of neil plasticity, which is adult neuroplasticity. Adult neuroplasticity is very different than developmental plasticity, because IT is the sort of plastic that one can direct towards one own specific desired learning. So we wanted to get a little bit technical here for sake of clarity, not for sake of confusion.

We would say adult plastics is really about self directed adaptive plasticity. And the reason we call IT that, as opposed to something else, or simply adult plastic see, is that there are many different forms of neuroplasticity. There is, for instance, maladaptive.

Neuroplasticity occurs. If one gets a really hard head hit and concussion, there will be changes to the brain and nervous system. But those changes of the brain nervous system do not allow IT to perform Better.

In fact, IT often impaired the brain of a systems ability to function, and therefore is more adaptive. So I don't want to get overly wordy with a number of different terms here, but I do think it's important. Understand that we have developmental plasticity again, in which the brain never system changes simply in response to experiencing specific things for Better or worse.

And there's adult self directed adaptive plastic in which one can direct specific changes in terms of learning things. Cognitive ly, or learning things in terms of motor function. So a sport dance eeta or a culmination ation of the two.

Now just to really clarify what I mean by development over the self active adaptive plastic, I mentioned that self directed adaptive pity, as you can start in adolescence, right, even though there's ongoing developmental plastics. Y mean, let's be really direct. The brain of a fourteen old is very different than the brain of that same individual, and that person is twenty one, because there's ongoing developmental plastics.

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 of plasticity. Now, the way to engage self directed adapt of plasticity, regardless of whether or not you're a thirteen old, fourteen old or you're a ninety year old or anywhere in between, is that IT requires two things. The first thing that 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 agent and frustration and believer not. The agitation and frustration is a reflection of the release of specific chemicals, in particular noem, ean and epinephrine, called nor journey, and a gentleman in the brain body that creates this discomfort and this heightened level of alerts and attention that many of us don't like intend to back away from.

But IT is exactly that chemical, or I should say, neurochemical mill you, 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 newer chemical 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 OK. So you need focus, dedicated attention to the thing that you're trying to learn.

It's often accompanies by agent frustration at eta. So that's perfectly Normal, in fact, as a signal that things are going right, meaning their headed towards learning. But there's a second component that's really required for self directed adaptive plasticity, and that's periods of deep arrest in particular, a good nigh sleep in particular on the night that follows that focus. 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 deeper relaxation, things like meditation and non sleep, deep breath, 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 neural plasticity, takes place. So the verb neural plastic, to see 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 plastics, which is passive, also requires good sleep.

It's slightly different or Frankly, it's a lot different in terms of the underlying mechanisms and 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 plastic. Just really want to emphasize this two step process. There should 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 woke him up in the midnight 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 where an attempt to learn do not despair, because IT turns out that there are water called second and third night effects. Also, once you sleep, you will learn those neuro plastic events, the reordering of connections that we call synapse ses, and the changes that occur in neutral circuits that reflects what we call self directed, adapted basis. That still will occur.

But ideally you ve got a great nigh sleep on the first night following, trying to learn in the second, I end the third, and so on and so on. Now there are few other things that are critical to understand about self directed adapt of plasticity that will become especially important when thinking about protocol for developing the ideal mental training visualization process for you, and that is that there are different forms of plasticity that occur between neons. Although the two main forms are what to call long term potential and long term depression.

And I just want to cue up right now that the word depression is a very loaded word, because the moment people here there were depression, they think, oh, no, that's bad. But in the case of news, plasticity, long term depression is simply a change in the connections between neurons and the excitability between neons that in many ways can be excEllent for learning things, in particular motor skills. And we'll get into this in more detAiling 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's 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 plastics.

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 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 are trying to hold the spoon. What you'll know is that their motor movements are terribly uncoordinated. They often will take that spoon to their cheek or to their eye, to their head.

We've all seen these very amusing photos of babies with balls of food on their head or with foot over their face or just everywhere. It's pears 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, synapse is between neurons, but rather because they have too many connections between too many different. The neural circuits that control very dedicated coordinated movement are not very 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 u tens to their mouth such that hopefully by about five, eight, five or six they are eating in a relatively cleaner way. And hopefully by time they're ten or eleven or twelve getting the food into the mouth and not all over their face. People learn this deberry degrees.

All you have to do is go to a restaurant and watch how people eat. And you will see a vast of variation in people's coordinated movements with utensils. But in general, there is a theme, the Younger the person, the more uncoordinated their movement of utensils, and as they get older, the more ordinary. 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 topic that will get into when we talk about age, really cogent decline and motor related dementia.

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 analyst, ent 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 reflective and repeated way. So think you're 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 your pencils. In the example I get before.

What's happening in all of those cases is that, yes, certain connections in the brain are being strengthened, or what we call potentiate, they are undergoing long term potential. This so called quoting fire together, wired together, montreal, that was popular. Zed by the great neurobiologist doctor color chats, my colleague at stanford.

But in addition to that long term depression, the quieting, or the silences of specific synapses is, that is, connections between neurons is absolutely critical for motor skill learning. So we have L, T, P, long term potential. And ltd, long term depression is every bit as important as lt. P, long term potential for getting Better at some sort of motoring 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 who's attempt do a tennis serve of the first time, it's all over the place now it's not perhaps all over the place and that they're doing a jumping jacque trying to serve the tennis ball. But they're generally asking the racket too widely on one trial and then they're asking IT too close to their body on the next trial. So if we were to draw line over each one of those trials, we would see that there were lined everywhere over time, whether once they couldn't get perfect the tennis serve, it's going to be line drawn, directly over line drought and directly over line, meaning the arch of that tennis serve is going to be very restricted.

And that, without question, has reflected the removal or the quite of particular synapse, is connections between irons in the brain and body to allow that very narrow, coordinated and directed movement. The same is true for learning anything in the code of 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 you're a Young child, you have to suppress the generation of just kind of random babbling sounds. Turns out baby isn't random at all, but the point is that you have to suppress the renunciation 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 connections so called long term potential and a scoping 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 fanatics listening to this who will be perhaps shouting back at whatever device my voice is coming out of weight. What about spite, timing, depending plasticity? Or what about their pulse facilitation? Yes, yes. And yes, there are multiple forms of communication between neurons. That can strength in those connections or weaken those connections.

But for today's discussion, we just broadly want to think about long term potential and long term depression because IT captures the two most important themes related to mental training and visualization, which is that when we perform a given cognitive or physical task in the real world, so we actually try the dance step or the tennis serve, or when we actually try a math problem where we try to learn some specific knowledge and write IT down and remember IT that is engaging particular neurons, right? They're firing the 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. So today we have to keep in mind that where there is strength ing of connections, there is also a weakening of connections. And when IT comes to mental training and visualization, and here's the really key point with mental training visualization, you are capturing both processes, both the potential that that is the building up and straining 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 visualization protocols that really harness the potential versus the depression aspect. And today, we will cover mental training and visualization protocols that capture both the potential and the depression aspect of neuropathy and in that way, serve as an argument that is a compliment to the actual real world cognitive and physical training that you're doing because i'll just keep this way right now. Turns out that mental training and visualization is not a replacement for a real world cognitive or motor behavior.

Again, mental training visualization cannot replace real world execution of cognitive tasks or of motor task if you want to learn. However, mental training visualization cannon 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 visualization, in fact, we can do little experiment right now that is not unlike many of the classic experiments looking at what's happening in the brain and body. Three, mental training visualization, in which I just ask you to close your eyes and imagine a yellow cube. And next to that yellow cube is a red rose.

And perhaps I also ask you to float or fly up above the cube in 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 yo 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. Another, regardless of your attention span, whether or not you have A D H or not, most of you will be able to do that to some degree or another.

We also know from neuro imaging studies in which people are placed into a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner that during the sort of visualization you just did or that described, that your visual cortex and associated areas, court in court, light up, they become very active in similar, but not identical ways to how they would light up and be activated. Where 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, cuban red rose in the real world, right in front you on a table, then, you know, get up on your tp toes and looked down on them from the top, and then walk around the table, 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, clothes, just in our mind's eye experiences. This is true not just a vision and what we call the visual domain, but also the auditory do mean. So, for instance, ince, I could play for you a short motive of a song that just pick something that I think most people know good as some, a terrible musician and even worse singer, but should take the the opening to A C.

D. Back in black, right? I think I can do that when it's like OK got IT that's the the actual sound, although admittedly a dreadful version of of the great cdc song back in black.

But now I ask you to close your eyes or we could keep them open and just imagine that, okay. Or for instance, I place you in a quiet room so you close your eyes and ask you to imagining opening to A C. D is black and black.

But I ask you to posit halfway through, what you would find again, is that most people, somewhere between ninety and ninety five percent of people, would be able to do all the sorts of things that described, right? Cuban rose, A C, D. Back in black, even a so mata sensory task.

Imagine to imagine what it's like to touch felt, or to touch chella hair, or something like that age and chilly hair, ideally a live chella sitting still. Those local curter would really, really fast, but they have very, very soft. Are high hair density so soft? Okay, most people can do that.

About five to fifteen percent of people are less able to do that. And there is a small percentage of people in that five fifteen percent that simply cannot do IT at all, that just cannot visualize well and will talk later about these people. They have what's called affiliation and the inability to mentally visualize.

But most people are actually pretty good at visualizing things when they are told what to visualize. And and this is a really key point. And if what they are told to visualize is very simple, and the whole visualization is quite brief, lasting on the order of about fifteen seconds, to generate the visualization in the auditory or in the visual aspect of one's minds.

I or year, if you will. And if it's repeated over and over, what's far harder for everybody to do. And in fact, what most people simply cannot do is imagine long extended scenes and stories in their mind that go on for minutes and minutes and involve a lot of different sensory stimuli. This is a really key point.

In fact, as we started to home in on ideal mental training visualization protocols, i'd like to establish this as the first principle of mental training visualization, which is that if you are going to use mental training visualization to its best effect in order to engage in al plasticity and learning, you need to keep those visualizations quite brief, really on the order of about fifteen to twenty 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 terms of music or dance, it's a that can be completed and repeated in fifteen seconds or less. Now, later will 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 y, so you don't want to embark on a mental training visualization paradise in which that involves a lot of a elaborate stimulate. 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 somebody who can do mental visualization, in fact, if you're somebody who has full blown affiliation, the inability to mentally visualize, then it's especially important that you make those mental training and visualizations really brief and very, very simple.

I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, athletic Greens. Athletic Greens, now called ag one, is a vitamin mineral probiotic c drink that covers all of your foundational nutritional needs. I've been taking athletic Green since two thousand and twelve, so i'm delighted that they're sponsoring the podcast.

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If you d like to try athletic Greens, you can go to athletic Greens dot com, slash, huberman and theyll give you five free travel packs that make IT really easy to mix up athletic Greens while you're on the road, in the car, on the plane, at sea, and they'll give you a year supply of vitamin d 3k two again, that's a letter Greenstock comes slash human man to get the five free travel packs and the year supply of vitamin d 3k two。 Now, in order to develop the best mental training 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 in their work, but in particular, Roger shepard, who do this work at stanford, and Stephen cosin, who is now at harvard, of course, others in the field.

But it's really the work of shepherd and cosin lay the foundation for our understanding of what happens in the brain when we mentally visualize something shepperd. 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. Of course, at the time when he did these experiments, there were no sophisticated brain imaging devices and machines like f mi.

However, everything about to describe has been later confirmed using things like MRI. What shepler did in 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 minds eye, well then IT took longer for them to perform those mental visualizations.

Now, many of you might think, dh, if I have to just imagine a trying golder a cube that's going to be very easy and very fast, well, as if I have to rotate that trying or or cube in my mind's eye, that's going to take more time. And indeed, that is somewhat of a do except, and this is so very important, except that what shepherd in his colleagues found is that how long IT takes somebody to generate and error ate a given visual image. Scales directly with the complexity of that image.

In fact, causin did some experiments, I think, illustrate this even Better. And here's the experiment. I love this experiment.

I think you will love you too, because he illustrates something so fundamentally important about how our brains work, not just for sake of mental training, visualization, but just 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 doctor, some boats, and had a location for getting food on the island, and some trees at some other small landMarks drawn out. And people look at this and memorized IT, or in other experiments, they just had people imagine this island in the location of these different landMarks on the island. So didn't really matter which, but then he had people imagine moving or walking from one location on the island to another.

So they say, OK, you're at the loading dock now. Move to the restaurant. Ay, you're at the restaurant now. Move to the palm tree. You're on the north ore 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. But cos lin 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 literally 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 shepherd causal and showed, great. I'm guessing, however, that for most people out there, you still grass me like, okay, interesting know how things happen in the real world, dict ates, how they happen in our minds eye.

But I want to make sure that I really nail home the importance of this for everybody. The importance of this is that when we look at something in the real world, so if I look at the pen in front of me, i'm holding up my pen. For those who they are listening, just hold on my pen in front of me.

I move IT to the right back and forth what's happening as i'm activating or i'm triggering the electrical activity of neurons, which we can think of kind of as pixel in my eye. okay. So it's left ford, the right word 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 to given speed. What the visualization experiments that shepherd causin 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 space al relationship between imagined and real experiences is exactly the same as well.

Put simply, when we imagine something in our minds eye or minds 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 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 OK, I put the top that's upward on the table, now down on the table and so forth, or to migrate around the island, the counter clockwise, going from, know, the northern coast, all the way down to the southern coast, clockwise and 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 brains experience of IT and our body's experiences 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 physical domain, they are not equivalent. So this is the second principal of mental training visualization. As you recall, the first principle of mental training visualization was that in order to make IT effective and needs to be very brief and very simple and repeated over and over again, the second principle of mental training visualization is that, well, yes, mental training visualization recaptures the same patterns of neural firing in the exact same way 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 is always going to be most effective when combined with real world training and experiences.

The experiment that i'm talking about involved the use of what are called by stable images or impossible figures. Some of you are probably familiar with impossible figures. These are figures or objects that when you look at them, have these odd features like you're not sure where they stop and where they start, where they end.

One good example would be the so called mobius strip. The movie strip is literally a strip or a line that is contiguous. IT goes up and IT loops around, and then IT comes around, and then IT goes back and and IT continues and continues.

And when you look at that, 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 look bending them going up at a right angle, perhaps. But then if you look at a little bit longer, that little piece that's facing up looks like it's in front and you can't really tell what's in front and what's in back.

And so it's called an impossible figure because you don't really know how to frame IT in your mind to tell what's closer to you and what's further apart by stable images are somewhat similar, although different in the sense that they typically are simple sleets. So for instance, the faces, faces by stable image is perhaps the most famous of these. Where you look at this image is very simple and IT looks like two bases.

But then you look at a little bit longer, 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 see the bases at the same time. But then if you decide to see the faces again, you can see the faces again, but the faces disappear.

So it's by stable, meaning that you can see the faces in vases at the same time. And impossible figures in 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 is that out in front of them. And that's effectively your visual system does.

It's very good at recreating visual images in your brain, in your mind's eye. Because if you think about IT, even with your eyes open, your brain is just creating abstracted representation of what he 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 face, that is constrained by different neural circuits, by different areas of the brain.

And somehow those circuits can't be no active. We cannot see the faces in the faces 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 in thing.

Okay, that's the front of IT. That's the back way. That's the back.

That's the front is going back and forth, but we can see them both at the same time. No one can see them both at the same time. Okay, we know this from brain imaging studies. Now, impossible figures and by stable images can be seen, right? You could look them up right now on your phone 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 face, look at the front of the cube, and now 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 visualization does and does not support real world learning. If you try to imagine a by stable image, you can't do IT.

In fact, no one can do IT until they do something else. okay? So for those of you and wait, I can do IT.

I can do faces, faces in my mind's eye, I promise you that the neuroscience ging disputes your belief. okay? And support the idea that we can see real world by stable images.

We can see real world impossible figures. But when we trying to imagine those in our minds eye, we simply can't do IT. We can do the perceptual shift in our minds eye.

We can't switch back and forth between faces and bases. However, and I just have to chocolate, 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, faces by stable image.

And then I ask you to imagine that by stable 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 perception experiences, combined with 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 visualization will be far more effective if you are performing the exact same or very similar mental and physical task in the real world.

Okay, so first principal is mental training 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 coding training. It's an augment.

It's an addition that can really help in the third principal of of mental training visualization is that you need to combine mental training visualization with real world behaviors and experiences that are very, very similar. 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 whats 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 course only once you'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 labelling them faces and bases, people are able to capture a lot of other neural machinery that's related to faces in vases. In fact, we have entire brain areas on both sides of the brain to voted to the processing of faces user for face area. We have areas in our brain that are involved in processing of 3d objects。 But faces are of particular value.

There's 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 recognition and expression of faces.

Recognition machine IT, of course, those other things. But IT is exceptionally good at that. Unless you're in a profession in which the relationships are between three d objects in 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 be Better out at some people you worse.

But when IT comes to faces, unless you have a condition like proper agnostic, which is an inability to recognize, say, famous faces and distinguish from non famous faces, or if you have some sort of face recognition deficit, which about anywhere from one perhaps to three percent of people out there have, and there is terrible recognizing faces. And by the way, there is 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. Already thems out there. But the point is that in your minds eye, you are Better able to manipulate specific objects or to see things more clearly in with more specificity.

When IT has a label that you recognize from your real world experience, as opposed to abstract or fictional labels, okay, again, stamp 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 visualization, and not just relying on mental training and visualization. And the tension here, that's a little bit of fun. And I don't think we've never talked about before on this podcast is that of UFO uni dense fied flying objects.

You know, there's a lot of people out there who think that we've seen UFO. I guess technically they have because as a UFO is an identify flying object in if its I uni dentists y at least to them, then IT is indeed UFO that I guess the question is whether not where the dispute, rather is whether or not those uf s are actually flown by aliens or control by alien. Think that's where the dispute lies.

But you can imagine how if somebody sees an object in their environment and decides, oh, that's a UFO. Okay, remember these faces. Faces are these impossible figures.

If they say, oh, that thing is a UFO as a post of something else, they see, in other words, the face, not the face. Well, that stamps IT down as a memory in their visual system and related systems. And then in their minds, eye, they are seeing the UFO.

They're not seeing the other thing that I could possibly be. Okay, so stamp on a very specific memory. So the point here is that mental training visualization relies on not just the physical on tours 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 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 visualization, which is that our cognitive labels, that is, what we decide is happening when we do mental training 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 cord, I imagine in my mind, I is identical to the real world record just because I decided is the brain doesn't work that way. It's not possible to just lie 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 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 they're working on their goal swing and you're going to do some mental training and visualization in order to improve your golf wing.

We already know again, let's just mark through them that your mental training visualization needs to be brief and simple, IT needs to be the same, or in fact, I will be, we can say the same as your real world glass wing. Another IT will take you exactly the same amount of time to perform that goal swing in your mind's eye, as IT would in the real world. Incredible, right? Again, something that maybe is taking a little bit time to sink in.

But once IT does give me like, wow, the brain is really an incredible machine. And that third principle that you still have to do, goal swings in the real world, in addition to the mental training of gold swings. And fourth, that if you want that mental training visualization to really improve your golf swing, you're going to a name or apply an identity to the specific golf swing or aspect of the goal swing that you're practicing.

So this could be abstract. You could call IT mental training and visualization of goldwing one a. And you could imagine your mind's eye, you the perfect goldwing over and over and over. And 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 goldwing. One a, okay, as opposed to a part which might be one b.

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, can enhance the mental training and visualization in significant ways. So when we apply identities or names to these mental training and visualization, and again, provide that they are brief and repeated and so on, we greatly enhance the amount of neural machinery in the brain, in anybody that we are able to recruit, when we go to perform those real world golf wings and golf puts. And here just replace goldwing and golf puts 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 are going to further, I want to share with you a couple of incredible aspects of mental visualization that really can be hardest and applied toward mental training and visualization. Some of these were done by Roger shepard and his graduate student and post dox, somewhere done by Steve cosine and by others. What these experiments really show is that mental training visualization is capturing many, many of the uz action features of real world behavior and perceptions, not all of them, but many of them.

So for instance, if I tell you to close size and imagine a ceiling that has tiles that are black and White, checker tiles, you know, one black tile, one title. For instance, we know, based on experiments where we measure i've movements behind closed islands, that people tend to move their eyes up when they imagining things above them, such as the ceiling. We're as if I tell you to imagine things down on the floor like you're taking a hike and you're looking for a rattlin nics.

Actually, just recently, I experiences because it's spring, hearing california rattle snake along a hiking trail, really quite beautiful though I have to confess, I enjoy keeping my distance. Don't like snakes are 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 with thoughts about rattlesnakes, number of things, what happens in your brain? Of course, activision, in the limmers 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 snick, eh, IT might be subtle, IT might be fast.

But statistically, that result shows up as opposed to when I imagine what I ask you to imagine something above you can 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 ly have some real world understanding about the relative sizes of elephants versus mice. Elephants generally are bigger than mice, thank goodness myself, smaller than elephants.

If I ask you to tell me about the details of that mouse face, 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 the elephants trunk is now, why would that be so? Okay, the position of the elephant drunk wasn't something that I told you wasn't dict by me.

It's in your minds. Ye, maybe you don't even know when 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 minds that i've versus a larger object, so if french is the mouse, first is the elephant, IT takes longer for you to do that.

In other words, just as with the map experiment, the distance between things on a map is conserved in your mind's eye as a linear relationship takes longer to go far distances between things on a map in your mind, then 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 equivalent 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, and IT does simple motor sequences, just as you would in the real world.

And if you're saying, of course, of course, of course, within 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 visualization is this notion of equivalence of mental imagery versus real world perception and behavior. These are the experiments, as you were call, where if people are told to look for clouds in their mental visualization, they tend to look up, or looking for something on the floor, they tend to look down, even behind closed islands.

Now this can be applied toward building, and especially effective mental training 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 visualization is going to be more effective if you do, because with consciously generated eye movements, again, even behind closed islands, 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 to training and visualization.

So what we're talking about here is, thus far, five principles of mental tinney visualization that are well established from the scientific research literature. In fact, i've been 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 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 shown note captions, but the title of the paper is best practice for motor imagery. A systematic literature on motor imaging training elements in five different disciplines, as the title suggests, is mainly for motor imagery training, but IT extends ds into music, which of course involves motor training and execution, but as well as education. This review established as a number of different important things.

I'm going to read of some of the key or highlight takeaway princess I described principal one of effective mental training visualization which is that the visualization be brief and IT be simple and that be repeated may ask um how many times that very brief five to fifteen second exercise of going through some routine should be repeated? While different studies have used different ranges of, let's call them, repetitions in a given trading session. But the number that seems to be most effective is somewhere between fifty and seventy five repeats percession.

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 fifteen seconds for completion of the entire motor sequence. Let's say, what you're trying to do, like a goldwing, 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 tea, bring that the golf club up, you might position your your feet just a little bit you that go that LV golfers do and then the swing if that whole thing takes five seconds in your mind's ye, and roughly five seconds in the real world within, you'd be able to repeat IT, of course, three times. In fifteen seconds that would be one repetition, even though you're doing IT three times.

So as one fifteen second epoch, as IT sometimes called e poc h epoch, and then you would rest for an approximately equivalent amount time, fifteen seconds or so, and then repeat and rest fifteen seconds or so, and then repeat, rest fifteen seconds, and then repeat again. Three golf swings within that fifteen seconds, rest fifteen seconds. Three gold swings within fifteen seconds.

Rest fifteen seconds. Truth told, these epoch and these respire do not need to be exact. You could imagine, for instance, that you get three repetitions of the swing within fourteen seconds.

Well then, do you do another one? Or do you wait until the end of that fifteen seconds? Engage you not to accept too much about those sorts of points. Rather, you want to do as many repeats as you can in about a fifteen second a poc, and then arrest for about fifty seconds, and then repeat for a total of fifty to seventy five repetitions, which might not sound like a lot to some of you, might sound like an awful lot to others of you.

To me that sounds like a lot fifty repetitions of something and where you're trying to concentrate in your minds eye on getting something accomplish 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 minds eye. That's also one of these sort of does.

But if you're trying to get Better at something that you've never performed before, you really should know that the mental training visualization, probably not the best argument to that real world training until you're able to perform IT successfully in the real world at least some of the time mental training visualization can be effective, however, at increasing the accuracy or the frequency at which you can do that real world behavior. So if Normally you're only getting the cracks swing or only heating the golf ball correctly, say ten percent, the time mental training on 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 cogent task.

So say for instance, um speaking a new language, you might ask what cash what in the landscape of speaking a new language can be restricted to five to fifteen seconds where I could repeat IT anywhere from one to three times in a given epoch the arrest and then keep repeating fifty to seventy five 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 chAllenging getting the accent in the enunciation, right? But you've completed IT successfully before, and you want to get more smooth or more fluid with IT.

Likewise, for you playing piano or guitar, you have to translate to the specific cognitive and or motor activity that you are seeking to improve that. But those epoch lasting five to fifteen seconds, are really the corner stone of an effective mental training and visualization practice and the repeated nature of IT fifty to seventy five repetitions in a given session is also another corner stone of an effective mental training visualization practice. Ah 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 visualization practice is how often you perform that mental training visualization practice. And again, number of different studies have looked at this through a number different lenses, meaning anywhere from two to eight times per week. He does appear that performing these sessions anywhere from three to five times per week is going to be effective.

We perhaps even say, most effective because most of the, let's just call the strongest data, really point to repeating these fifty to seventy five 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 that 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 and motor task in a way that satisfaction or perhaps just improved, perhaps you're not one hundred percent, 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 won't 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 been spoke there, although I don't want to edit this out.

I spoke in a sense that again, I said for the thing that you're trying to learn, remember mental training visualization is going to be most effective for building up the number of accurate trials. Are the your ability to do something with a greater frequency of something that you're already capable of doing or have done at least once in the real world? Okay, this is not to say that mental training visualization can be used to acquire new skills.

IT can in principle, but IT has been shown to be most effective for enhancing the speed and the accuracy of skills that one has already demonstrated some degree of proficiency at in the real world. I think that's important to point out because we often hear mental training, visualization and the equivalence of perceptual and motor experiences in our minds eye to the real world. And we think, oh, 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 way that really does translate back to the real world.

Now if you recall principal number three or what i'm calling principal number three of effective mental training, visualization, which was that you have to be able to perform the thing you that you're trying to get Better out through visualization and imaging in the real world that you 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 are some really interesting data, uh, not just in the review that I mentioned but in couple of other papers that were going to talk about in a few minutes. But what i've done is i've since sizzled 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, that no training is kind of a duck, except that there are are people for incident, people who are injured, who are trying to maintain or replenished some motor scale 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 safe for them while in a somewhat restricted format. So princess, if you've damaged a limb or your experiencing chronic pain and you need to take a layoff from some physical activity, there are now many studies looking at stroke patients, at patients that have been an accent ce tvi.

Also people who are suffering from more conventional limb and connective tissue injuries, that if they do mental training, and obviously is not going to put them at risk of doing those same movements as IT was in the real world, right? But that I can actually accelerate, or at least maintain skill performance. This is pretty exciting. If you think about IT, what this means and the reason to underscores this, mental training is Better than no training, is that should you find yourself in the unfortunate circumstances being injured, you are 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 visualization can really help keep that online or even help you improve over time.

Fact, I have a colleague in the psychology department at stanford who told me an anecdote, and immediately it's just an anecdote of a student who was recruits stanford, both for their academic crowds, but also far their billions in tennis, and was injured in their first year, and at first thought this was devastating, but did a cognitive reframe around the idea that that 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. Just pretty remarkable.

But this color pointed out to me, they were very careful to include a lot of mental training visualization during that in layoff s 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, we are 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 ten hours a week versus mental training for ten hours a week, which group performance Better? And turns out it's the ones do the physical training for ten hours per week.

However, we also know that combination 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 ten 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 colony of domain is always going to be more effective on an our by our basis compared to mental training.

So if you can do real world training, and perhaps we should be calling in 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 they were talking about because here's the really cool thing.

If you do ten hours per week of real world physical training, again, could be running, could be music, could be that, could be whatever is you're going to learn, shooting baskets, ls, 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, that would be greater than you could achieve with mental training alone, because we already establish that real world training is more powerful in learning skills and retaining skills. Then is mental training okay? If any of that was confusing, let me just say one more time. Just to be ult clear, if you have the option to do real world training for a cognitive and door 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 cleaned 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 coggins ties. 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, then doing no training at all. okay.

So total layoffs, 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 talk about the neural plasticity in 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 focus attention, both when you're doing IT in the real world and when you're doing mental training. And IT requires a rest and sleep. And in fact, you would be very wise to try and get a good nigh sleep, both on the days when you do physical training again, also got 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 to take away if you are doing the maximum out of physical training that you can do according to your schedule, preventing injury and all those sorts of important constraints, and you're going to add mental training and imagery.

IT doesn't really matter when you do IT. You could do IT immediately after your physical training. You could do IT on a separate day, but you do want a place IT at a time in which you can try and get good sleep that night.

So for instance, believe 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 try and get as much quality sleep as you possibly can on the night following that physical environmental training. Okay, this is true pretty much every night of your life.

If I had my way, that is, if I had a magic one, which obviously I don't, I went ensure that I and everyone else in the world gets sufficient amounts of quality seep every single night. But that's just not realistic. They're going to be times where that's simply not going to happen for whatever reason.

And I always say, if you're not going to get sufficient amounts of quality sleep for whatever reason, trying to make IT for a fun reason or a good reason. But I think getting sufficit amounts of quality sleep eighty percent the night til your life is a reasonable goal and one that's worth driving toward. And we have lots of episodes now, three, really on mastering sleep, on perfecting your sleep and uh episode guess episode with the great Matthew Walker who wrote the book why why we sleep, the incredibly important book, all of those, as well as our tool kept for sleep, describe ways to improve your sleep.

So you can refer to those episodes if you're having chAllenges were sleep and want to improve on sleep, and things like non sleeve deep breath, which can support your ability to sleep, any your ability to learn. So sleep is still vitally important, not just for ensuring neural plastic y occurs following real world training, but also following mental training. And again, when you place that mental training is not so critical, at least a doesn't appear to be based on the literature.

So if anyone out there has knowledge of any peer review studies stating that mental training should be done either before after some hours away from real world training, please send that to me or put you in the excuse me, put IT in the comments on youtube and i'll see IT there because do you read all the comments, but i'm not aware of any any such data or analysis. And by the way, if you are interested in understanding the relationship between motor skill acquisition and retention and this first night phenomenon of sleep, the first night after training versus sleep on the second I set, or there's a really wonderful paper that was published by no other than the great Matthew Walker when I believe he was a graduates dude, maybe he was opposed. Talk when to this, in Robert stick gold lab at harvard, the title of the papers, sleep and time course of motor skill learning.

This is a paper publish in two thousand three, still an incredibly important paper. I will provide a link to IT in the show note captions that 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 console ligation of motor learning at at a really wonderful paper, and of course, but just one of Matthew and robber stick gold incredible papers on sleep and learning. Remember the beginning of the episode when I mentioned that many people are good at mental training 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 trained 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 p reviewed studies on this aspect of mental training visualization point to the fact that there are no significant differences between males and females in terms of their ability to mentally visualized, nor their ability to use that mental visualization to our improving cognitive motor skills. That point was, uh, covered in some detail in the review I mentioned earlier, best practice for motor image, a systematic literature on motor image training elements in five different disciples. This review also looked at age related effects.

And and perhaps the only thing that really popped out from this literature review in terms of age dependent differences that pointed changes in protocols that you might make is that for individual sixty five 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 due to some lower, upper limit of physical training that they can do because of the age, or whether not that something specific to do with older or versus Younger neutral 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 twenty years, and there are four days and so on, physical training more effective, the mental training, we said that before combination of physical and mental training more effective, then 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 OK. So we talked about sets and reps.

We talked about, you know, five to fifteen second epoch with about fifteen second brakes in between or rest between sets, if you will, repeat for fifty to seventy five 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 close. 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 a bad in, for instance, is wearing a head camp, okay, or a body cam and doing something with your hands were being in virtual reality and having the sense that whatever you see in front of you, and that's moving in, that you're doing that you.

So what I mean by this is a mental training or visualization protocol. Ference ince, 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, kay, as opposed to seeing yourself from outside of your body. So looking at yourself, say, standing next year or from ross the room, you're looking yourself playing the piano or playing at r 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 visualization is generally more effective than third person mental training and visualization, which perhaps raises another course of does out there. But IT needn't have been the case, right? And 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 skee e more quickly.

Because you have that third person perspective where you can really see every aspect in every element of what you're trying to perform well. Turns out that the first person mental training visualization is significantly more effective than that third person mental training visualization. So if what you're trying to learn lenn s 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 instinct? 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 know ordering of a particular sentence in another language, or doing some sort of computation or problem solving of some sort in your head, will that itself, of course, this first person, because it's inside your own body as supposed 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 chAllen 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 visualization should always be done. Eyes closed. But IT turns out that's not how a lot of studies of mental training visualization have been done.

In fact, many of them have arrived at really impressive protocols, which are essentially the protocols that i've distilled out in him, listing out during today's having people either watch videos of themselves performing a given skill and imagining themselves in that role and get into them. So again, during the mental training visualization, they're watching a moving themselves there somewhat in the third person perspective. I guess we technically say they are in the third person perspective, but they're watching themself.

So in doing that, we know based on neural imaging studies, and 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 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 visual zone, which is that whatever is that we're trying to build up or consolidate as a skill needs to be brief and repeated.

So 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 instant are trying to get Better at dealing with public speaking and there isn't a particular skill or alterations of particular sentences or words that they're trying to accomplish, but rather they're trying to learn to be more relax or to articulate Better in the public speaking scenario. There would be one of the few instances in which I just suggest more general theme and not exact recapitulation of some specific words that are 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 automation ic training because what you're really trying to do is control your automatic nervous system, the nervous system aspect that controls how alert or commute as supposed to a specific skill. However, you could also translate this to dance steps or two 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 visualization is going to be more effective, as I mentioned before. And if you are going to use third person mental training of visualization, ideally you would be looking at yourself either on video or listening to yourself in audio and or video, that is going to be more effective than closing your and trying to imagine yourself from a third person perspective in your minds eye OK.

So just to make a 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 someone that was surprised to me. I always thought that mental training visualization was done with ice clothes.

Okay, close your eyes. You imagine, 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, visualization and the different neural circuits that IT recruits. And along those lines, as a really interesting study, they came out not that long ago.

This was just a summer of twenty twenty two. Like to discuss in a little bit of detail because IT really hamers home a number of the principles that we talked about. The title of the article is mental practice, modulates functional connectivity between the cerebel m and the primary motor cortex.

Going to tell you the essential features of the study. First of all, primary motor cortex, sometimes called emma, 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 motoring neurons sit what's called the ventral horn of the spinal cord. Along the spinal cord, you have sensory inputs coming from skin and muscle.

And what's got proper, accept the feedback that tells you where your limbs are in relation to each other and to yourself and so on. Also have motor neurons that live in the spinal court. They're actually the ones that send little wires that we call axons out to the muscles, releases to calling on to those muscles and allow those muscles to contract lower motor neurons, other ones that actually generate movement.

However, they are largely responsible for reflective movements, are already learned movement. And they require some input from things like central pattern generators and some other circuits within the spinal cord brains them. But it's those m one primary motor cortex neurons that are called upper motor neurons because they control low motor neons through directed action.

Okay, so when I say primary motor cortex, i'm really talking about those upper motor neurons. And one, the Sarah belen, is an area in the backyard brain. For you to look at the brain, you see, two, the lobs back there.

There are highly foliated. Foliated means that lots of, lots of folds and lots of bumps and moves back there, and actually means the mini brain IT looks like a kind of a mini brain stuffin. The back of the brain in certain animals, the cereBellar is much larger than the rest of the brain.

In humans, the cerebellum is relatively small compared to the rest of so called neocortex outer shell. The human brain, the survey is involved in baLance, is also involved in eye movements, is also involved in timing and motor learning, and the key thing thing to understand is that the cereBellar communicates with the primary mother cortex, and IT can do so through what's called inhibition. IT has output that inhibit the activity of neons in the motor cortex and elsewhere, and that has a profound influence on the execution of motor behavior and the learning of particularly motor behaviors.

Now I don't want to get in to too much detail around all this, but what you need to know is that cereBellar communicates with and one primary motor cortex, and one is primary motor cortex that was, the upper modern neurons that control the lower murdering neurons and are going to control physical behavior and execution of physical movements. The communication between cereBellar and primary motor cortex is inhibitory, although you can activate motor cortex two. 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, where you end up with is more exciting. okay? So the take away here that's key.

And everyone should be able to understand, even though you may or may not be following this, all cereBellar primary motor cortex ting 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 cereBellar 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 motoring sequence. It's one that you're all familiar with. It's that tapping sequence I talked about before where the film is digit one the next for your number two, middle inger number three, ring finger number four and pink evening your 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 tasks to one group, just looked at an attentional q. And how to maintain focus on that attentional key in another group did mental practice.

They basically did fifty imagined trial. So just in their mind's eye of this one two, one three, one four, one five on repeat, okay, fifty trials, much in the same way as what I reference, says the ideal protocol earlier. Okay, fifty round to 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 this study. I think you're interesting, but the ones are most important are that, quote, we found mental practice enhances both the speed and accuracy of this one two, one three, one four, one five performance in the real world. When people did these fifty imagine trials, there are many results out there, different papers that parallel and essentially say the same thing as what is said in this paper.

Remember, there have been studies of mental training dating back to the 1 eighties。 But what this paper really does IT looks at the neural machinery and the changes in the neural machinery, and what they found using transparently al magnetic stimulation, both in the context of stimulating, but also recording activity and connectivity between the development primary motor cortex, is that mental training enhanced the net exciting of cereBellar to motor cortex communication. That is, IT reduced the innovation 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 of the car rebellion. Activation or inhibition change the patterns of excitation going directly to the spinal cord because those pathways is actually exist through a couple of intermediate stations.

What IT really showed is that when people do mental training, and here you could say OK fifty trials, that a lot of trials, but it's not actually that many trials is pretty fast learning. If you think about, do the task in the real world, do fifty trials of the imagine 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 cerebel m and primary motor cortex.

okay. So this study is one of several, but not a tremendous number studies out there that are starting to really pinpoint the underlying neural circuits that allow mental training visualization to really improve motor scope performance. But again, and please hear me on this in the study and in the vast majority of other studies that shown significant improvement in motor performance in the real world by using mental training 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 that really understand about performance of motoring sequences, but in the real world, and in the imagine context, is that IT involves the doing as what we call a go action, and not doing certain things. What I mean by not doing well for many tasks out there, even once as simple as the one, two, one, 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 and action component and a withhold action component, and the ability to withhold action is strongly constrained by the tim domain. 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 sequences well. So one of the key things about mental training visualization that's really remarkable is that I can also be used and has been shown to improve not just go aspects of motor performance and colony performance, but also no go aspects of motor performance and skill learning.

Now the go no go thing is something i've discuss before on this podcast in reference to the so called basal ganglia. Basal ganglia are sub cortical, so they're below that bumpy surface of the human brain that we're most accustomed to sing. When we look at IT from the outside in, the basal ganglia are strongly involved in go versus no go type tasks in 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 the golf wing, 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 a much as seventy five percent of motor learning is about restricting inappropriate movements or other terms 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 to see which, as you recall, we have a lot of interconnected aspects of our brain and ever system early in life. Remember the example of the kid trying to eat and getting the spoon of food and bowl on their head and set up, and then over time, getting more accurate to bring food to their mouth and eating in in a clean way, things that most, but not all, people accomplished at some point in the course of their lifetime.

Well, there haven't been many, but there been a few very interesting studies looking at how mental training visualization can improve the no go aspect of motoring learning. And I think this is important to highlight because IT really mirrors what's done in the real world as supposed to just a finger tapping types, 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. You will also provide a in the shown of captions.

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 popular zed by gordon logan and William cohen or logan, is that vanderpool 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 countour, you or another research subject would sit in front of a screen. There are two keys on the keyboard or two keys among the other keys on the keyboard, one which is designated left, the other which is designated right.

And then on the screen, you'll be presented, for instance, with a left facing or a right facing arrow. So in the initial trial, what would happen is that era would pop up on the screen, and your job is to press the left key. When the right facing arrow is presented, you pressed the right, hey, pretty straight forward, but there is a limited amount of time.

And what you can do this. And the idea is that you're going to need to do this within approximately five hundred million seconds of the presentation of that ero or else it's going to tell you that you miss that trial. Of course, if you press the wrong key.

So if the argos left and you press the right key, then you would be told you ve got that one wrong OK. So this is a reaction time test and not one that's particularly novel. What's novel and what logan and coin developed was that in the stop signal task, everyone's in a while, not every trial, but everyone's in a while, that arrow is presented.

And then with some delay ranging from anywhere from one hundred million seconds to maybe three hundred fifty million seconds, there will 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 era, 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 ero, there's a higher probability that you have already generated the key pressing movement OK.

So at the link that we provided, the shown of 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, impressing of the left, right key somewhere in the neighbor. D between three hundred million seconds. And maybe as long as five hundred million seconds, let you'll get an average of how quickly you respond.

And then of course, if you choose to, and I would hope you choose to go on into the stop signal task, you will be told trial by trial whether not you are hitting the right keys because if you are, you'll be allowed to progressed to the next trial or if you are told to stop, that is, you get to 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 in 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 signals presented very shortly after, and lets say eight hundred million seconds, which is very, very brief mof time after the presentation of the ero, there's a good chance that you are going to be able to withhold the key pressing behavior.

However, if the delay is anywhere from two hundred and three hundred and fifty million seconds after the presentation of the ero, chances are that you're going to press the button even when you shouldn't have on at least some of those trials. okay. And if you try and game the system and wait a certain amount of time after the presentation of each gl, 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 fund little task. IT doesn't cost anything or that maybe a couple of minutes of your time. And if you do have time to go to IT, I think um IT will give you a much deeper flavor for the sorts of experiments that we're talking about here and that you find that these stop signals are actually pretty hard to generate when you're trying to learn some new motor behavior.

And that actually illustrates a bigger point here. If today you sense that we have been talking about studies of tapping fingers and not 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 using these studies really target the specific neural circuit is that is the same neural circuit that you would use for the performance of essentially any motoring task. Now, of course, other motor task, like once were you involved your feet, or cognitive task, where you have to think really hard about specific information and search for that information.

Assembly in particular ways, of course, involve other neurons and neural circuits that we haven't discuss today. But the core components of these go and logo tasker are they stop signal tasks really capture the core elements of most all of cognitive endor 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 described to you is entitled motor imaging combined with physical training, improves response in ambition in the stop signal task. Okay, so that titles 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 Prices, verses a combination of the physical training. So the actual pressing of the buttons are withholding. Impressing of the button says 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 performance.

And we ve talked about, i'll get to the specific in the moment, but I really obey 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 fourth, what they found was that the mental training and physical training groups, so mental and real world training groups performed significantly Better in the stop signal reaction time, that is, they were able to withhold action when they needed to withhold action more frequently and with more accuracy vended either the physical training or mental training groups alone.

So this actually spits in the face of what we said earlier, which is that physical training is always Better than mental training, and mental training is always Better than no training. And it's important to point out here that both the physical training and the mental training groups experiences 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 in 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 with holding mistakes as opposed to trying to generate the right behaviors per say, well then you are probably Better off to your accommodation of mental training and a physical training. Let me stay that little bit differently. If you're finding that you're screwing up something not because you can't initiate that particularly 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 your coaches, for your students out there, keep that in mind. When trying to learn how to withhold particular action sequences because they are 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 power basis.

Then is physical training alone. A couple of key details about the study should you decide to implement these protocols. In this study, they did approximately thirty 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 hundred and forty four go trials and about forty eight stop trials.

Okay, so this is important. If you are a coach, your student, or you're just going to self direct this kind of learning in yourself directed adaptive plasticity, it's important than you mix in both go and no go trials. okay.

IT wasn't always the case that there was a stop signal generated. The other thing that was really impressive about the study is that the changes occurred very quickly. So the training was performed five times over five days. So once a day for five days, again, back to this three to five times per week principle. And the improvements were really significant in some cases.

In fact, if you decide to produce this paper, you can go to a table two, and you can see, you know, in some cases are 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 for greater then we 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 with holding component, this no go component that here is captured so nicely in the stop signal task. So before we round up our discussion about motor training visualization, want 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 create with at the beginning of today's parodi briefly mentioned fenton, which is this phenomenon where some people just simply that can't, or seem to have extreme chAllenge generating visual imaging.

But in the number of studies expLoring how ffa, gic, as there's sometimes called, though nowadays not considered polite, if you will, to refer to people according to their condition so forever since proper nosier is a condition in which people are unable to recognize particular faces and in the past these people were referred to as proper no six okay, as if their condition defined them uh right um now is it's not considered polite to do that rather we say the person has prop nosie or suffers from prop sino sia although the the word d suffer then also has become a little bit touchy. I'm going to do my best to just try me as clear as possible here and explain that people who have F T A can have fanta to varying degrees, so they can either have a complete absence of ability to generate mental imaging, or they have a poor or kind of rudimentary ability to generate visual library in their mind's eye. IT was thought that people have authentic sia, or not capable of what's called synthesia synthesia, or when people have perceptual blending.

And this is not well under the influence of any kind of psychiatric or other kind of drug. Perceptual blending of an a typical kind or rare kind actually have some friends, two friends that have different forms of synthesis. A 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 the 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 someone in self worth? Are these people Better at piano? Are they more perceptive of colors in the environment? Not necessarily.

So this is just the perceptual blending. IT doesn't necessarily lend itself to any improved ability. Now you could imagine why people would hypothesize that people have fantail, especially its its extreme form would not be capable of or have since thetis IT.

Turns out that's not the case. A couple of really interesting papers. Again, we will link these in the showed captions. Um one is entitled what is the relationship between affect sia synthesiser and autism and the other one is a fantail, the science of visual imaging extremes. And I really like to review affiliate asa, the science of visual image extremes.

For those of you that are interested in understanding fented with more depth, the study addressing the relationship between fantasia synthesia and autism found that frontage a is indeed linked to weak visual imaging, but the advantages can also be synthetic and vice versa. What was also interesting about the studies? They address the question of whether or not people who have f integer 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 spec um is also undergoing revision now because we are now coming to understand that autism and nowadays generally not considered critical people autistics in that sense. But autism is considered one set of positions along a spectrum that includes things like experts at sea but that may also include other aspects of cognition and even personality. So these are starting to be viewed not just as a spectrum or one continuum, ranging from, you know, non autistics to autistic, but a lot of variation and subtle ty and between, and even crossing over with other aspects of personality.

Psychology and neuroscience. okay. So i'm not trying to be vay here. I am trying to be accurate rather by saying the whole description and catalist ation of autistic, non autistic at sea 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 a teaser tend to exhibit more of the features they are associated with the autism spectrum. Now how those things relate to one another in terms of their clinical relevance is in clear and of course, is entirely unclear as to what's the chicken and what's the egg there. So you could imagine, upon intended, for instance, that people that are on the autism spectrum might be less proficient at generating visual imaging because they are exceedingly proficient at other things.

You could also imagine that people are placed onto the autism spectrum s sometimes referred to, or are associated particular features on the autism spector, because in a caused way of the affiliation, of course, it's extremely important to highlight that not all people that consider themselves or that people consider autistic or that are all the artists, spector, aspergers, any variation there are necessarily have a tia. Just as IT is that not all people that are the autism spectrum completely lack, or even lack what's called theory of mine, which is the ability to empathising as describe feelings and motivations of others when viewing the actions and perceived feelings of others. okay.

So what I just described hopefully doesn't come across as just a bunch of 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 diversa. Okay, in a future episode, I promise to cover synthetic and autism and some of the related cognitive and motoring aspects of autism and things like aspergers.

I'm going to feature an expert guests are actually several expert guests in this area because that 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 in 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 aspergers versus non autistic and non aspergers and so on. This so called mind task, in the fact asking whether not children or adults can really get in the mind of others.

That's a typical task developed by Simon bern coin, but also whether not children and adults are capable of generating mental imaging in a really vivid way, or whether not they have minor or even extreme chAllenge in doing so. And perhaps the most direct way to explain why, included this aspect of the discussion of mental training visualization as that relates to different cognitive types or neurocognitive finot pes, such as autism, asperger at seta is because if you think about motor skill execution or cognitive scale execution and the relationship between mental training visualization and motor skills or cognitive kills, that's all pretty strait forward when you're talking about finger tapping and go no go tasks and learning piano things of that sort. But in many, many ways are learning of social cognition, are learning of how to behave in certain circumstances.

What's considered Normal or a typical neurotypical and neural, a typical, 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 ment, and I ve just saying appropriate and inappropriate for given context behavior.

In other words, social learning and social cognition, an is every bit as much a learned behavior and pattern of cognitive motor ate patterns as is tapping fingers with holding key presses in a go no go task is just that IT transmitted into a domain that involves smiling versus frowning versus asking a question, versus staying silent, versus sitting still, versus fighting what's appropriate and when, what's inappropriate and when. All of that is what we call social cognition and has direct parallel to everything we've been talking about up to 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 visualization practice, everything ranging from making sure that the practice involved brief epoch repeats of specific sequences of motor and recognition 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 visualization. And I should mention that if you do mental training visualization repeatedly over time, you get Better at mental training visualization. There's a what's called meta plasticity here.

So it's not just about engaging neural plasticity of particular circuits, is also about getting Better at engaging plasticity or plasticity of plasticity. I also describe the key importance of being able to actually execute specific movements and colony tasks in the real world, if you want the mental training 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 a motor learning really is something that you should do in the real world as much as possible. But if you can't do the injury, 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, injure, 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 scale, a combination of physical training. Mental training is gone 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, we're on a consistent basis.

Well, then on an hour by our 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 are 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 mention long term depression well in describing the improvement in logo task to stop signal tasks. A lot of what's observed during those task is an improvement, or rather an increase in longer m depression of specific neural connections.

So my hope is that in learning about those basic neural circuits and plastics mechanisms, and in learning about the critical importance of focus and attention during learning both real world and imagine, as well as the importance of sleep and deep rest, for really consolidating learning and the different tools, the various steps of principles of effective mental training visualization, that you now have a fairly coherent, or maybe in a very coherent picture, of how to develop the best mental training visualization protocols for you, I realized that everyone has different goals. Everyone has different time constraint. If you are somebody that's interested in developing a mental training visualization protocol, so if you're a coach or teacher or simply a learner or you're trying to self direct your own adaptive plasticity, I want to emphasize that the key components that we discuss today are essential to include.

But I wouldn't obsess about whether not a given epoch is fifteen or twenty seconds or even twenty five seconds. I won't obsess over whether not you got thirty repetitions in and then your mind drifted, or whether not you could do the full fifty to seventy five, or whether 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 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 our physical task. So if you're trying to learn anything at all, I do encourage you to explore motor training and visualization because basically all of the studies out there, fact, I couldn't find one exception where some degree of improvement wasn't observed when people use motor training visualization on a consistent basis, even just that three to five times per week, these simple repeats over and over. So I don't want to overcomplicate or they could sound like mental training 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 of visualization is a very effective way to improve real world performance. If you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe our youtube channel. That's a terrific zero cost way to support us.

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