'Imagine...' - A Very Powerful Way Of Altering Our Attitudes Is By The Power Of Imagination

Sometimes, there are very special and relatable places which seem to stand out for us: a school playground, maybe an old church, or that discreet corner where you kissed you for the first time. Before that kiss you had never even noticed that corner. It is as if the special and unique experience with that dear person transferred a positive emotion to the place. Our attitude for these places modifies suddenly, they become valuable to us. But can this also happen purely by the power of our imagination instead of real experiences? Roland Benoit and Philipp Paulus of the Max Planck Institute for Cognitive and Cerebral Human Sciences, along with Daniel Schacter of Harvard University, examined this question in a study published in the journal Nature Communications. They show that our attitudes can easily be influenced not only by what we actually experience but also by what we imagine. In addition, they believe that the phenomenon is based on activity at a particular location in the front of our brains, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex.

Participants in their study were first asked to name the people they like very much and also the people they do not like at all. In addition, they were asked to provide a list of places they considered neutral. Later, when participants were lying on the MRI scanner, they were asked to vividly imagine how they would spend time with a beloved person in one of the neutral places. "To imagine myself with my daughter in the elevator of our high school, where she presses all the buttons, finally we reach the roof terrace, where we go out to enjoy the view", describes the first author Roland Benoit, who leads the research group 'Adaptive Memory'.

After the MRI scan, he along with his colleagues were able to determine that the attitudes of the participants towards the places had changed: the previously neutral places they had imagined with liked people were now considered more positive than at the beginning of the study. The authors first observed this effect with study participants in Cambridge, MA, and then replicated it successfully in Leipzig, Germany. "The simple act of imagining interacting with a beloved person in a neutral place can transfer the emotional value of the person to this place, and we do not even have to actually experience the episode," says co-author Daniel Schacter.

Using MRI data, the researchers were able to show how this mechanism works in the brain. The ventromedial prefrontal cortex plays an important role in this process. This is where the information about individual people and places in our environment is stored, as the authors assumed. But this region also evaluates how important people and individual places are to us. "We propose that this region groups representations of our environment, uniting information about the whole brain that forms a general image," explains Roland Benoit.

By: Preeti Narula

Content: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/05/190517115127.htm