Imagination Study Could Help Fuel Sports, Music Work Performance
New research from the University of Colorado has found that 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.
I imagine all the people in total awe when Lucille Ball started in on Rickey in what was the first great American comedy. This was 1951, six years after my dad was born, 20 years til I would be born. It was a period our imaginations were being test - by that I mean the days of radio only entertainment had faded, even if 28% of US Households still didn’t have a TV set. A year later the legendary soap opera Guiding Light started to air, but few know it began as a radio telecast. When our imaginations had to work and think and we could conjure up what we thought characters looked like. By 1955, half the nation had a TV set and began to slowly chip away at one of the great things about being alive. Not seeing, just hearing. In 1952, only about 25% of the country saw the Yankees 20-year-old Mickey Mantle homer at Ebbets Field to propel the Yanks over the Brooklyn Dodgers in Game 7 of the World Series. My dad and his brothers and my grat grandmother gathered around a transistor, imaging Mickey coming to the bat. Most of them were Red Sox fans, dad and Nanny liked Mantle. They imagined the towering homer, since they didn’t yet have a television.
There have been countless studies about our imagination and what fuels it and how it changes as we come of age. Some have studied the benefit of imagining things you want in hopes of getting them. I don’t mean material things as much experiences.
The University of Colorado research about using imaginations is being lauded as potentially useful to help find new ways to address mental health issues, improve relationships and even sports and musical performances.
Cognitive neuroscientists at the UofC’s Boulder campus did the research alongside the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Germany. The reserachers say the findings provide “some of the strongest evidence yet that vivid imagining can have tangible neural and behavioral impacts.”
“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.
Graduate student Aroma Dabas says the findings “suggest that imagination is not passive.”. “Rather, it can actively shape what we expect and what we choose.”
Individuals with damage to memory centers in the brain find it hard to imagine new experiences, while most kids develop their capacity to imagine around age 3.
“If memory and imagination are so similar, then theoretically people should be able to learn from merely imagined events,” Benoit said in an interview in the publication Nature Communication.
To test this, the researchers recruited 50 people for a brain imaging study:
Say we encounter something that gives us more reward of happiness than we had thought it would
In this situation, “our brain produces dopamine to signal that we, unexpectedly, like it”
The more surprising the encounter, the greater this “prediction error,” then the more our brain takes note of the so-called neural connections to lock in that preference
Then the researchers asked the participants to jot down the names of 30 people they knew and rank them from those they liked to those they felt neutral about, to those they disliked. Fascinating exercise.
Then using a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine, participants were presented with the names of those ranked as neutral. They were instructed to imagine for 8 seconds either a positive experience with that person or a negative one. Then in a follow up test of the same cohort, it was clear people had developed a preference for those they had more imaginary fun with.
And brain scans illustrated this with amazing detail. There’s something called the ventral striatum that oversees reward prediction error, the researchers said.
Dabas believes the findings provide a kind of roadmap now to help imagine future events. If “vividly imagining future scenarios, say a social encounter at a weekend BBQ or a work meeting about a disgruntled client, this imagining can influence our motivation, and later choices.”