You Are the Placebo: Making Your Mind Matter

than nine years imprisoned in the Soviet Union after being falsely accused of spying for the United States in the s. Sharansky—who spent days of his prison term in a small, darkened, freezing-cold punishment cell—played a game of mental chess against himself everyday, keeping track of the board coordinates and the positions of each piece in his mind.
This enabled Sharansky to maintain many of his neural maps (which normally require external stimulation to stay intact. After his release, he immigrated to Israel and eventually became an Israeli cabinet minister.
When world chess champion Gary Kasparov came to Israel into play a simultaneous chess match against 25 Israelis, Sharansky beat him.
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Aaron Rodgers, quarterback for the Green Bay Packers, also imagines moves in his head that he often later executes with precision on the field.
Leading up to the Packers 2011 Super Bowl win, in a play-off game that the sixth-seeded Packers won 48 to 21 against the top-seeded Atlanta
Falcons, Rodgers completed 31 of 36 passes (86.1 percent, the fifth-best postseason completion percentage of all time.
“In the sixth grade, a coach taught us about the importance of visualization Rodgers told a sports reporter for USA Today.
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“When I’m in a meeting, watching film, or lying in bed before I go to sleep, I always visualize making those plays. A lot of those plays I made in the game, I
had thought about. As I lay on the couch, I visualized making them.”
Rodgers was also able to successfully spin out of three potential sacks in that game, later noting about those plays, I visualized the majority before I made them.”
Countless other professional athletes have also used mental rehearsal to stunning effect, including golfer Tiger Woods basketball stars Michael
Jordan, Larry Bird, and Jerry West and baseball pitcher Roy Halladay.
Champion golfer Jack Nicklaus wrote in his book Golf My Way:
I never hit a shot, even in practice, without having a very sharp, in-focus picture of it in my head. It’s like a color movie. First, I seethe ball where I want it to finish,
nice and white and sitting up high on the bright-green grass. Then the scene quickly changes, and I seethe ball going there its path, trajectory, and shape, even its behavior on landing. Then there’s sort of a fade-out, and the next scene shows me making the kind of swing that will turn the previous images into reality. Only at the end of this short, private, Hollywood spectacular do I select a club and step up to the ball.
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As we can see from these examples alone (and there are many, many more just like them, plenty of evidence shows that mental rehearsal is extremely effective for learning a physical skill with minimal physical practice.
I can’t resist adding one more example, this time from Jim Carrey, who
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tells an amazing story about what he did when he first came to Los
Angeles in the late s as a struggling actor looking for work. He’d written a paragraph-long affirmation on apiece of paper about meeting the right type of people, getting the right types of acting jobs, working on the right movie with the right casting, and being successful and contributing something worthwhile and making a difference in the world.
He would go up to Mulholland Drive in the Hollywood Hills every night and lean back in his convertible and lookup at the sky. He’d say that paragraph to himself, committing it to memory, as he imagined that what he was describing was actually happening. And he wouldn’t drive back down from that Hollywood overlook until he felt as though he was the person he’d been imagining, until it felt real for him. He even wrote a check to himself for $10 million, penning for acting services rendered on it and dating it Thanksgiving 1995.” He carried the check in his wallet for years.
Finally, in 1994, three movies were released that made Carrey a star.
First, Ace Ventura: Pet Detective came out in February, followed by The

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