Changing Your Mind with Virtual Reality

It's been a time-honored tradition that women have the right to change their minds. It turns out that people can literally change their minds, and not just about what to have for dinner.

Stroke victims that have lost use of a part of their brain can eventually have another part of the brain take over the lost function. This is hardly ground-breaking or new information, although it is wonderful news for those adults needing rehabilitation after a stroke or other brain damage.

Neuroplasticity is the brain's ability to reorganize itself by forming new connections throughout life. Previously, it was thought that only babies and children had any significant plasticity to the brain. Once you become an adult, with all your quirks, habits, mind-sets, behaviors, or even mental illnesses, you were set. Scientists are discovering that neuroplasticity does not end in adulthood. All those books showing which parts of the brain perform which function aren't exactly wrong. It's just that the brain's functions are more fluid than we knew.

A fascinating experiment at Harvard Medical School may have changed how we all look at learning abilities. A neuroscientist named Alvaro Pascual-Leone instructed volunteers to play five-finger piano as fluidly as they could every day for five days, two hours a day. At the end of each practice session, the volunteers sat beneath a coil of wire that measured the function of neurons beneath the coil by sending a magnetic pulse into the motor cortex of the brain. The scientists found that at the end of the five days, the amount of motor cortex devoted to the finger movements had spread and taken over surrounding areas of the brain.

Interesting stuff, right? Using a particular muscle causes the brain to devote more space to that function. But neuroscientist Pascual-Leone had another experiment in mind. He had another group of volunteers who were to just think about practicing the five finger piano exercise. They played the simple piece of music over and over in their minds, while holding their fingers still and simply imagining how they would move those fingers while playing. Then they too, sat under the coil of wire that measured how much of the cortex was devoted to piano-playing finger movements.

The results were astonishing. The area of motor cortex had expanded in the imaginary players in the same way that it had in the players who physically pounded piano keys. Pascual-Leone stated that, "Mental practice resulted in a similar reorganization of the brain."

The implications are enormous. Can athletes master new skills with less physical practice by merely imagining a new swimming stroke, or golf swing, or forward pass? Can we imagine ourselves into new talents?

I'd like to learn to knit, but my ability to sit still and learn something slowly is a bit limited. What if I could imagine my fingers handling the knitting needle and yarn properly, over and over and over? When I then sat down with an actual needle and yarn, would the physical learning time decrease?

And if my brain doesn't know the difference anyway, would it make me just as happy to imagine cooking a gourmet, five-star, four-course meal as it would in reality? Aside from the pleasure of actually eating delicious food, of course.

For years, the neuroscientific and psychiatric communities have assumed that an adult human brain was basically hardwired by adulthood. We have such theories as happiness set point, which assumed that a person has a level of happiness previously determined by their brain, and will invariably rise or fall automatically to that level. Psychiatric illnesses or diseases are considered to be immutable faulty wiring.

But maybe that isn't the case. As Alvaro Pascual-Leone demonstrated, the brain is more complex than we have thought. Imagination and thought have more power than the scientific community has ever believed.

This new finding also opens up lots of marketing possibilities. Maybe virtual vacations will be all the rage in a few years. What if we could practice raising children, or being happy, or forming better friendships along with surfing in Baja, climbing Mount Kilimanjaro, or riding the rapids of the Colorado River? Neuroplasticity could be big business.

And just to do an experiment of my own, today I'll just imagine I'm lying on a beach in Mexico while I do my grocery shopping. I might not get a tan, but my brain should be just as relaxed and happy. Right?