Science-Based Mental Training & Visualization for Improved Learning

If you are going to use mental training and visualization to its best effect in order to engage neuroplasticity and learning, you need to keep those visualizations quite brief—really on the order of about 15-20 seconds or so—and pretty darn sparse, meaning not including a lot of elaborate visualization, not including a lot of sequences of motor steps.

When we apply identities or names to these mental trainings and visualizations... we greatly enhance the amount of neural machinery in the brain and body that we are able to recruit when we go to perform... 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.

Those epochs lasting 5-15 seconds are really the cornerstone of an effective mental training and visualization practice. And the repeated nature of it—50-75 repetitions in a given session—is also another cornerstone of an effective mental training and visualization practice...

If you do 10 hours per week of real-world physical training... and you add 1 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.

When it comes to mental training and visualization... you are capturing both processes—both the potentiation, that is the building up and strengthening of connections, and the weakening of the connections that are inappropriate for the thing you're trying to learn.

If you are doing the maximum amount of physical training that you can do... and you're going to add mental training and imagery, it doesn't really matter when you do it ... But you do want to place it at a time in which you can try and get good sleep that night.

During sleep and other states of deep relaxation... the rewiring of neural connections—that is, the actual neuroplasticity—takes place. So, the verb neuroplasticity, the rearrangement of connections between neurons, really occurs during sleep—in particular, on the first night following an attempt to learn something through this focused attention.

What the visualization experiments that Shepherd and Kosslyn and others did show is that the processing speed of imagined experiences is exactly the same as the processing speed of real experiences, and the spatial relationship between imagined and real experiences is exactly the same as well.

Your mental training and visualization will be far more effective if you are performing the exact same or very similar mental and physical tasks in the real world.

One of the things that also makes mental training and visualization more effective is when we assign cognitive labels to what's going on when we visualize.