Inform Yourself

My good friend Jay Niblick, founder of Innermetrix International, recently completed a study called The Genius Project. His study became the basis for his latest book, What’s Your Genius? This post is part of the Second Evolution of finding your genius, Future Visioning.

In the 1960’s Dr. Maxwell Maltz, an American Plastic Surgeon by training, conducted research to uncover why some of his patients failed to appreciate any relief from their mental suffering following successful plastic surgery. Even though the physical cause of their dissatisfaction was corrected, they continued to be just as dissatisfied with themselves as they were prior to surgery. Dr. Maltz wanted to understand how a person’s mental image of themselves influenced their interpretation of their physical image. After years of research into what drove people’s perception of themselves, what Dr. Maltz found was that our minds can’t tell the difference between a synthetic experience and a real-world experience – as long as that synthetic experience was sufficiently detailed or real enough. By synthetic experience he means imaginary, one held strictly in our heads and never having actually happened. In other words, if a person creates an image in their head that is real enough, even if it isn’t real or has never actually existed, their mind is likely to believe it as though it were a reality.

Dr. Maltz wrote a book called Psycho-Cybernetics, which details the results of his investigations. In it he described the human brain and nervous system as a “perfect goal striving servo- mechanism. Experimental and clinical psychologists have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that the human nervous system cannot tell the difference between an ‘actual’ experience and an experience imagined vividly enough and in detail”, explains Dr. Maltz.

In the book Dr. Maltz provides an account of an experiment on the effects of mental practice on improving basketball free throws. The study, published in Research Quarterly, divided the subjects into three groups. Each group was tested for free throw accuracy at the beginning and the end of the experiment. The three groups were:
• Group one physically practiced free throws for 20 days
• Group two performed no practice at all
• Group three spent 20 minutes a day getting into a deeply relaxed state and visualizing themselves shooting free throws. When they missed, they would visualize themselves correcting their aim accordingly.

The results were quite remarkable. The first group, which practiced 20 minutes a day, improved in scoring by 24%. The second group, which had no practice, showed no improvement at all, and the third group, which practiced only in their minds, improved in scoring 23%. Amazingly, pure mental practice yielded almost identical results as were seen in the group that practices physically.

In the book Peak Performance, Mental Training Techniques of the World’s Greatest Athletes, Charles Garfield talks about a similar experiment conducted by Soviet sports scientists. The study examined the effect of mental training, including visualization like described by Maltz, on four groups of world-class athletes prior to competing in the 1980 Lake Placid Olympics. The elite athletes were divided into the following four groups:
• Group 1 – 100% physical training
• Group 2 – 75% physical training, 25% mental training
• Group 3 – 50% physical training, 50% mental training
• Group 4 – 25% physical training, 75% mental training

What the researchers found was that group 4 – the group with the most mental training – showed significantly greater improvement than group 3. Likewise, group 3 showed more improvement than group 2 and group 2 showed more improvement than group 1. The findings of research like this show that if you believe in something firmly enough, and can create an image of it in your head that is clear enough, your mind will accept it as real. The effects of this belief are very important because these effects manifest in the real world in better performance. If the belief you create is sufficient enough, your mind will react to it in all the same ways it would react to a real environment. Have you ever felt your heart beat increase at just the thought of being in danger when there was no real danger at all? Have you ever gotten sad reading a sad story or watching a tearful moment in a movie even though you knew it wasn’t real? The suspension of belief that movie makers and authors seek to create is one example of what Dr. Maltz was talking about.

The opposite is also true in that if you don’t possess a clear enough image for some aspect of your life, you mind will not believe in it and your attitude towards it will be like that of any other thing you don’t really believe in (i.e., speculative, unconvinced, uncertain, etc.).

This means that if the synthetic image you create of yourself is a negative one (e.g., fat, ugly, clumsy, etc.), and it is real enough, believed enough, it can actually become your reality. While you may be no less coordinated than the person next to you, with a sufficient enough belief that you are clumsy, you will drop the ball more. If you create a strong enough belief in your head that you are obese, as you look in the mirror the image your mind interprets is a far cry from the reality that your optic nerves convey. Although you may be withering away to unhealthy levels your brain sees an image of obesity and grotesqueness.

In my next post I will explain how this directly correlates to you defining Your Genius!