14 DAY TRIAL // Scientists at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, in France, have recently demonstrated that the human brain has a virtually limitless potential when it comes to perceptual learning. They say that mental imagery training has the ability to boost this ability, and argue that thinking about something over and over again could actually be as good as doing it. The new work was conducted by expert Elisa Tartaglia, who is based at the EPFL Laboratory of Psychophysics.
She explains that perceptual learning is a concept that refers to learning something by being constantly exposed to it. Apparently, imagining that thing, without actually seeing it, has the same effect on the mind, which is able to learn what it needs to, without actually being exposed to new stimuli. Details of the groundbreaking discovery appear in the latest issue of the respected scientific journal Current Biology, the team reports.
“When trained, radiologists are able to detect anomalies on medical images which are extremely hard to detect for untrained people. The results of our study would predict that mental imagery training, hence, repeatedly mentally visualizing the anomalies that one wants to detect, would be sufficient to become able to detect them,” Tartaglia says. In the experiments that proved the brain was able to learn by imaging things, volunteers were asked to determine the proximity between three lines, by pushing the correct button. They were able to do so with high percentage rates, and were then asked to return to the lab to perform the study again.
The second time, they exhibited even more impressive scores. But they were not the only ones who evolved. A different group was asked to do the same thing, but not by looking at images. They had to detect proximity using various audio signals. They too were able to improve on their own performances in follow-up tests, the team reports. What the French team showed was basically the fact that synapses did not only fire in response to a physical signal – as previous knowledge had it –, but also in the presence of a mental one.