The Non-BS Science of Manifestation: How Your Imagination Can Help With Pain, Anxiety, Conflict, and Recovery | Cassi Vieten

**Dan Harris** (0:03)
Hey, hey, everybody. Welcome to the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm your host, Dan Harris. Today, we're going to talk about how to reduce catastrophizing, interpersonal conflict, and even physical pain, while meanwhile increasing your sense of safety in your own nervous system through an innate capacity we all have.
That capacity is imagination. Now, you might be thinking, imagination, that sounds either boring or like something other people have, like people who work at Disney or Pixar. But we're all imagining all the time, thinking about it, we're always casting forward into the future thinking about how things may go, often in paranoid and phantasmagoric ways. But my guest is going to talk about what she calls adaptive imagination, healthy imagination that we can use to benefit in lots of really interesting ways. One thing you might be imagining at this point in my introduction here is that, is what you're talking about similar to the popular notion of manifestation? Well, it is and it isn't and we'll get into that in this interview.
My guest today is Dr. Cassie Vieten. She's a clinical psychologist and the Director of Research at the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination at the University of California at San Diego, where she also directs the Center for Mindfulness. And she's got a new book, which is called Imagine That, Transform How You Think, Feel and Live with the Science of Imagination. Dr. Cassie Vieten, welcome to the show.

**Cassi Vieten** (1:35)
Hey, it's great to be here, Dan.

**Dan Harris** (1:36)
Imagination, you call it the oldest human technology.
Why do you call it that? And more broadly, what is imagination in your view?

**Cassi Vieten** (1:49)
So the first thing I would say to listeners is number one, to begin to view your imagination as a useful tool, as a useful territory of your cognition. So when I talk about imagination, you know, they think of it as a kind of, maybe a little frivolous, a little bit of a luxury. Some people are very imaginative, others aren't.
But the truth is that all of us are imagining all day, every day, and it profoundly affects how we show up in the world, how we perceive reality, learning how to use your imagination in a way that's beneficial, is beneficial not only to how you experience the world, which is very important, but also to your brain, to your body, and to your health. Imagination, I guess I think about it as the oldest human technology, because even as we became mammals and started to kind of understand how to survive, I believe that probably for a very long time, what you saw was what you got, you know? It wasn't like, I wonder what's around the corner. I wonder what's over that mountain over there. Over time, there's this inner part of our cognition that has evolved, and that lets us test out situations before we get into them, so that we can sort of try to figure out, who am I in this? Who will I be in this when I'm going to a job interview? How might it go? That's the default mode network, sitting and wondering and projecting and conjecturing. And so that's one form of imagination. I call it simulation imagination, whereas there's another form of imagination that I call generative imagination. And I know you're familiar with the research on mindfulness and now more recently on psychedelics, that there's a bit of a dampening of the default mode network. The other parts of your brain begin to light up. And especially with psychedelics, there's a ton of network interconnectivity that's happening. And so that's where these new and different ideas start to emerge. The interesting way that mindfulness connects to imagination is, it allows you to understand when am I imagining and when am I sensing? Am I telling myself a story right now?
Or is this something that's apparent through my five senses? And that is very helpful, especially with negative forms of imagination. And you know this from your meditation practice, I know it, that one of the interesting things is when you sit quietly, practicing mindfulness, my first 10-day retreat, I could not believe how much I was imagining and how much of that was negative. And so when we become aware of our imagination and how our mind wanders, we can begin to feel a little bit more empowered about, what do I want to be imagining right now? We may want to sit and be completely with exactly what is, which is the goal of many meditation techniques. But we also in our day-to-day lives might say, I notice I'm imagining something really awful about the rest of my day. What if I was to say, how about if I imagine something positive for the rest of my day?