In the midst of researching the power of the imagination I stumbled upon a study carried out at Harvard Medical School. 

The Harvard researchers under Neuroscientist Alvaro Pascual-Leone instructed the members of one group of volunteers who had never played the piano before to play as fluidly as they could, trying to keep to the metronome’s 60 beats per minute. Every day for five days, the volunteers practised for two hours. Then they took a test.

The transcranial-magnetic-stimulation (TMS) test allows scientists to assess the functions of a specific area of neurons. In the piano players, the TMS mapped how much the motor cortex controlled the finger movements needed for the piano exercise. What the scientists found was that after a week of practise. the stretch of motor cortex devoted to these finger movements had spread like naturalised plants onto surrounding areas.

Then Pascual-Leone extended the experiment by having another group of volunteers merely think about practising the ...