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A little bit of imagination can go a long way. The evidence keeps piling up. Picture yourself smacking a tennis ball expertly across the net, or performing a difficult piano concerto without striking a single wrong note, and you will likely perform better in real life, according to more than a decade of research. Imagination can also shape our preferences: Mentally rehearsing chance meetings with loved ones in specific places can enhance how much we like those places, some studies suggest.
Now researchers have shown that simply visualizing a positive interaction with a person can make us like them better. This mental exercise activates certain areas of the brain linked to learning and preference, according to a team from the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Germany and the University of Hamburg. The findings, published in the journal Nature Communications, could help shape treatments for phobias and other mental health conditions and even improve a person’s social relationships.
“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 co-author Roland Benoit, a cognitive neuroscientist now at Colorado University, Boulder, in a statement.
Humans learn, form habits, and establish likes and dislikes through a process known as reward prediction error. When something goes unexpectedly well, our brains treat us to a chemical reward: dopamine. The more surprising the new information is, the more powerful the burst of neurotransmitter, and the more our brains lay down neural tracks that help us recall that information later. This is also known as reinforcement learning.
Read more: “The Faulty Weathermen of the Mind”
The team of scientists used this feature of the human brain to test how imagination influences relationships. First, they recruited 50 people with no history of neurological or mental health disorders for a small brain imaging study. They asked these participants to list 30 people they knew, ranking them in terms of how familiar they were and how they felt about them: love, neutral, or dislike.
Then, while the participants were in a brain-scanning fMRI machine, the researchers presented them with the names of neutrally ranked people who were sufficiently familiar. They asked them to imagine vividly, for 8 seconds, a positive or a negative experience based on a prompt sentence—for instance, enjoying an ice cream with them on a hot day. At the end of the experiment, the participants were asked to rate how pleasant the experience felt.
When the participants were tested later, they reported greater liking for the acquaintances with whom they had more imaginary fun. The more vivid the imagined experience, the more pleasant people felt about it, and therefore the more surprising it seemed. These signals showed up in brain scans—the more pleasant and surprising the positive experience, the more the ventral striatum, the region of the brain that governs reward prediction error, lit up, and the more it synced up with the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, a region involved in representing people. The hippocampus, which is thought to play a key role in detecting novelty and building a coherent account of reality, also glowed up on the scans.
“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 co-author Aroma Dabas, who worked on the paper as a graduate student at Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences.
In contrast, participants didn’t change their minds about the individuals whom they imagined in negative scenarios. The scientists believe that’s because the surprise element was less powerful: These scenarios were generally less vivid, and only ranked moderately negative to neutral by participants. They noted that future research should dig into how imagination affects negative preferences.
The downside of this kind of imaginative learning: People with anxiety and depression can learn to expect negative outcomes by imagining them too frequently, the authors note. Some early evidence suggests that highly neurotic people may benefit less from mentally rehearsing positive experiences. A reminder for anyone who tends to ruminate.
“It suggests that imagination is not passive,” added Dabas. “Rather, it can actively shape what we expect and what we choose.” 
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Lead image: Paper Trident / Shutterstock
