Priming Your Mind and Body for a New Future

If you are familiar with my work, you know that I’m in love with the concept of mental rehearsal. I am fascinated by how we can change the brain as well as the body by thought alone. Think about that for a moment. If you focus your attention on specific imagery in your mind and become very present with a sequence of repeated thoughts and feelings, your brain and body will not know the difference between what is occurring in the outer world and what is happening in your inner world. So when you’re fully engaged and focused, the inner world of imagination will appear as an outer-world experience — and your biology will change accordingly. That means you can make your brain and body look as if a physical experience has already happened without having the actual experience. What you put your attention on and mentally rehearse over and over again not only becomes who you are from a biological perspective, it also determines your future. Here’s a good example. A team of Harvard researchers took a group of volunteers who had never before played the piano and divided the group in half. One half practiced a simple five-finger piano exercise for two hours a day over a period of five days. The remaining half did the same thing, but just by imagining they were sitting at the piano — without physically moving their fingers in any way. The before-and-after brain scans showed that both groups created a dramatic number of new neural circuits and new neurological programming in the region of their brains that controls finger movements, even though one group did so by thought alone. 3 Think about this. The folks who mentally rehearsed the actions had brains that looked like the experience had already happened — even though they never lifted a finger. If you were to put them in front of a piano after five days of mental rehearsal, many of them would be able to play the exercise they imagined pretty well, even though they had never before tickled the ivories. By mentally imagining the activity every day, they installed the neurological hardware in preparation for the experience. They repeatedly fired and wired those brain circuits with their attention and intention, and over time the hardware became an automatic software program in their brains and it became easier to do the next time. So if they were to start to play after five days of mental practice, their behaviors would become easily aligned with their conscious intentions because they primed their brains for the experience ahead of time. That’s how powerful the mind can be, once trained. Similar studies show the same kinds of results with muscle training. In a pioneering study at the Cleveland Clinic, ten research subjects between the ages of 20 and 35 imagined flexing one of their biceps as hard as they could in five training sessions a week for 12 weeks. Every other week, the researchers recorded the subjects’ electrical brain activity during their sessions and measured their muscle strength. By the end of the study, the subjects had increased their biceps’ strength by 13.5 percent, even though they hadn’t actually been using their muscles at all. They maintained this gain for three months after the training sessions stopped. 4 More recently, a research team made up of scientists from the University of Texas at San Antonio, the Cleveland Clinic, and the Kessler Foundation Research Center in West Orange, New Jersey, asked subjects to visualize contracting their elbow flexor muscles. As they did so, they were instructed to urge the muscles to flex as strong and hard as possible — adding a firm intention to their strong mental energy — for 15-minute sessions, five days a week, for 12 weeks. One group of subjects was instructed to use what is called external or third-person imagery, imagining themselves performing the exercise by observing themselves in a scene in their heads separate from the experience (like watching a movie of themselves). A second group was instructed to use internal or first-person imagery, imagining that their bodies as they existed right then in real time were doing the exercise, making it more immediate and realistic. A third group, the control, did no practice. The group using external imagery (as well as the control group) showed no significant change, but the group using internal imagery showed a 10.8 percent increase in strength. 5 Another team of researchers from Ohio University went so far as to wrap the wrists of 29 volunteers in surgical casts for one month, ensuring they wouldn’t be able to move their wrists even unintentionally. Half the group practiced mental-imagery exercises for 11 minutes a day, five days a week, imagining they were flexing their immobilized wrist muscles while actually remaining completely still. The other half, the control group, did nothing. At the end of the month, when all the casts came off, the muscles of the imagery group were twice as strong as those of the control group. 6 Each of these three muscle studies shows how mental rehearsal not only changes the brain, but can also change the body by thought alone. In other words, by practicing the behaviors in their mind and consciously reviewing the activity on a regular basis, the bodies of the subjects looked like they had been physically performing the activity — and yet they never did the exercises. Those who added the emotional component of doing the exercise as hard as possible to the intensity of the mental imagery made the experience even more real and the results more pronounced. In the piano-playing study, the brains of the research subjects looked as though the experience they’d imagined had already happened because they had primed their brains for that future. In a similar way, the subjects in the muscle[1]flexing studies changed their bodies to look as if they had previously experienced that reality — just by mentally rehearsing the activity through thought alone. You can see why when you wake up in the morning and start thinking about the people you have to see, the places you have to go, and the things you have to do in your busy schedule (that’s mentally rehearsing), and then you add an intense emotion to it like suffering or unhappiness or frustration, just like the elbow flexor volunteers who urged their muscles to flex without moving them at all, you are conditioning your brain and body to look like that future has already happened. Since experience enriches the brain and creates an emotion that signals the body, when you continuously create an inward experience that is as real as an outer experience, over time you’re going to change your brain and body — just like any real experience would. In fact, when you wake up and start thinking about your day, neurologically, biologically, chemically, and even genetically (which I will explain in the next section), it looks as though that day has already happened for you. And in fact, it has. Once you actually start the day’s activities, just as in the experiments above, your body is naturally and automatically going to behave equal to your conscious or unconscious intentions. If you’ve been doing the same things for years on end, those circuits — as well as the rest of your biology — are more readily and easily activated. That’s because not only do you prime your biology every day with your mind, but you also re-create the same physical behaviors in order to reinforce those experiences further in your brain and body. And it actually becomes easier to go unconscious every day because you keep mentally and physically reinforcing the same habits over again — creating the habit of behaving by habit.