Your brain on imagination: Study reveals how the mind’s eye helps us learn and change

Merely imagining a positive encounter with someone can not only make you like them better but can also change how information about that person is stored in your brain, according to new research published Dec. 10 in the journal “Nature Communication.”

The paper, led by cognitive neuroscientists at the University of Colorado Boulder and the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitve and Brain Sciences in Germany, provides some of the strongest evidence yet that vivid imagining can have tangible neural and behavioral impacts. The findings could inform new ways to address mental health issues, improve relationships and even boost sports and musical performance.

“We show that we can learn from imagined experiences, and it works very much the same way in the brain that it does when we learn from actual experiences,” said senior author Roland Benoit, associate professor of psychology and neuroscience at CU Boulder.

“It suggests that imagination is not passive,” said first author Aroma Dabas, who conducted the study as a graduate student at Max Planck. “Rather, it can actively shape what we expect and what we choose.”

What imagination and memory have in common

Previous research has suggested that the same brain regions that enable us to remember the past are at play when we imagine the future.

Children develop the capacity to imagine and remember around the same time —age 3. In older adults, these abilities tend to decline around the same time, too. And individuals with damage to memory centers in the brain find it hard to imagine new experiences.

“If memory and imagination are so similar, then theoretically people should be able to learn from merely imagined events,” said Benoit.

To test this theory, the researchers recruited 50 people for a brain imaging study.

The experiments centered around “reward prediction error,” a phenomenon critical to helping people establish preferences, form habits and learn.

It works like this: We encounter something in the real world that gives us more reward than we predicted. Our brain produces the neurotransmitter dopamine to signal that we, unexpectedly, like it. The more of a surprise that positive encounter is, the greater this “prediction error,” and the more our brain lays down neural connections to lock in that preference.

To test whether an imagined encounter would set that same brain machinery in motion, the researchers asked study subjects to list 30 people  and rank them from those they liked to those they felt neutral about to those they disliked.

Inside a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine, participants were presented with names of those ranked as neutral. They were instructed to imagine, vividly, for 8 seconds, either a positive experience with that person or a negative experience.

Participants developed a preference for the people they’d had more imaginary fun with, and, on a subsequent test, they indicated that they liked them more.

Remarkably, how they arrived at that preference played out clearly on their brain scans: The ventral striatum (the main brain region that governs reward prediction error) lit up more during imaginations when the participants experienced a stronger prediction error. This region appeared to work in tandem with the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, which is involved in storing memories of individual people.

“This provides a mechanism-level reason for how vividly imagining future scenarios, like a conversation, a social encounter, or a challenging situation, might influence our motivation, avoidance tendencies and later choices,” said Dabas.

Putting imagination into action

In psychotherapy, the potential applications for imagination are broad, said Benoit.

For instance, instead of exposing themselves to real-life fears to try to get over phobias, people could imagine them and get similar results.

To ease tensions at work, one might imagine a fun time with a coworker they aren’t so sure about.

Imagination has its dark sides, too. People with anxiety and depression tend to vividly imagine more negative things, and this can exacerbate problems.

“You can paint the world black just by imagining it,” said Benoit.

The new study did not find that imagining negative experiences with individuals made participants like them less. The authors hope to do more research to understand why.

The takeaway for now: Imagine better relationships and they just might happen that way in real life.