\It is well-known that Daniel Day-Lewis spent months in a wheelchair to prepare for his role in 'My Left Foot'.

As part of their research, John Gruzelier and colleagues at Goldsmiths, University of London, used neurofeedback training to improve actors' performance.
In training, each actor watched a simulation of a theatre auditorium, as if on stage, while wearing electrodes on their scalp. The lights and sounds of the simulation were programmed to change in response to the wearer's brain activity.
Each actor was told to control their brainwaves to take the lights and crowd noise to a given level. The brain activity needed to achieve this was somewhere between slow-wave activity, associated with sleep, and fast-wave activity, associated with alert wakefulness.
"It's the natural relaxed state of focused attention," New Scientist quoted Gruzelier as saying.
It's what actors refer to as "listening"; what you need to achieve a Judy Dench-class performance, he adds.
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Gruzelier's team found that both the actors and professors' scores were higher after the seven weeks of training compared with a group that received no training over the same period.
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