Play Piano, Outrun Mean Dogs: All in your Brain

Turns out my parents could have saved the money they spent on a piano. I could have learned in my imagination.

In a chapter of The Brain That Changes Itself, I learned about an experiment where a “mental practice” group sat in front of an electric piano keyboard for two hours a day and imagined playing a sequence of notes and hearing them played, while the other “practice group” actually played the music on the keyboard.

Both groups had their brains mapped before the experiment, each day during it, and afterward. When each group played the sequence of notes they’d been imagining or practicing, the computer measured accuracy.

By the third day, the imagined group played as accurately as the practiced group. By the fifth day the practiced group made gains, but those gains were overcome by the imagined group with a single two-hour physical practice session.

This goes way beyond the so-called power of positive thinking.  The book reported on a study where the subjects who did physical exercise of a sort increased their muscular strength by 30% while those who only imagined the same exercises increased theirs by 22%.

This has real implications for business communicators. For example, if you were selling widgets or sports drinks to kids in tough neighborhoods, instead of making general claims like “Widget will make you run faster & jump higher,” you should try “Buy Widget to outrun mean neighborhood dogs -- even while jumping trashbags and open manholes.”

Not only would more kids try Widget, the visual image of them navigating the urban obstacle course might convince their brains they could do it.

What's next for Widget?  Maybe the kids would start a viral marketing campaign...

Editing The Pope

Vatican correspondence doesn't usually interest me, but when the media called the pope's latest encyclical a "papal white paper" I took note. I used it as a case study for the six-step process of writing a white paper.

I also took the opportunity to suggest how, if it had been written for business, I would have re-written it:

As written: The Church does not have technical solutions to offer and does not claim “to interfere in any way in the politics of States.” She does, however, have a mission of truth to accomplish, in every time and circumstance, for a society that is attuned to man, to his dignity, to his vocation.

I'd write: The Church maintains its distance from the politics of States (”Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s"). At the same time, She speaks directly to individuals in all walks of life, including statecraft, to apply Christ’s teachings to their daily lives and decisions in all matters, including business, economics and the proper use of modern technologies.

Caveat: I wouldn't presume to tell the pope to re-write this message. My focus is educating business communicators on the places where a business white paper will align and diverge from the centuries-old style perpetuated by Pope Benedict XVI.

Your Brain and the Fart Joke

According to Yale professor of psychology, Paul Bloom, “Good smells, such as fresh bread, make people kinder and more likely to help a stranger; bad smells, like farts (the experimenters used fart spray from a novelty store), make people more judgmental.

"If you ask people to unscramble sentences, they tend to be more polite, minutes later, if the sentences contain positive words like honor rather than negative words like bluntly."

Next time you’re delivering a presentation, keep this in mind. The oft-repeated advice to open with a joke should be tempered by what you just learned about neurophysiology — don’t make it a fart joke.  More on this in my blog.