A research group led by Kyoto Institute of Technology researcher Kyonosuke Yagi and Professor Nobuyuki Kita of the School of Fundamental Sciences confirmed through experiments that simply imagining one's body becoming larger, as in Gulliver's Travels, increases one's stride length and changes the way one walks.
According to the Kyoto Institute of Technology, the research group used 18 healthy men and women aged 19 to 13 as subjects.
-Walk with your eyes open
Walking with eyes covered
- Cover your eyes and walk while imagining that you have grown tall enough to reach the 4-meter ceiling.
- Imagine your normal body and walk with your eyes covered
・Walk with your eyes open, imagining your body as if it were a normal body
-We had them try it out and measured their walking height and stride length.
As a result, when participants covered their eyes and imagined themselves growing taller, reaching the 4-metre ceiling, they found that their imagination caused them to walk with their feet raised higher and their stride length increased, even though their actual body size did not change.
Previously, such experiments had been conducted using advanced technology such as virtual reality (VR), but this study found that when vision was blocked, participants could completely change their body image using only their imagination. The research group said they had found that mindset and imagination have a major impact on exercise, and believes that this finding could be applied to rehabilitation and sports.
Paper information:【Frontiers in Human Neuroscience】Impact of body image on the kinematics of gait initiation
