Mental Practice Part I: Enhancing Mental Practice and Its Benefits

This series of videos on mental practicing will give you information on its benefits, why it works, ways to enhance mental practice, what's going on in the brain when you mental practice, and answer many common questions (including what to do if you're not very good at it).

Part I: Enhancing Mental Practice and Its Benefits:    • Mental Practice Part I: Enhancing Men...  
Part II: Brain Activation and Experts v. Novices:    • Mental Practice Part II: Brain Activa...  
Part III: Answers to Common Questions:    • Mental Practice Part III: Answers to ...  

Here is my previous video about mental practice that I mention in this video:    • What Musicians Can Learn About Practi...  

Citations in video:
Pascual-Leone, A., et al. (1995). Modulation of muscle responses evoked by transcranial magnetic stimulation during the acquisition of new fine motor skills. Journal of Neurophysiology 74(3): 1037-1045.
Iorio, C., Brattico, E., Munk Larsen, F., Vuust, P., & Bonetti, L. (2022). The effect of mental practice on music memorization. Psychology of Music, 50(1), 230-244.

Combo of mental and physical practice:
Smith, D., Wright, C. J., & Cantwell, C. (2008). Beating the bunker: The effect of PETTLEP imagery on golf bunker shot performance. Research quarterly for exercise and sport, 79(3), 385-391.
Frank, C., Land, W. M., Popp, C., & Schack, T. (2014). Mental representation and mental practice: experimental investigation on the functional links between motor memory and motor imagery. PloS one, 9(4), e95175.

Dynamic mental practice:
Guillot, A., Moschberger, K., & Collet, C. (2013). Coupling movement with imagery as a new perspective for motor imagery practice. Behavioral and Brain Functions, 9(1), 1-8.
Ferreira Dias Kanthack, T., Guillot, A., Ricardo Altimari, L., Nunez Nagy, S., Collet, C., & Di Rienzo, F. (2016). Selective efficacy of static and dynamic imagery in different states of physical fatigue. PloS one, 11(3), e0149654.

AOMI:
Eaves, D. L., Riach, M., Holmes, P. S., & Wright, D. J. (2016). Motor imagery during action observation: a brief review of evidence, theory and future research opportunities. Frontiers in neuroscience, 10, 514.
Marshall, B., Wright, D. J., Holmes, P. S., & Wood, G. (2019). Combining action observation and motor imagery improves eye–hand coordination during novel visuomotor task performance. Journal of Motor Behavior.
Romano-Smith, S., Wood, G., Wright, D. J., & Wakefield, C. J. (2018). Simultaneous and alternate action observation and motor imagery combinations improve aiming performance. Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 38, 100-106.
Clark, S. E., & Ste-Marie, D. M. (2007). The impact of self-as-a-model interventions on children's self-regulation of learning and swimming performance. Journal of sports sciences, 25(5), 577-586.


A little bit on my background:
I attended Oberlin College and Conservatory as an undergraduate, double majoring in viola performance and neuroscience. The neuroscience was just for fun (truly!) and I had no plans to continue with it after I graduated. But when I got to New England Conservatory for my masters in viola performance, I realized something was missing. After my roommate came home from being a subject in a study at Harvard looking at musicians’ versus non-musicians’ brains, I realized I had to be a double degree student my whole life. So at NEC, I did a number of independent studies looking at topics having to do with music and the brain, as well as working for Dr. Mark Tramo, the director of the Institute for Music and Brain Science, at that time at Harvard (now at UCLA). After NEC, I attended the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University for my DMA in viola performance. While there, I took graduate-level neuroscience classes nearly every semester, I worked in a lab for a long time, I was the assistant director for two interdisciplinary symposia on music and the brain, and I developed and taught a class on music and the brain. Since that time, I have published several articles in both music and scientific journals on music and the brain (many of which you can access on my website: https://mollygebrian.com/writing/) and give presentations on the topic regularly at conferences, universities, and schools around the world. For five years, I taught viola at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, where I also taught an honors course on music and the brain. Now, I teach viola at the University of Arizona, where I also continue to investigate aspects of the cognitive neuroscience of music.