Dear Larry,
Visualization is a hugely important process that has a number of different forms and uses. The way golfers always talk about visualization is pretty much limited to "imagining the ball rolling in the cup." This is not a very deep or sophisticated appreciation of visualization.
The fundamental property of the brain that makes it useful for survival is the prediction of future action and its consequences, so that the animal or human can successfully bridge behavior from the present to the future by astute action planning and execution. Plants don't need a brain because they don't have to move to eat or reproduce. Movement is a whole different form of living, and movement requires independent negotiation of challenges from point A to point B. "Visualization" is a form of prediction of the future. There are other forms of predicting the future that do not involve images, but are more intuitive or more motion-oriented or body-oriented.
The overwhelming majority of movement in everyday life (if not every single movement) involves tacit prediction of actions. When we reach for the door knob, we predict the shape of the doorknob as our hands shape themselves; we predict the time-to-contact for reaching the doorknob; we predict the temperature of the doorknob; we predict the solidity or wobbliness of the doorknob; we predict the difficulty of turning the doorknob; etc. If anything "surprises" us in this series of expectations, our brains go on alert because something isn't right and we therefore may be in danger. This is the feeling of shock of miscalculating the number of steps downward.
In golf, "visualization" is a form of predicting. But predicting what? Most golfers understand erroneously that simply visualizing the desired shot makes it happen. There's a little more to it than that. Good visualization is good predicting. You are not placing an order at McDonald's for the perfect putt -- instead, you are problem-solving the putt so that your solution is the best one you can come up with. The difference is between "hoping" and "expecting" the putt to come out as planned.
Accurate predicting in this problem-solving sense requires accuracy of information and experienced use of the information so that the visualization of the future corresponds very closely to what the future ought to look like with an excellent putt. Most of the accuracy comes from knowing the timing of how a ball will roll across a green -- in detail, from start to finish, without big gaps.
If you find yourself visualizing only a little piece of the putt, like the ball crossing over onto the cup, then this is a hopeful use of visualization. When the total putt is visualized in a problem-solving way, the golfer does not avoid or ignore the problems, but engages them directly and "sees" what works best.
Another, wholly separate aspect of visualization is a form of self-hypnosis -- or guiding behavior by suggestiveness. This form of visualiztion is not so much problem-solving as problem-avoiding. Self-hypnosis works to block out distractions, emotional fluxes, and other brain processes that would derail the physical execution of the planned stroke. A complete, multi-sensory form of this sort of visualization is nearly clairvoyant in its convincingness. Ben Crenshaw would "foresee" the winning putt as he waited his turn or as he stood at address, and it would be "foreseen" with such detail and clarity that he would hear the jubilant roar of the gallery as the putt crled into the cup. Then he would simply putt, and his "vision" would come true. In this sense, visualization can be used as a gateway into the zone.
All of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (a development of Eriksonian hynosis) is based on the sensory modalities with which the brain interacts with the world. A key principle of hypnosis and NLP is to make the "suggestion" acceptable by making it easy to accept -- that is, non-threatening and life-like and likeable. To this end, NLP suggestions are usually multi-sensory and have a sense of temporal beginning, middle and end. Golf visualization needs this as well.
Mental practice is just something academics started exploring once it was learned that practicing physical behaviors mentally activated many (but not all) of the same brain processes that the actual physical behavior activated. There is some research that suggests that "learning" a new behavior is faster when early mental practice is used, and the sort of results you describe from Stanford is probably a mixture of early learning plus some self-hypnosis in the sense of problem-blocking.
Other forms of predicting are also immensely useful -- especially kinesthetic or motion imagining. A practice stroke is a form of predicting and a mental practice stroke is also a form of predicting. In both cases, the focus is on the form, size, and timing of the movement -- perhaps visually in part, but certainly in terms of the "feel" of the body action. This form of predicting is not so much a matter of "muscle memory" (a vague term not used in neuroscience) as it is a combination of knowledge of what the good stroke looks and feels like (and why, if possible), knowledge of how to make it (what moves how, where, and when), and what feelings should be occuring where, when, and how. When done properly, the focus is on the accuracy of the experience so that the desired form of motion in the prediction corresponds to reality in the execution.
This previous
Flatstick Forum post on "Imagery Training" addresses many of these same issues in greater detail. There is a nice series of studies on some details of how this works in the brain in the
Science>Neurscience>Motor learning section of my website. A similar section covers mental imagery:
Science>Neuroscience>Mental Imagery. In the
Science>Psychology>Visualization section, there are resources for visualization in sports.
The bottom line is that predicting how the putt should go is a matter of information processing under skilled application of knowledge and experience. This sort of predicting may be visual or kinesthetic or even intuitive, and can be used for problem-solving, problem-blocking, and promoting the chances of the plan and the reality corresponding closely. There is no real "mystery" in some other-worldly dimension about this -- no putts really sink due to magic.
Cheers!
Geoff Mangum
Putting Theorist and Instructor
Geoff Mangum's PuttingZone
http://puttingzone.com>
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