listen to a conversation between a student and a professor.So John, what can I do for you?Well, it\'s about the stuff you talked about yesterday, about the research on the brain.Okay. Well, one thing was that experiment where two groups of people were learning to play a finger exercise on the piano.If I understood you correctly,one group actually practiced the exercise on the piano, and the other group, they didn\'t move their hands. They just kind of imagined, visualizedhow their fingers would move on the piano.That\'s right. And each group did that every day for five days,two hours a day.Okay, so I did understand that part.I guess what I wasn\'t clear on was the results of the experiment.I mean, I don\'t think it was like, you knowthat at the end, both groups could play the exercise equally well. That\'s right. No,what the researchers were interested inwere changes in the brain that took place as a result of the practice,okay And what they found was that a certain part of the brain, the part that controls your fingers when you\'re playing the piano,that part had expanded as a result of the practice, and it expanded in both groups,the group that actually practiced on the pianoand the group that just imagined itthis mental practice they were doinglearning the exercise, was changing the physical structure of a portion of the brain,rewiring it, expanding it.It\'s amazing that just thinking could do that could affect the brain like that.I wonder if that\'s true for sports toowell, the idea that you can improve, say, your performance in a sport byvisualizing it has been around for quite a while, butI don\'t know that anyone suspected that you were actually alteringthe physical structure of your brain when you did it.I wish that men I could skip basketball practice and just lie around and think about practicing tonight.Good luck with your coach on that one,it\'ll still require lots of real practice, physical practice,but maybe with the mental training, it\'ll require less practice,or maybe you\'d learn to do it better than with the physical practice alone, okay?And I had just one other question.You also made some point about meditation?Yes, I was talking about a researcher who studied brain activity in some people who\'d been practicing meditation for many years,and he found out that they, too had, apparently to these many years of meditation practice changed their brains,patterns connections within their brains.For instance, they gradually enabled themselves to consciously activatethe left prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that\'s active when we\'re feeling happy.So they kind of train themselves to be happy, yeswhich is interesting, because usually we think we have to have something, you know, or like,achieve something to feel happy, but they don\'t need thatgood point.