Why is Imagery Important?

Donna Luder, who certified me in the Pilates method, on mental imagery. As a dancer and researcher, Luder uses visualizations and images when teaching Pilates to clients and is inspired by the Franklin Method.

As Luder's student, I feel more of a connection with my body using cues of imagery, like imagining my spine is a "strand of pearls" for example. But a whole lot more goes into using one's brain for these cues.

About Mental Imagery
by Donna Luder © 2007-08 All rights reserved.
For two and a half millennia, philosophers have discussed and debated the role-assignments of the body and mind. Is the mind superior and the body inferior, or is the body just a way to access the mind, or is there no separation? The debate over the relative superiority of mind or body may not be a useful construct for physical educators. Instead, it may be more useful for teachers to recognize athletic goals can be enhanced through physical or cognitive skill development. Students of movement would be well-served to be accomplished in both skills.
Athletic coaches and physical education teachers are familiar with skill drills and other physical techniques for improving athletic ability. Somewhat less familiar is the cognitive technique of mental imagery. This paper seeks to review the research behind mental imagery, discuss the philosophy of mental imagery, and provide a concrete prescription for the front line of movement educators to improve motor learning and performance through mental imagery. It is advantageous to use this cognitive skill because it is potentially quick, powerful, and applicable to all people in all walks of life, from ballerinas to football players to stroke survivors.
Ernst Weber (1795-1878) founded the field of psychophysics by studying the relationship between sensory information and cognitive evaluation of that information between 1829 and 1834, according to Mook (2004). In 1860, Gustav Fechner contributed a method to correlate physical variables to mental variables over the entire range of possible variables (Mook). Fechner was sufficiently mesmerized to later pen the metaphysical text “On Life After Death”. Early 20th century research branched into the field of mental imagery and theorized the body would respond to mental practice alone (Washburn, 1916) but EMG did not confirm this theory until 1932 (Jacobson). Simultaneously, the lay literature began to explore how concepts from modern science could enhance desired outcomes. The year 1927 brought pianist Heinrich Kosnick’s Lebenssteigerung (Life-Enhancement) in which he described how his “psycho-physiological” method could increase the skills of his piano students. In 1933, Freeman showed concomitant muscle activity could be measured during mental imagery of an activity, as cited in Green (1994). By 1934, Sackett concluded that physical practice was superior to mental imagery but mental imagery did improve performance. Mabel Todd, a professor at Columbia University Teachers College, published The Thinking Body in 1937 in which she outlined her philosophy of “Structural Hygiene” that taught students mental processes to influence ease of movement and posture. In the mid- to late-20th century, multiple reviews of previous research (Richardson, 1967; Corbin 1972; Weinberg 1982; and Feltz and Landers, 1983) concluded mental practice is indeed an effective method for improving performance.
Although research supports mental practice as a viable method of physical skill development, the question remains: how does it work? Evidence points to the theory that mental imagery is consciousness itself (Marks, 1999 and Ginsburg, 1999). Wittgenstein declared mental images are the means by which we interact with the world, they are how we know (1949/1978). For example, when a chef following a recipe reads the ingredient “artichoke”, the chef may visualize the artichoke, smell its aroma, taste it, spatially locate it in the kitchen, kinesthetically feel its spiky roughness, or relate to it emotionally. All of these responses are represented by mental imagery. Even the word “artichoke” on the recipe card is an image, a representation of the real thing. Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) expresses this concept with the phrase, “the map is not the territory” (Bavister and Vickers, 2004). In the same way that a map is a representation of the territory but is not the territory itself, the image of the artichoke is not the artichoke any more than the word “artichoke” is an artichoke. Although the mental image of the artichoke as a smell, taste, visual picture, location, or sensation is not the artichoke, it is a valid and useful representation of an artichoke, and the method by which the chef is made conscious of the ingredient for the recipe.
That which one is conscious of is one’s reality; it is a truism from which one operates. Plato’s allegory of the cave described prisoners who have spent their entire lives in a cave, chained so that they can only see flickering shadows on the cave wall. The prisoners think the shadows are real, substantive beings, because it is all they have ever experienced. It is obvious to the outsider that shadows have no substance; they are not real in the sense that people are real. However, whether something is experienced as real has very little to do with its status in the physical world. Only the subject’s perception of the object, dictates its realness (Heidegger, 1932/2002).
In order for an athlete to be considered conscious, some type of mental imagery is in use. The batter anticipates the feel of the bat connecting to the ball, the diver mentally hears the quiet splash of a perfect dive, the dancer visualizes the flight of a swan, and the soccer player daydreams about a friend and subsequently gets thumped by an incoming ball! A constant river of mental information flows through the mind of every conscious human and it can be influenced by consciously chosen imagery.
Purposeful manipulation of mental imagery is familiar to elite level athletes who report using imagery more often than less experienced athletes (Hall, Rodgers and Barr, 1990). This content is largely at the athlete’s discretion and therefore a potential ally in performance success. The athlete who images crossing the finish-line and seeing the desired time on the clock is “using imagery” to succeed; Walter Mitty daydreaming of his secret life as a fighter-pilot thus escapes his normal life. Both streams of thought are purposeful and, by design, both are “real” to the thinker. Negative imagery is just as “real” to the athlete and also powerful. For this reason, negative imagery has been shown to produce significant performance deterioration (Hall, Schmidt, Durand, and Buckolz, 1994).
Vividness refers to how clearly an athlete sees the image. Control is the ability to direct an image and manipulate its contents. Both are important characteristics of successful imagery. Start and Richardson as cited in Green (1994), found that athletes who had high degrees of both vividness and control performed best. They found the next best combination was low vividness and high control, then low vividness and low control, and lastly high vividness and low control. This surprising finding caused the authors to conclude that if an athlete can vividly image performing, but cannot control the image to direct what is wanted, the athlete might actually be practicing detrimental movement patterns.

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