In one of the most famous experiments in psychology, researcher Alan Richardson divided his schoolboy subjects into three groups. The boys of each group were tested on their skills at sinking a basketball from the free-throw line. The first group was then told to practice shooting free throws every day. The second group was told that they should not practice shooting at all, but rather should visualize themselves shooting the basketball. The third group was told not to practice or visualize at all.
At the end of twenty days the groups were reassembled and tested. The non-practicing, non-visualizing group predictably showed no improvement. The group which had practiced every day showed a 24 percent improvement. The ones who had practiced only in the mind’s eye showed an improvement of 23 percent.196 These remarkable results—demonstrating that mental practice brought almost as much improvement as actual physical practice—have been confirmed again and again in similar tests in recent years.
Dr. O. Carl Simonton, director of the Cancer Counseling and Research Center in Fort Worth, Texas, tells his patients—most of them diagnosed as terminal cancer cases—to visualize their bodies successfully resisting and conquering the cancer, “If you are receiving radiation treatment,” he counsels, “picture it as a beam of millions of bullets of energy hitting any cells in its path.” White blood cells can be seen in the mind’s eye as “a vast army,” or as valiant White Knights, or powerful polar bears tearing apart and devouring the cancer cells. Statistical studies of Simonton’s patients show that those who use visualization and relaxation live twice as long after the diagnosis of cancer as those who do not. Many recover completely through that inexplicable phenomenon known as spontaneous remission.
What You See Is What You Get
Manipulation of mental imagery is probably the most ancient technique for mobilizing inner energies for self-healing and self-regulation. I suspect that the earliest images that have come down to us from our ancient ancestors—the cave paintings found in southern France and Spain—were used as tools for guided visualization. We know that the shamans and healers of primitive cultures are able to see themselves leaving their bodies and going on extraordinary journeys, to reach the source of wisdom and return with its healing power. But visualization is not inherently spiritual, associated only with mystical practices or primitive mentalities. Aristotle contended that mental imagery was not merely one element of thought, but the absolutely essential element: “It is impossible even to think without a mental picture,” he wrote. “The same affection is involved in thinking as in drawing a diagram.” Albert Einstein, when asked what kind of thinking he used to produce his creative work, replied, “The words or the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The psychical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be ‘voluntarily’ reproduced and combined.”30
Biofeedback researchers have found that the most effective way of manipulating any body process is through visualization: Migraine sufferers who want to increase the blood flow and warmth of their hands (which generally alleviates migraines) do so easily when they visualize their hands dipped in hot water or resting on the hot sand of a beach. People with chronic muscular tensions can visualize their muscles as ropes or tightly twisted towels becoming untwisted, limp. In fact, C. Maxwell Cade, who has conducted biofeedback research on more than four thousand subjects, says, flatly, “The ability to think in sensory images instead of in words is as absolutely essential first step toward the mastery of higher states of consciousness, self-control of pain, etc.” 40
Mental images seem to be the natural mode of thought, and recent studies show that our minds can remember visual images much better than words or numbers—so much so that it’s now thought that our capabilities for visual recognition are practically perfect. In one experiment, subjects were shown thousands of slides, one every ten seconds, over a period of days. Later the slides were mixed with others that the subjects hadn’t seen, and were shown to the subjects at a rate as fast as one every second, hour after hour, and at times were even shown in mirror image or backward, yet the subject recognized virtually every image that had been shown to him before. The experimenter concluded: “These experiments … suggest that recognition of pictures is essentially perfect.”227
This extraordinary capacity for retaining and manipulating mental images is one of our most powerful gifts. The power that mental images exert over us is even more remarkable. Exactly how mental images are able to cause such profound effects on our system is still a mystery, but many students of consciousness have observed that vivid mental images seem to be accepted by our bodies as being real. This is one way of viewing the basketball experiments: By holding strong images of successfully shooting basketballs, the mind was able to convince the body that the mental images were actually happening, and the body “learned” from this mental picture.
Dr. Edmund Jacobson, a physiologist and the developer of Progressive Relaxation therapy, established this link between mental image and body by having people visualize themselves running. He then used a machine to measure their minute muscular contractions, which he found to be of the type the subjects would have produced if they had actually been running.113, 114 For some reason, when the mind perceives something as happening, it tends to generate organic changes.
Just how remarkable some of those organic changes can be is seen in the hundreds of spontaneous remissions brought about by the visualization techniques of O. Carl Simonton. Less crucial, but equally striking, are the numerous meticulously documented cases of breast enlargement in groups of women using visualization. Each study used a different visualization technique: In one, the women were told to visualize a warm towel over their breasts, with a heat lamp shining down on them. Other groups visualized themselves as they would like to be. Still others visualized blood and energy flowing into their breasts. In all the studies the increase in breast size was significant. The average increase in breast measurement was slightly under one and a half inches in one study, two inches in another. One carefully controlled study was limited to twelve weeks, with an average bust increase of 2.1 inches; and at the same time many of the women reported that they had lost weight, so the increase was not the result of extra pounds.136, 169, 261, 262
Some may feel ambivalent about the value of investing mental energy in breast enlargement. But the unquestionable implication of these studies is that mental imagery has power to bring about dramatic and rapid organic change. And what is true for breast enlargement is also true for losing weight or overcoming illness. Quite literally, what you “see” is what you get.
Researchers in the field of mental imagery now believe that about 15 percent of all people are “visualizers” who experience virtually constant, vivid mental imagery; another 1.5 percent of the population are “verbalizers,” operating mostly (but not entirely) in a world of words and verbal thoughts, ideas, and structures. The remaining 70 percent lie on a spectrum between these two types. Tests made from the earliest days of infancy through adulthood show that males are consistently superior to females in visualization and visual-spatial ability, though both males and females show a similar distribution of verbalizers and visualizers. Studies show that high visualizers breathe more regularly than verbalizers, and that verbalizers breathe more regularly than they normally do when doing spatial tasks that require visualization. Writer Gordon Rattray Taylor cites studies showing that “high imagers are more relaxed, more creative, more mature, and more flexible than low-imagers…. We have a clue in the fact that absence of imagery is correlated with strong defences against impulse.”246
As for the value of imagery, aside from the life-enhancing qualities of visualization and the relaxed physical state that seems to accompany it, there are definite practical advantages. Many studies have shown clearly that visual imagery is associated with the ability to remember: The stronger your mental imagery, the less effort you will need to take in and commit to memory an idea or event. People with “supermemories” are able to perform their feats through mental images. With words, linked end to end like boxcars, we can understand only in linear fashion, one bit at a time, while with imagery we can assimilate an entire scene, event, or complex relationship. Visualization is also a crucial element of creativity; by “seeing” things which have never been, or visualizing events before they have taken place, we can truly invent the future, just as we can invent a work of art or a new machine. History is studded with stories of creative geniuses who first encountered their reality-changing ideas in the form of visions, or mental images.
Professor Thomas Taylor of Texas A & M recently conducted a fascinating test of the effects of floating on learning and thinking. Taylor had tested subject groups to see which were visualizers and which were verbalizers, and concluded: “When the same learning records are analyzed on the basis of persons who are basically ‘visualizers’ versus those who are primarily ‘conceptualizers’ (non-visual thinkers), a greater degree of learning occurred in the visual than in the non-visual group.”248 Taylor also noted that the float group appeared to visualize better than the non-float group, and produced significantly higher amounts of theta waves, which are known to be associated with strong mental imagery.
If you are a poor visualizer or believe that you have no ability to see pictures in your mind, it is important to remember that in reality you are able to produce imagery. “There is a virtual unanimity among imagery researchers,” writes psychologist Robert Sommer, “that everyone has the capacity to think visually. This is as innate a potential as drawing or building or the use of language, or any other skill that develops through practice. If the potential is there, there is the possibility of improvement through training. Not all people can become super-imagers, any more than they will be able to sketch like Leonardo … but everyone has the potential to improve the pungency of his or her thinking over what it presently is.”224 The ability to experience and manipulate clear inner imagery can be increased dramatically through practice and experience. And the best environment that has yet been created for experiencing mental imagery at its most intense and vivid, and for manipulating mental imagery, is the floatation tank.
The floatation tank is the optimal environment for visualization because the relaxation it ensures is so profound that the brain soon begins to generate an unprecedented amount of very slow, strong, rhythmical theta waves, which are associated with vivid, lifelike hypnagogic images. All methods of visualization used throughout history—the yogi’s and monk’s relaxed motionless lotus posture, the shaman’s drug-induced catatonia—have emphasized that a state of deep relaxation is essential to successful visualization. In the tank, deep relaxation and strong mental imagery come spontaneously and effortlessly.