Mental practice

From the book "The Brain That Changes Itself" is this story about Alvaro Pascual-Leone, who is a neuroscientist at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. He conducted an imagining experiment in his lab.  He taught two groups of people, who had never studied piano, a sequence of notes.  He showed them which fingers to move and let them hear the notes as they were played.  Then one group sat in front of an electric piano keyboard for two hours a day for five days and imagined playing the sequence and hearing it played.  The other group actually played the music two hours a day for five days.

Then the groups were asked to play as a computer measured their accuracy.  Both groups learned the sequence, and both showed similar brain changes.  By the end of the fifth day, the changes in motor signals to the muscles were the same in both groups. And on this  fifth day, the players who had imagined were as accurate playing the notes as the actual players had been on their third day.  All it took was one session lasting 2 hours to make them as accurate as the playing group.

Clearly, mental practice has merit. 
*****************
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, a Soviet human rights activist, spent nine years in prison.  Four hundred days of this time was spent in solitary confinement in freezing, darkened 5X6 foot punishment cells.  Prisoners in isolation often fall apart mentally because the use-it-or-lose-it brain needs external stimulation. During this extended period of solitary, Sharansky played mental chess for months on end, playing both black and white, from opposite perspectives.  He once said, half joking, that he kept at chess thinking he might as well use the opportunity to become the world champion.

After he was released, he became a cabinet minister in Israel.  When the world champion, Garry Kasparov, played against the prime minister and leaders of the cabinet, he beat all of them except Sharansky.

Now you have heard something interesting.