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

A new study led by cognitive neuroscientists at the University of Colorado Boulder and the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences shows that merely imagining a positive encounter with someone can make you like them better by engaging brain regions involved with learning and preference. The findings could have implications for psychotherapy, sports performance and more.
 

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 December 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. Understanding such learning, the authors say, could elucidate 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 capacities to imagine and remember at 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 what is known as “reward prediction error,” the phenomenon critical for helping people establish preferences, form habits and learn.

It goes something like this: We encounter something in the real world that gives us more reward than we predicted it would. Our brain produces a puff of 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 they knew 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 (for instance, an ice cream cone with them on a hot day) or a negative experience (say, they borrowed your bike and returned it broken).

Over the course of the task, participants developed a preference for the people they’d had more imaginary fun with, and, on a subsequent test, they even 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 strongly during imaginations when the participants experienced a stronger prediction error. This region worked together with a region called the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, which is involved in storing memories of individual people. The imaginations thus seemed to have changed the knowledge about the people that is stored in the brain.

“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.

Previous work by other research groups has also suggested that mentally rehearsing movements, like playing the piano , can improve performance on the real—life stage.

The research informs many potential applications, for example in the realm of psychotherapy. Instead of exposing themselves to real-life fears — as is already done in the common phobia remedy known as exposure therapy — people can just imagine them and get similar results. The current research provides important insights into the underlying mechanisms.

To ease tensions at work, an individual might imagine a positive experience with a co-worker they aren’t so sure about.

Imagination has its dark sides too though, the authors note.

For instance, people with anxiety and depression tend to vividly imagine more negative things, and perseverating on those can exacerbate mental health problems.

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

Notably, the research did not find that imagining negative experiences with individual people made participants like them less. The authors hope to do more studies to understand why that is.

The takeaway for now: Imagine better relationships and they just may come.