The Science of Visualization

Mica Schuchardt
Feb 18, 2019
7 min read

So I try a lot of different things in blind faith hoping that they will work, but visualization is NOT one of those things. It's proven. In today’s post, I’m going to share (some of) the scientific evidence (because there’s a lot of it) documenting the power of visualization.

Ok, so the first thing we need to establish is that our brain is not particularly good at distinguishing a real experience from an imagined one. This is why people can have a panic attack just by thinking about their trigger, your heart rate can increase and you can feel sick to your stomach when you imagine a public speaking engagement, and it’s why sometimes when watching a movie or reading a book you experience real emotions and physiologic responses as if you are actually participating in the story. In all of these situations, the mind created images that the brain perceived as real.

So, the important question becomes what if we intentionally and consistently visualize specific images - would that translate to real changes in our brain, body, and experience?

The lazy man’s guide to muscle gains

Study #1: Researchers set out to test if mental training could induce an increase in muscle strength. The experimental participants were separated into two groups – one group mentally rehearsed doing repetitions of finger abduction movements and the other group visualized doing elbow flexion movements. Both groups were instructed to imagine performing these movements against maximum resistance. The mental exercise sessions lasted 15 minutes and were completed 5x/week. Just to be clear, there was no actual movement or physical training involved in this study. After 12 weeks, the finger abduction group had a 35% increase in strength and the elbow flexion group demonstrated a 13.5% increase in strength.¹

Study #2: In a similar study, researchers randomly assigned college athletes into 3 groups – a control group, a mental exercise group (this group listened to audio tracks guiding them through visualizations of exercise), and a physical exercise group (who actually performed the exercises described in the audio track). This study was specifically analyzing hip flexor strength and after 2 weeks, the control group had no significant change in strength, the mental exercise group had a 24% increase in strength, and the physical exercise group had a 28% increase in strength – i.e. mental training yielded similar results as physical training for increasing strength of the targeted muscle group.²

So ya, these types of experiments are some of my favorites because it means I can get booty gains without going to the gym…and it gives me something to do while bored in class.

Becoming Mozart

Study #3: Harvard put out a study that was evaluating 2 groups of people with similar intellect that had no prior experience with piano playing. One group practiced playing piano scales every day for a set period of time, and the other group merely thought about playing piano scales for the same period of time. After the study, the brains of both groups were found to have the exact same types of structural changes – notably, significant growth in the part of the brain that corresponds with fine motor movement (associated with piano playing). So, the group that just thought about playing the piano had changed their brains as if they had actually been practicing and doing the movements.³

Study #4: This is just some anecdotal evidence, but the great Walter Gieseking – a 20th century pianist and teacher, was notorious for learning entire piano concertos while on plane flights just by mental rehearsing.⁴

The most important filter you'll ever read about

Alright, so now that we have established that visualizing something is comparable to actually doing the something, let’s talk about a specific part of the brain affected by visualization known as the reticular activating system (RAS). RAS serves as a filter or gatekeeper between our sensory systems and our conscious mind. The RAS is like Google – there’s millions of websites out there, but you filter them out by typing in a key word…in the case of your brain, the “key word” is what the RAS thinks is important to you. This is a pretty spectacular function because, you know, if all of our sensory information reached the conscious level, we would be really good at sitting on our beds and staring at the wall, but anything beyond that would likely be experienced as incredibly overwhelming.

Here’s an exercise to show you what the RAS is all about:

Answer Key

If you counted 13 passes, that’s correct.

If you noticed a guy in a bear suit moon walk through the middle of the group AND counted the correct number of passes, then congratulations. Your reticular activating system lets in more random crap than the average human’s. You can consider that a super power if you want.

In any case, most people don’t see the moon walking bear – that’s because you told your brain that counting the passes is what’s important, so the reticular activating system takes the liberty of filtering out all of the other details.

Let’s look at a real life example: say you think that no body likes you at your workplace. If you think that on a regular basis you are essentially priming your RAS to look for every piece of evidence it can find in your sensory experience to validate that belief. Suddenly you become hyperaware of people whispering, a weird look someone gave you, your coworkers’ body language – you get the idea. This phenomenon is called confirmation bias. Regardless of whether something is true or untrue, good or bad, real or fabricated - our brain likes information that is consistent with our beliefs and experiences rather than information that causes dissonance. This is why politics are such a challenge...

Ok, so just to summarize - the RAS plays an important function, but it can also make us low-key paranoid, cynical, and closed-minded. We can get tunnel vision for seeing everything wrong with the world rather than everything that’s right. We can get stuck in patterns of the mundane and we can totally miss opportunities for a new future.

So, the point is…

Visualization can change the RAS filter. By visualizing, we are telling our brain what’s important to us and we are effectively tricking our brain into thinking we are having new experiences. The RAS will then respond by letting in sensory input that supports our visualized experiences.⁵ So basically you’re breaking free from the old patterns of the past and you are laying down new patterns for your future, inviting in new experiences that are consistent with your goals.

Let’s say that you have the goal of improving self-worth (which is an important goal that I think everyone should have). During your visualization you see yourself doing life as if you have a strong sense of self-worth – you see yourself speaking up at work because you know your ideas have value, you see yourself expressing your needs to your partner, you see yourself setting boundaries in your personal life, you see yourself choosing healthy foods and working out because you deserve to be healthy…so on and so forth. In doing so, your RAS starts looking for opportunities and evidence to support and validate what’s important to you. You start seeing options you never saw before and it can break you out of your prior tunnel vision.

People who use(d) this hack:

Muhammad Ali stressed the importance of seeing himself victorious long before the actual fight.
Jim Carrey used to picture himself being the greatest actor in the world.
Michael Jordan always took the shot in his mind before he ever took one in real life.
Pretty much every successful entrepreneur and world changer ever – Albert Einstein, Napoleon Hill, Joel Brown, Bob Proctor, Joe Dispenza…the list goes on

FEEL IT IN YOUR BODY

Next, I want to highlight the importance of experiencing positive emotions with your visualization. This typically happens naturally, because if you’re good at visualizing, your brain is perceiving it as a real experience anyway (and if visualization isn’t your strong suit, no worries – we all have the ability to visualize and we can strengthen our ability with practice – it’s just like a muscle). Anyways, elevated emotional states have been associated with countless health benefits (just google it), and based on the energetic interactions of the universe, when you raise your emotional frequency, you then attract people and things (because things are made of energy, too) into your life that match your heightened vibration. So ya, benefits no matter how you look at it. Here’s a chart of emotional frequencies so you know what to shoot for:

Tik-tok

The aspect of visualization that hasn’t been nailed down by research yet is how long to do it for. The big idea is that it needs to be a consistent practice, so daily visualization would be ideal. In the research, I’ve seen mental rehearsals lasting from 30 sec to 2 hours - so, just do what feels right to you and what makes sense in light of the type of event, circumstance, or goal you are trying to achieve.

I personally visualize during my morning meditation – I spend about 3 minutes visualizing my ideal day and another 3 minutes visualizing my ideal life 5 years from now. I have experienced incredible benefits, and I’m certain you will too.

So, in summary, visualization is essentially intentional day dreaming, and it has been proven to create structural changes in the brain, physical changes in the body, and because of the positive emotions it elicits, it raises your energetic frequency as well – i.e. this is a high yield practice with widespread benefits. My hope is that this information has inspired you to add some type of visualization practice to your daily routine…because your goals deserve at least 30 seconds of your time, am I right?!

Happy visualizing!

Love and light,

Mica

References:

1. Ranganathan VK, Siemionow V, Liu JZ, Sahgal V, Yue GH. From mental power to muscle power—gaining strength by using the mind. Neuropsychologia. 2004;42(7):944-956. doi:10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2003.11.018.

2. Shackell EM, Standing L. Mind over matter: mental training increases physical strength. North American Journal of Psychology. 2007;9(1).

3. Pascual-Leone A, Nguyet D, Cohen LG, Brasil-Neto JP, Cammarota A, Hallett M. Modulation of muscle responses evoked by transcranial magnetic stimulation during the acquisition of new fine motor skills. Journal of Neurophysiology. 1995;74(3):1037-1045. doi:10.1152/jn.1995.74.3.1037.

4. Biography of the Day: Walter Gieseking. altmarius. http://altmarius.ning.com/m/blogpost?id=3496555:BlogPost:282145. Published November 5, 2011. Accessed February 18, 2019.

5. Taylor J. How to Use Visualisation to Achieve Goals. Flowstate Collective. https://www.flowstate.co/how-to-use-the-science-of-visualisation-to-achieve-your-goals/. Published December 8, 2015. Accessed February 18, 2019.