sakiro wrote
i'm interested in make a similar experiment like this one but (and here i need your help to know if this is possible in the first place) to increase the muscle mass of x part of my body ..

Hi dude,
Apologies for delay!
Your experiment design will depend on whether you want 'bigger' OR 'better'.
If x part of your body contains muscle, its mass per unit volume (not the same as size, although denser muscles do get larger too) can be increased by genome hacking. The fastest way is using electrical stimulaton across the relevant muscle/s whilst watching workout videos and imagining you're the exerciser. Images should be in the first person (like you ARE the person, not like you are watching the person.)

If you video yourself working out and use that it would be perfect. Bruce Lee is said to have used this as well as other techniques, for 'passive' training.

Focusing on the 'end result' is a matter of 'behaving as though' rather than thinking 'one day I will look like that' we are thinking, 'that's me'.

But no woo woo!  :  )  We have to align with reality. Someone who's 1.5m tall is never gonna be 2m tall without surgery, and someone with a naturally small frame (like Bruce Lee) is never gonna be the size of Arnie, though they may well be as strong.

The body uses density of muscle, not size, for increased strength. Size increase is easily achieved with steroids, but it doesn't bring greater strength if density is low (most of the muscles fill up with retained water).

Other vital things your body will need to make such a change are the energy to do the building, and the building blocks to make more muscle. We cannot imagine these  :  )  and they depend on a stable low GI diet with extra protein after workouts.

Christian Bale (actor) is very good at these body-shaping hacks, and has managed to look everything from emaciated to porky in various roles. From playing an anorexic (in 'The Machinist') weighing 121 pounds, he was cast as Batman and weighed in at 220 pounds in just 5 months.

Food + imagination can indeed increase muscle density, but muscle tone can only be achieved by actually using it. Current research indications are that High Intensity Interval training (HIT) is the fastest way to good muscle tone:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 … 123639.htm

Keep us informed of your results!
Best,
AR

Sakiro Wrote:

Probably the results are direct related to how good is your imagination? (N3) And do you think that concepts like overtraining are applied to this? Like "training to much" in your imagination can make recover slower, drain up your CNS, etc etc .. (something real with the real stuff)

'Overtraining' can happen in any field; physical or mental, if we forget the stretch-relax rule. Too much of the same activity without a break is always a problem unless it encompasses both stress and relax (eg, breathing). To absorb and remember what we're learning we need regular breaks doing something totally different.

the "problem" is the practice to understand that you must suspend belief for a little to make that new reality emerge inside-->out .. and like we work more from out ---> inside right?

Suspension of disbelief isn't necessary when you're fully aware of what you are doing. With practice; it becomes a different state you step into where you choose to experience something simply in order to see what it is like, in full understanding (as a cheeky bonus) that doing this  will make it more likely to be so. (So never imitate idiots -your unconscious will assume you want to be like that for real.)

In other words we play at being (for example) Batman because we think it might be interesting to see what Batman feels like, we want to know what it actually feels like to be Batman, to have the experience of being Batman. We know we can give ourselves that experience so don't have to believe we are Batman, we simply have to behave as though we were Batman. * How does Batman speak/walk? What sort of things does Batman think about? What does Batman eat for breakfast? Just copy that. You can even say to yourself "I'm copying Batman"; it won't affect the modeling process. Try joining the group as Batman and posting in the PG forum, thinking, 'How would Batman answer this?'

People tend to overcomplicate the 'Behave as though' process. It's as simple as joining in a childhood game with a group of kids where someone says, "okay I'm the nurse, Dave here is the patient with a broken knee, so you be the doctor." You just immediately start thinking of what a doctor might do in such situations and ad-lib your lines in the game. Modeling is that simple. We just need to surround ourselves with good models as input, get out of the way (ie, stop thinking about it logically) and let it do itself. Allow yourself to play.

We're modeling someone (or a conglomerate of someones) all the time. Our power as NHers is to be able to choose who they are because we know how this stuff works.

It's a bit like psych-profiling, you don't have to believe you actually are the criminal in order to imagine from previous experience how she or he might think or what they might do in given situations.
Best,
AR

More about this:

If mirror neurons fires being only the observer, it's true that we can learn and model people and theirs skills and behaviours only just looking at them?

Of course, you recommend it as part of COMP not only looking the model but imagining that we are doing the momvement too, and makes sense to be the optimal way to model someone, not just looking but "doing" (even if at only looking we are somehow doing in some level because of mirror neurons firing but you get my point)

I'm curious what happen when we are looking at someone doing something far far away of our present level of skill .. for example someone with zero gymnastic skill looking at a guy doing backflips, what kind of patterns mirror neurons fires? probably a very innacurate low resolution copy? it's worth of something in that case?

But i remember too the example of the baby monkey that pull his tongue out, only to looking the other guy doing it (when theorically he NEVER did it before), but maybe is different when we are talking about very basic movement patterns.


Thinking about that, is when i remember when i read in the tutorials that the skill/concept we want to learn must have some points of similarity to something known before we can get it.

Do you think it makes a difference to imagining yourself doing something vs imagining looking at you (like a videotape) doing something, like an observer of yourself?

We need to create a list of fictional/real characters of healthy/strong examples of theirs respectivly networks, for example Tony Stark for N5. With a resource of videos/books to see what they behave like.

I read about you doing some work in this with Spark with good results? (N5 too)


Ok, i'm talking too much LOL, i need to experiment/play with this a lot =)

Cheers

Sakiro Wrote:
If mirror neurons fires being only the observer, it's true that we can learn and model people and theirs skills and behaviours only just looking at them?

MNs are active when we do things, when we watch others do things, and when we imagine doing things.

If someone has no experience at all of a new activity and cannot imagine how it's being done, they won't fire. For example if someone came in here and started changing color at will, no mirror neurons would fire in me. I haven't a clue what's going on and no chance of copying it. There are not enough points of similarity between what I know already and what's happening. My brain & body has no experience of which neurons should fire to achieve the changes I see. I've never seen anything like it.

If a bird flew around in here, even though I am not a bird, have no flying skills and will never fly, my MNs would fire if I watched it or imagined flying, priming roughly what muscles are being used. The bird's movements have enough points of similarity to my own muscular movements to be recognizable (and you often see little kids flap their arms pretending to be birds). The unconscious knows 'wings are like arms'. Of course we don't have the musculature & skeletal design to fly, but we do have experience of things like jumping and landing from height, hang gliding or parachuting or skiing or swimming, and can imagine what muscles flight must use.

Being able to imagine something is what makes MNs fire when we're copying it. The more points of similarity to known movements, the more neurons fire. If we're watching an activity with interest, the brain assumes its something we may need to learn to do ourselves. This is part of natural culture and N3's 'when in Rome' strategy.

Baby animals are especially primed to model the behaviors they see; it's so vital to survival. Motions like tongue-protruding, grinning and sucking have all been practiced in the womb. So the monkey already knows how to put out its own tongue and what that feels like. The example of tongue-protruding in the 'other animal' has enough points of similarity to 'what is known' to be copied.

You asked:Do you think it makes a difference to imagining yourself doing something vs imagining looking at you (like a videotape) doing something, like an observer of yourself?

It's more powerful to imagine in 'first person shooter' mode.
Re: list of fictional characters, together with their abilities/skills = great idea; do you have the time?

You wrote: I read about you doing some work in this with Spark with good results?

I don't know what 'Spark' is, so either I've wiped some memory by accident, or this is a mix-up? It could be useful to know which  :  )
Best,
AR

Hi dude,

When we're little kids its hard to imagine being a teenager. Its a pretty similar feeling...and we know the whole is going to be more than the sum of its parts (or from a 'ghost in the machine' POV,  the soul is more than the hum of its parts.)

Ah Spock, yes, I wouldn't be who I am today without good old Spock, who of course lacked sentiments and emotions, yet somehow still managed to experience fascination and humor  :  )

If Spock was human he'd have been a front loader who lacked rear-to-front connections, but Vulcans train themselves that way by choice; it isn't done to them by accident. If it was, they'd probably rebel against coercion for being illogical   :  )
Best,
AR