Pascual-Leone and colleagues at The National Institute for Health done one experiment.
They recruited three groups of adult human volunteers, who could not play the piano. Every day for five days, the volunteers do the activities given to them for two hours. At the end of each day’s practice session, they sat beneath a coil of wire that sent a brief magnetic pulse into the motor cortex of their brain, located in a strip running from the crown of the head toward each ear. The so-called transcranial-magnetic-stimulation (TMS) test allows scientists to infer the function of neurons just beneath the coil.
The focus of TMS mapping was to know how much of the motor cortex controlled the finger movements needed for the piano exercise.
The first group (control group) has the task of merely stare at the piano. As you can expect there was no difference in their brain scan. It almost look same as in the following picture.
The second group were taught five-finger piano exercises. There was changes in their brain scans. No surprise, it should change. Right? Yes it did as in the following picture.
Most interesting is the third group. They were not asked to practice piano. But asked to imagine they were playing the piano. Guess what will be the result. There is no physical activity happening. So there should not be any change in the brain connections. It should be like the first group.
But you are wrong. There are big changes. See the following figure. brain scans showed almost identical patterns to those of the subjects who physically did the playing.
This stunning result tells us that it is not so much the contraction of muscles that was responsible for the change in the brain configuration, but rather the thought that preceded it, which was common to both non-control groups.
Ref: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7500130
Remember: Every thought you have leave its mark on your brain.
Part 1: Magic as medicine?
To be concluded …