

The Science of Mental Fitness (2012) - bsmith
http://www.damninteresting.com/the-science-of-mental-fitness

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kittyfoofoo
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.

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knodi123
someone should redo this, but break both arms, and only imagine working out
with one of them.

~~~
tjradcliffe
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.

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hellofunk
>>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.

~~~
throwaway7767
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.

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kale
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.

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simplicio
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.

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thisisananth
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!

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sudoherethere
"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.

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thekingofspain
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?

~~~
jerf
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.

~~~
thekingofspain
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.

~~~
jerf
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.)

