Imagine your path to a better relationship

A a little imagination can go a long way. The evidence continues to mount. Imagine yourself expertly hitting a tennis ball across the net or performing a difficult piano concerto without hitting a single wrong note, and you’ll likely perform better in real life, according to more than a decade of research. Imagination can also shape our preferences: Mentally rehearsing chance encounters with loved ones in specific places can reinforce 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 preferences, according to a team from the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Germany and the University of Hamburg. The results, published in the journal Natural communicationscould help shape treatments for phobias and other mental health problems and even improve a person’s social relationships.

“We show that we can learn from imagined experiences, and it works in much the same way in the brain as when we learn from real experiences,” co-author Roland Benoit, a cognitive neuroscientist now at the University of Colorado at Boulder, said in a statement.

Humans learn, form habits, and establish likes and dislikes through a process known as reward prediction error. When something unexpectedly goes well, our brain gives us a chemical reward: dopamine. The more surprising the new information, the more powerful the burst of neurotransmitter and the more our brain traces neural trails that help us memorize this information later. This is also known as reinforcement learning.

Read more: “Wrong meteorologists 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 based on how familiar they were and how they felt about them: love, neutrality, or dislike.

Then, while the participants were in a brain-scanning fMRI machine, the researchers presented them with the names of neutrally categorized and sufficiently familiar people. They asked them to vividly imagine, for 8 seconds, a positive or negative experience based on a quick sentence, such as enjoying ice cream with them on a hot day. At the end of the experiment, participants were asked to rate the degree of pleasure they felt during the experience.

When participants were tested later, they reported liking more the knowledge they had the most imaginative fun with. The more vivid the imagined experience, the more pleasant people found it and therefore the more surprising it seemed. These signals appeared 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 synchronized with the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, a region involved in the representation of people. The hippocampus, which is thought to play a key role in detecting novelty and constructing a coherent representation of reality, also shined on the scanners.

“This provides a mechanism-level reason for how vividly imagining future scenarios, such as a conversation, social encounter, or difficult situation, might influence our motivation, avoidance tendencies, and subsequent choices,” said co-author Aroma Dabas, who worked on the paper as a graduate student at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences.

In contrast, participants did not change their minds about the individuals they imagined in negative scenarios. The scientists believe this is because the element of surprise was less powerful: these scenarios were generally less striking and were rated only moderately negative to neutral by participants. They noted that future research should investigate how imagination affects negative preferences.

The downside to this type of imaginative learning: People with anxiety and depression may 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 mental rehearsal of positive experiences. A reminder for anyone who tends to ruminate.

“This suggests that imagination is not passive,” Dabas added. “Rather, it can actively shape what we expect and what we choose.” »

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Main image: Paper Trident / Shutterstock

• Kristen French

  Published on December 29, 2025

  Kristen French is an associate editor at Nautilus. She has worked in science journalism since 2013, reporting and writing articles and news for publications such as Wired, Backchannel, The Verge, And New York Review. She holds a master’s degree in science journalism from Columbia University.