Beyond the Power of Your Subconscious Mind by C. James Jensen Page A

piano, a sequence of notes, showing them which fingers to move and letting them hear the notes as they were played. Then members of one group, the “mental practice” group, sat in front of an electric piano keyboard, two hours a day, for five days, and imagined both playing the sequence and hearing it played. A second “physical practice” group actually played the music two hours a day for five days. Both groups had their brains mapped before the experiment, each day during it, and afterward. Then both groups were asked to play the sequence, and a computer measured the accuracy of their performances.
    Pasqual-Leone found that both groups learned to play the sequence, and both showed similar brain map changes. Remarkably, mental practice alone produced the same physical changes in the motor system as actually playing the piece. By the end of the fifth day, the changes in motor signals to the muscles were the same in both groups, and the imaging players were as accurate as the actual players were on their third day.
    The level of improvement at five days in the mental practice group, however, substantially was not as great as in those who did physical practice. But, when the mental practice group finished its mental training and was given a single two-hour physical practice session, its overall performance improved to the level of the physical practice group’s performance at five days. Clearly mental practice is an effective way to prepare for learning a physical skill with minimal physical practice.”

     
    Dr. Doidge continues,

     
    One of the most advanced forms of mental practice is “mental chess,” played without a board or pieces. The players imagine the board and the play, keeping track of the positions. Anatoly Sharansky, the Soviet human rights activist, used mental chess to survive in prison. Sharansky, a Jewish computer specialist falsely accused of spying for the United States in 1977, spent nine years in prison, four hundred days of that time in solitary confinement in freezing, darkened, five-by-six-foot punishment cells. Political prisoners in isolation often fall apart mentally because the use-it-or-lose-it brain needs external stimulation to maintain its maps. During this extended period of sensory deprivation, Sharansky played mental chess for months on end, which probably helped him keep his brain from degrading. He played both white and black, holding the game in his head, from opposite perspectives— an extraordinary challenge to the brain. Sharansky once told me, half joking, that he kept at chess thinking he might as well use the opportunity to become the world champion. After he was released, with the help of Western pressure, he went to Israel and became a Cabinet minister. When the World Champion, Garry Kasparov, played against the prime minister and leader of the Cabinet, he beat all of them except Sharansky.
    . . . One reason we can change our brains simply by imagining is that, from a neuroscientific point of view, imagining an act and doing it are not as different as they seem. When people close their eyes and visualize a simple object, such as the letter “A,” the primary visual cortex lights up, just as it would if the subject were actually looking at the letter “A.” Brain scans show that in action and imagination many of the same parts of the brain are activated. That is why visualizing can improve performance.

     
    Thank you, Dr. Doidge.
     
    Now let me share with you an actual life experience that further documents the power of directed visualization.
    In 1975, while flying home to Portland, Oregon, from Los Angeles, I read The Inner Game of Tennis by W. Timothy Gallwey. I was so impressed with Tim’s writing that I tracked him down and invited him to come to Portland to talk with our company’s management team as well as the Oregon chapter of the Young Presidents’ Organization.
    As a result of that encounter, Tim and I developed a friendship and association, and to