Imagery research relating to flexibility and performance
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Australian psychologist Alan Richardson took 3 groups of basketball players and tested their ability to take freethrows. Then he instructed the first group to spend 20 minutes a day practicing freethrows. He told the second group not to practice and had the third group spend 20 minutes a day imaging that they were shooting perfect baskets.
As might be expected, the group that did nothing, didn't improve, the frist group improved by 24 % but through the power of imagery alone, the third group improved an astonishing 23 %, almost as much as the group that practiced physically.
Mary Orser and Richard Zarro, Changing your Destiny (New York Haper & Row, 1989, p. 274
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In 1995 Alvaro Pascual-Leone had a group of volounteers practice a five-finger piano exercise, and a comparable group merely think about practicing. They focused on each finger movement in turn, essentially playing the simple piece in their heads, one note at a time.
Actual physical practice produced changes in each volounteers motor cortex, as expected. But so did mere mental rehearsal, and to the same degree as that brought on by physical practice. Motor circuits become active during pure mental imagery. Like actual, tphysical movements, imagined movement trigger synaptic change at the cortical level. Merely thinking about movement produced brain change comparable to those triggered by actual movement.
Journal of Neurophysiology, 74, pp 1037 - 1045
Psychologist Shlomo Breznitz at Hebrew University, Jerusalem, had several groups of soldiers march 40 kilometers (about 25 miles), but gave each group different information.
He had some groups march 30 kilometers and then told them, they had to march another 10 kilometers. Another he told they had to march 60 but actually only had them march 40 kilometers. He allowed some to see distance markers and provided no clues to others how far they had walked.
At the end of the study Breznitz found that the stress hormone levels in the soldiers blood always reflected their estimate and not the actual distance they had marched. In other words, their bodies responded not to reality, but to what they were imaging as reality.
Bernie T. Siegel, Love, p 29
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