Your brain learns from imagination like real experience

Every day, your brain runs little “what if” scenes. You practice what you’ll say in a meeting, or picture how a first date might go. Most of the time, it feels harmless, like mental background noise.

New research suggests it’s doing more than passing the time. Simply imagining a positive moment with someone can make you like that person more, and it can also change how your brain stores information about them.

Treating make-believe like a lesson

The work was led by cognitive neuroscientists at the University of Colorado Boulder and the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitve and Brain Sciences in Germany.

“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.”

Memory and imagination overlap

Scientists have noticed for years that memory and imagination overlap. Similar brain networks help you remember something that happened and help you build a scene that has not happened yet. That overlap shows up across the lifespan, too.

Kids tend to gain stronger memory and imagination skills around the same time, and older adults often see both abilities fade together.

“If memory and imagination are so similar, then theoretically people should be able to learn from merely imagined events,” said Benoit.

That idea matters because learning is not just about facts. It’s also how you form preferences, decide who feels safe, and choose what to do next.

Brain response to imagined experiences

To see if imagination can teach the brain the way real life does, the researchers recruited 50 people for a brain imaging study.

The experiment focused on something called reward prediction error, which helps the brain update what it expects.

When something turns out better than expected, the brain treats it like useful news and strengthens the connections that support that preference.

Participants first listed 30 people they knew and ranked them, from people they liked to people they felt neutral about to people they disliked.

During a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scan, participants saw the names of people they had ranked as neutral.

Each time a name appeared, participants spent 8 seconds vividly imagining either a positive experience with that person or a negative experience.

Imagination can influence motivation

After the scan, participants tended to prefer the people they had imagined having more fun with.

On a later test, they also reported liking those people more. The brain data tracked that shift in a specific reward-and-learning circuit.

The ventral striatum, a key brain region involved in reward prediction error, became more active during imagination when a participant experienced a stronger prediction error.

The scans also suggested that this region worked together with the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, a region linked with storing information about other people and updating social memories.

“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.

Why this matters in real life

The findings connect to a tool that already shows up in mental health care: guided imagery.

Therapists often ask clients to mentally rehearse situations that feel hard, like a feared event, a difficult conversation, or a stressful setting.

The study points to a reason that kind of practice might shift expectations and choices, even before anything happens out in the real world.

Benoit also noted a darker side. People dealing with anxiety or depression often get stuck in vivid negative scenes, and those scenes can color what they expect from other people and from themselves.

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

The study did not find that imagining negative experiences with someone made participants like that person less, and the authors want to explore why.

For now, the message is simple: the brain does not treat imagination like nothing. What you rehearse in your head can shape what you learn, who you warm up to, and what you expect to happen next.

The full study was published in the journal Nature Communications.

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