This post isn’t about watching James Cameron’s avatar movie whilst being on a treadmill. So for all those people that thought it was something to do with that film you’re out of luck. I digress anyway on with the post, Stanford University has found out that people who watch themselves as an avatar.
Using one particular piece of exercise equipment, found it was a good way to get people motivated to exercise the, people in the study who watched themselves as an avatar exercising on a treadmill. Were more likely to want to do it in comparison to those who looked at avatars who were doing nothing in particular or just hanging out.
The people who were watching avatars of themselves exercise, did so for an hour longer in comparison to the other group who was not doing very much. The researchers were very surprised at the results because they didn’t think it would work at all and were quite skeptical to start off with.
In each of the three studies which involved 80 people they found that when people saw digital representations of themselves, they really were motivated to do more exercise.
The way they conducted the study was to put a virtual reality helmet onto the people and digitise their face using a picture of themselves. So the moral of the story is if you are likely to see yourself doing something then you are far more likely to behave that way. This is something that sports psychologists do when they are trying to help someone get better performance from what they are doing.
So if you see yourself exercising then hopefully you are more likely to want to do it. This might explain some of the reasons why the Nintendo Wii console is popular with a lot of people even though you don’t actually have a picture of yourself as your own avatar you do, in fact, see yourself doing the particular activity which helps with your motivation.
Maybe in years to come, we will see a lot more of this kind of technology, which will help people whom are struggling to motivate themselves to exercise. Why not try some mental visualisation yourself and see if it works. Or do you yourself already do it and has it worked for you?
This is a another interesting piece of research of how our brains work and how we can support ourselves better if we are struggling to motivate ourselves to exercise.
Source http://abcnews.go.com/
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