Mental training and visualization can improve learning speed and long-term retention of motor and cognitive skills.

“using mental training is a reasonable substitute but not a complete substitute”

“mental training and visualization is a fascinating process that has been shown over and over again in now hundreds of studies to improve our ability to learn anything”

“if you're trying to get better at something that you've never performed before you really should know that the mental training visualization is probably not the best augment to that real world training until you're able to perform it successfully in the real world at least some of the time”

“Imagining the sequence of behavior that you'd like to maintain or even build up over time provided you've done that motor sequence before in the real world well the mental training and visualization can really keep that online or even help you improve over time”

“mental training and visualization can really help bring that number up”

“mental training visualization is going to be most effective for building up the number of accurate trials or the your ability to do something with a greater frequency of something that you're already capable of doing or have done at least once in the real world okay this is not to say that mental training and visualization can't be used to acquire new skills it can in principle but it has been shown to be most effective for enhancing the speed and the accuracy of skills that one has already demonstrated some degree of proficiency at in the real world”

“the key Importance of Being able to actually execute specific movements and cognitive tasks in the real world if you want the mental training and visualization to be especially effective”