Tips and Tricks

Choosing your thought: The thought that you train on and use for your Mental Commands can be anything. They can be literal (i.e. you can try and focus on pushing the virtual box) or they can be as abstract as you like (i.e. where push is associated with visualizing a scene or counting backwards from 500 in steps of 7). The possibilities are endless. Different strategies work best for different people, so try a few out.

If you are training a profile with one command, you want to make that one command as strong and distinct as possible. One way to achieve this is to use something that is multi-modal - i.e. something that contains different sensory and kinematic (related to movements of your muscles) components all together. If you have a strong disposition toward any of these modalities (e.g. you are a musician and so can easily imagine auditory sounds), you may find focusing on this single modality works best for you.

If you are training a profile with multiple commands, you may find you get best results if each of your commands uses a single and different sensory or kinematic modality (e.g. one that is visual, one that is auditory and one that is kinematic). What is most important is that they are distinct from each other and you are able to recreate them accurately in your mind repeatedly.

You may also find that associating different hand gestures or postures with a Command can help to better reproduce them.

Multiple commands: The more Commands that are in a profile the harder it is to trigger them independently. For best results, we recommend becoming confident with one command before trying a profile with two, and for becoming confident with two commands before trying a profile with three, etc.

Training sequence: If you are training a profile with one command, we recommend that you alternate training of the Command with training of the Neutral state. This will provide the best contrast for your profile.

If you plan to develop a profile with multiple commands, we recommend adding in all of the Commands at an early stage in the training process, rather than perfecting one Command before adding in the others. This way you can, from the beginning, ensure that the Commands are well separated from each other and work well together. You may find that cycling through them in sequence for training gives you the best result.

Words of encouragement: Controlling machines with your mind is hard. Do not be discouraged if you are not able to master mind control right away. Being able to recreate a thought in your mind at will is something that take practice for most of us to learn. It is like learning how to generate certain patterns of brain activity to learn how to walk or talk. Practice certainly does help and you will likely find that with repeated trainings, your ability to trigger a command at will becomes much easier.

The ability to clear your mind of distracting thoughts while focusing on a particular one can be a great way to train your brain to have better focus in other situations. Indeed, some people use Mental Commands training to challenge and train their attentional control generally.