You’re laughing with a friend and having a great dinner when she gets a startled/alarmed look and reaches for her throat. She makes a few vigorous spasms with her torso, starts to turn odd colors, and slumps over without having made another sound. Are you prepared to deal with this? What exactly do you do?
What do you do when you see this? (Thanks Philwelch(1)for the image)
That’s not a rhetorical question. Take a moment to walk (in your mind) through the steps exactly as you’d do them. This process is called visualization, and it’s an important part of skill training. It’s particularly helpful for skills you can’t actually practice physically and are likely to need to have solid on the spur of the moment. (If you don’t know what you should do in this situation, here’s a great free prep for you: visit the site linked at the bottom of the article and learn the skill.)
How does visualization work?
The process is simple: You imagine a situation and run through in your mind the precise set of steps you’d take in response, what you’d say and do.
What this does to your brain: Visualization activates a large proportion of the same brain cells as one uses to actually do the action. Some parts of your brain are so convinced, they actually adjust the visualization actions to account for things like fatigue (Demougeot et al., 2011). What’s the value in that?
“Neurons that fire together, wire together.” This is a sound-bite version of the Hebb’s** model of learning. He developed it all the way back in 1949, but it’s withstood the test of time, being confirmed by each cool new neuroscience technique that comes down the pike. What it means is that when a particular set of brain cells is used in sequence, such as when we perform a particular action, those brain cells strengthen their connections with each other so that they are easier to activate as a group the next time. That’s why actions get faster, easier, and more accurate as we practice them repeatedly.
Whenever one brain cell activates another, the connection between them gets stronger, and easier to use the next time.
The problem comes in when there are actions we really want to be fast, easy, and accurate when the time comes … but we can’t physically practice them as much as would be helpful. You can’t just go around doing Heimlich maneuvers or CPR on people in most settings for practice, or at the other end of the spectrum, practice damaging attackers who grabbed you from behind. You’ve heard how you should respond when your car starts to spin out on ice, but you may not have had a chance to practice that even once.
Visualization may be the best way to ‘practice’ driving on surfaces such as this. Thanks Famartin(2) for the image.
Visualization helps get around the no/too little practice problem. By mental rehearsal, we actually get the right sets of brain cells making good connections, so when we need them they’ll be easy to activate as a complex group. It doesn’t sound like it would be very effective, just to imagine actions (at least it didn’t sound like it to me), but the evidence is clear that it really works very well. In some circumstances, it’s been shown to be just as effective as the real thing! (Kappes and Morewedge, 2016)
Visualization as a test of preps
It’s nicest when you can practice the skill a little bit in ‘real life’, as that’s the best way to be confident that your plan of action will really work. That’s a luxury we don’t always have, though; and visualization alone is much better than just ‘textbook learning’ how to do something. The up side is that we can use visualization to help us holes in our preps.
This is a technique I use often at work, when I’m going to try a new procedure and I’ll have to invest a lot of time, trouble, and money on the first attempt. To quote Einstein, “If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn’t be research,” so there’s always a risk that something won’t work as planned. I found I can lower the error rate significantly by doing visualization of the procedure before I try it for real. I imagine myself doing things step by step, looking for potential flaws. Do I have the tool needed for this step at hand? What do I do if this potential problem arises?
You can do the same thing with your preps. Sitting in a car in a traffic jam, visualize how it would go if the cars were all dead (EMP maybe). Ok, do you know where you’re going to meet your family? What’s in the car with you right now? Can you carry that stuff as far as you need to? Will you have good enough shoes to do that walking, will you be warm enough, do you know alternate routes if you need them? What if it were snowing and you needed to do it in that weather? If you’re stuck out for the night on your route (in your imaginary trek), visualize every bit of it, from opening the food containers to finding your light source to taking your evening meds.
Visualization to speed decision-making when time is short
This one I got from my Mom. When she taught me to drive, she taught me to look at situations and decide what I was going to do if Problem X arose. If a deer jumps out of that ditch, do you brake or go for the ditch? You sure don’t dodge into the other lane this close to the top of a hill; a head-on with traffic coming the other lane would just ruin your day. I still find myself doing that; when I hear a car coming behind me I’m checking the quality of my ditch so I know what to do if I’m not sure the driver is giving me space. A couple of times I’ve had to use these ‘contingency plans’ and I could do it very fast and without the stress destroying my ability to decide – because I’d already decided.
Your brain is way more capable than many people give it credit for, so make best use of it. Visualize yourself succeeding and you’re more likely to succeed; and that’s not just some positive thinking slogan.
* Red Cross choking first aid summary: http://www.redcross.org/flash/brr/English-html/conscious-choking.asp
** Hebb, D.O. (1949). The Organization of Behavior. New York: Wiley & Sons.
*** Kappes, H. B., & Morewedge, C. K. (2016). Mental Simulation as Substitute for Experience. Social & Personality Psychology Compass, 10(7), 405-420. doi:10.1111/spc3.12257
**** Muscle Fatigue Affects Mental Simulation of Action.