Visualization In Technique

I recently reread a chapter on leaping (Alan's honing book I think), which talked about swatting the keyboard effortlessly instead of tensing up. this works so well! I took it one step further and imagined little black dots (flies) that I was swatting on the keyboard. it struck me just how powerful visualization is. that same day I was practicing a fast sequence where the musical line flowed up from the LH to the RH and back down. I've always found this strangely difficult to do evenly. I decided to apply the killer technique+visualization combo! first as I went from left thumb to right I imagined that I was doing an ordinary legato weight shift as between two fingers. pretending like this led to the next visualization - my two hands suddenly merged into one Meta-Hand! this felt quite freaky, pretending I had just one hand, but it sure worked! anyway, my question was, has anyone else experimented with visualisations? I'm eager to learn some more!

I came up with an interesting thing along these lines the other day. Basically, if you're going by step from thumb to fifth and have any basic idea of the arm following the fingers, you are very much used to the idea of the arm flowing continuosly. You don't stop the arm into most fingers because you're already going towards the next. But there's a tendency to stop dead on arriving at the fifth and jam. When the notes run back down at once, I like to use some kind of circle to aim slightly past the fifth and then curve onto a route back. But it's still very easy to forget this and aim AT a direct collision with the fifth whenever the line stops on a longer note there, rather than to drift the arm slightly through the action of moving the key. I realised this habit comes in many places (and it can happen on the thumb equivalent too, in the opposite direction). In the quick leaps outwards in chopin's op. 25 no. 5 I aimed down at the 5th fingers, not to drift the arm beyond while the finger continued to stand freely and comfortably. Anyway, to combat this, sometimes try imagining you had a 6th finger that would play after the fifth, on an adjacent note up. Every time you reach the "end" visualise what it might feel like if another finger was sitting there and the arm was going to guide you a little further, while you play that one. If you can trick your fifth into never feeling like the end of the line, it's amazing how just a little extra arm movement can get the finger working better during the key depression. Although it's essential know how to get arm aligned in a theoretical optimal alignment for each finger, once you're already used to being there it's actually far better to be aiming to drift the arm slowly through and beyond that point, while the finger plays. It's easy to start to aim to get the arm to find that exact point and stop dead precisely when you're there, but this encourages you to stab the arm down into the fifth, rather than flow onwards in a way that makes room for the finger to engage from a place of freedom and ease. When if feels like a final destination, you tend to tense up to support an arm shove that goes straight down, rather than move the finger freely as the arm floats beyond. The imaginary extra finger really helps to stop that habit of digging the arm down into a point of completion- because you're always aiming past rather than jamming into a stop.