I read a story recently about a POW in Vietnam who spent the better part of a decade in captivity. He was an avid golfer before he was captured. After his release, he shot even par on his very first round. When asked how he did it after not touching a golf club for so long, he replied that everyday he simply imagined shooting a perfect round.

It’s all in your head, man.

Anecdotally (!) when I was a trucker and had to drive a different motor, I’d often start off crunching the gears, hitting the wrong switches etc. I found the best technique was to drive for an hour or so then stop for an early breakfast.

During the time sat not driving, my brain would somehow integrate what I’d learned down into a subconscious level, so when I started driving again I was suddenly no longer making the same mistakes.

In WW2 the RAF called it “Fighter Pilot Syndrome” where under pressure you’d react faster than you could think, and if you hadn’t transitioned properly from one aircraft type to another you’d get into trouble, probably a good reason for the development of flight and other simulators. Would be interesting to know how the current military deal with such phenomena. I’d strongly suspect “interval training”, flying a simulator then taking a break, would work better than intensive training.

Anecdotally again I’ve heard the same sort of thing from musicians, practicing then stopping generates a different learning than continous practicing.

Authors: Vinoth K. Ranganathan, Vlodek Siemionow, Jing Z. Liu, Vinod Sahgal and Guang H. Yue
Title: From mental power to muscle power—gaining strength by using the mind
Published: Neuropsychologia, Vol 42(7), 2004

Here’s the abstract:
The purposes of this project were to determine mental training-induced strength gains (without performing physical exercises) in the little finger abductor as well as in the elbow flexor muscles, which are frequently used during daily living, and to quantify cortical signals that mediate maximal voluntary contractions (MVCs) of the two muscle groups. Thirty young, healthy volunteers participated in the study. The first group (N=8) was trained to perform “mental contractions” of little finger abduction (ABD); the second group (N=8) performed mental contractions of elbow (ELB) flexion; and the third group (N=8) was not trained but participated in all measurements and served as a control group. Finally, six volunteers performed training of physical maximal finger abductions. Training lasted for 12 weeks (15 min per day, 5 days per week). At the end of training, we found that the ABD group had increased their finger abduction strength by 35% (P<0.005) and the ELB group augmented their elbow flexion strength by 13.5% (P<0.001). The physical training group increased the finger abduction strength by 53% (P<0.01). The control group showed no significant changes in strength for either finger abduction or elbow flexion tasks. The improvement in muscle strength for trained groups was accompanied by significant increases in electroencephalogram-derived cortical potential, a measure previously shown to be directly related to control of voluntary muscle contractions. We conclude that the mental training employed by this study enhances the cortical output signal, which drives the muscles to a higher activation level and increases strength.