The Science of Mental Fitness (2012) | Hacker News Reader

The Science of Mental Fitness (2012)

damninteresting.com

69 pointsbsmith17 comments

Josh Waitzkin describes something like this in his book The Art of Learning. Basically, he broke his arm a few months before an important martial arts tournament. While it was immobilized in a sling, he worked out the other arm then meditated, imagining he was working out the busted arm. He reported that this helped keep his bad arm from atrophying and becoming weak while he couldn't use it.

Imagining working out immobilized arm helped keep his bad arm from atrophying?

I'd really need to see some case/study on this stuff.

There was at least one study I know of that visualization can mitigate the atrophy caused by immobilization by 50%. From the abstract[1]:

> A group of healthy individuals underwent 4 wk of wrist-hand immobilization to induce weakness. Another group also underwent 4 wk of immobilization, but they also performed mental imagery of strong muscle contractions 5 days/wk.

Here were their results:

> Immobilization decreased strength 45.1 ± 5.0%, impaired VA 23.2 ± 5.8%, and prolonged the SP 13.5 ± 2.6%. Mental imagery training, however, attenuated the loss of strength and VA by ∼50% (23.8 ± 5.6% and 12.9 ± 3.2% reductions, respectively) and eliminated prolongation of the SP (4.8 ± 2.8% reduction).

The Atlantic ran a story on that research paper[2].

I am curious if the participants in the experimental group strictly adhered to the protocol, or if they flexed their arms within the constraints. More research needs to be done, but visualization is a common practice among top athletes (Michael Phelps and "watching the video tape"[3]).

A quick Google search for visualization during exercise yielded another article[4] summarizing a study[5] on the effects of visualization on strength gain. From the abstract:

> The first group (N = 8) was trained to perform "mental contractions" of little finger abduction (ABD); the second group (N = 8) performed mental contractions of elbow (ELB) flexion; and the third group (N = 8) was not trained but participated in all measurements and served as a control group. [...] Training lasted for 12 weeks (15 min per day, 5 days per week).

The results:

> At the end of training, we found that the ABD group had increased their finger abduction strength by 35% (P < 0.005) and the ELB group augmented their elbow flexion strength by 13.5% (P < 0.001). The physical training group increased the finger abduction strength by 53% (P < 0.01). The control group showed no significant changes in strength for either finger abduction or elbow flexion tasks.

The nice thing about this study is that it also attempted to explain the strength increases by taking EEG measurements of brain activity. It showed a significant increase in activity related to increased control of voluntary muscle contractions.

This effect has been the basis for stroke recovery program developed at the University of Alabama Birmingham by Dr. Eduard Taub. Here is explaining the program and it's results to the Dalaim Lama October 2014[6]. This is relevant because the therapy is about reorganizing the brain to use an unaffected area to regain partial muscle control. In other words, the therapy finds and strengthens new neural pathways to control the otherwise healthy muscles[7].

There are a lot of techniques that people have used for learning and training that we only recently started to take seriously and verify using EEG and fMRI by peering into the brain. I have been researching this stuff to inform an ed tech product for efficient lifelong learning, specifically to teach people about how the brain works and the implications and applications for learning.

I am trying to empower people to be efficient, confident learners. Doubt and not knowing how to learn leads people to believe that they are just "not smart" and discourages from from learning. It is true for children and adults.

[1]http://jn.physiology.org/content/112/12/3219

[2]http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/01/muscle-str...

[3]http://lifehacker.com/5896846/the-right-habits

[4]http://sportsmedicine.about.com/od/sportspsychology/a/thinks...

[5]http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?uid=14998709&cmd=showdeta...

[6]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJlmRISL-QA&feature=youtu.be...

[7]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constraint-induced_movement_th...

someone should redo this, but break both arms, and only imagine working out with one of them.

You don't have to break 'em, just put them in casts.

I realize you're joking, but it reminded me of this story: one of my ex-girlfriends actually did something like this as part of her PhD: she signed up half a dozen volunteers--including herself--to wear casts on one arm for six weeks.

It was a total bust: she was the only subject who made it through more than half the investigation period. The rest mostly came in after a week or so and asked to have the casts removed. One didn't even want to wait for that once they had decided they couldn't stand to go on with it, and soaked it off at home.

Maybe with modern plastic immobilization it would be easier to do this kind of research, but it was pretty extreme at the time and getting ethics approval today would be almost impossible.

>>the mental-exercise group physically increased the strength of one of their fingers by imagining, repeatedly, over the course of about three months, that they were exercising it. They didn’t have to lift a finger in order to convince their brains that they were, in fact, lifting a finger.

Wow! Now that is something to think about. No pun intended. But wow. Mind over matter, literally.

this is something I believe really works for things that are hard to do. For exdample pick any activity with a difficulty of balance. visualization, especially structured consistent visualization over a time period I think will make an impact. I don't know this but I think more tests are needed. I also think there is something to visulization healing. But it makes you wonder, if it works, how is it working and what are the limitations. And if there are limitations, why are there limitations.

It's like the matrix, some rules can be bent, others can be broken i guess.

Truer words are rarely spoken.

I wonder how they controlled for the ideomotor effect - if you think about moving a muscle without moving it, you tend to still flex/move it slightly even without noticing it. This might be enough to explain the strength increae.

Some strength gains from strength training are a result of more neurons making connections from the motor center of the brain to the muscle tissue. Thinking about moving a muscle might make more neurons form to the muscle, making more of them contract when it does move.

Props to the author/website for providing links to the papers it discusses at the bottom of the page. Drives me nuts when articles neglect to do this.

Very interesting article. In hindu mythology, we hear tales of sages having great powers that they could do lot of things just by thought and I always thought it was all untrue. But it seems they don't seem to be much farther from reality!

"A 2007 Canadian study targeting hip muscles had the same outcome: a group of college students using weightlifting increased their hip-muscle strength by 28.3%, a control-group doing nothing to their hip muscles exhibited no change in strength, and a group working on the muscles only via mental imagery showed an increase in the strength of those muscles by 23.7%."

I wonder if you get all benefits of workout/cardio by just imagining. Would love to go for 10 minutes imaginary runs while sitting at my desk when my brain needs a break.

Would seem that this could tie into Lucid Dreaming and Dream Control. Wonder what would happen if the same workouts were done while dreaming. Same results?

Probably not, because the relevant bits are probably too disconnected. I've often dreamed of running down the road at ~50mph, complete with proprioceptive cues that I am running, and I can't say I've seen an effect.

I'm not talking just about dreaming, I'm talking about lucid dreaming and dream control. If you're not lucid in your dreams, then I don't think it's too ridiculous of me to assume that those dreams are "normal" for you, so you wouldn't expect to see any improvement, even if dreaming about things like that could offer improvement.

What I'm talking about is people who can realize they are dreaming, and then make a concerted effort to consistently use that time for mental training like the article mentions. That seems far more likely to yield results than sporadic running dreams.

Sorry, yes, I wasn't clear. I've been a natural lucid dreamer for 25 years now, to the point that I can't even remember the last time I had the "recognition" that I was dreaming... for me I long since just know, pretty much all the time. I'll cop I wasn't deliberately trying to exercise, but I doubt it'll matter.

Besides, this sounds like the sort of thing you can already do in your down time, riding the bus, sitting at your desk, etc. Regardless of how "lucid" you are, counting on getting anything like this done in your sleep is a crapshoot compared to setting an alarm on your phone and doing it during the day.

If indeed it works that well, which I'm still skeptical about. Common sense suggests that if it were this easy we'd have collectively discovered this as a race a long time ago. (Kinda like Larry Niven's arguments about why humans almost certainly don't have psi powers... if they worked, we'd know. The very fact we're "wondering" is strong evidence that there's nothing there, or the effect is so small as to be useless and essentially undetectable.)

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