Neuroscientist Explains Why People Don't Get What They Want In Life But Rather What They 'Believe'
Turns out concepts like manifestation have a scientific basis to them.
Wirestock | Getty Images | Canva Pro Concepts like manifestation, the law of attraction, and the idea that "your thoughts become your reality" are often thought of (or criticized) as being solely spiritual concepts. But what if there's an actual scientific basis for them?
It turns out there is, and it illustrates just how much more control we have over our own brains than we realize.
A neuroscientist says people get what they 'believe,' not what they want, because beliefs have biological impacts.
The central idea of things like manifestation or the law of attraction is basically that you get from life what you put into it. If you constantly worry about being broke, the thinking goes, you will attract financial difficulty because that's where you've been putting all your energy.
Change your thoughts to those of positivity and abundance, and your material experiences will change over time as well. This is what practitioners and gurus mean by "thoughts become reality."
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It's easy to take issue with this, of course, because if you extend the idea far enough, it quickly laps over into victim blaming. But there is actually a dimension of this concept that isn't spirituality but is simply good old-fashioned science, as neuroscientist Emily McDonald explained in a recent video.
"My life changed when I realized that you do not get what you want in life; you get what you believe," Emily said in her video, and she identified three neuroscientific reasons why this is the case.
Beliefs can have very real biological impacts — the placebo effect is a prime example.
"They include the placebo effect in the percent efficacy of a drug because the placebo effect is a real effect that creates biological changes," she explained. That means that even just the belief that a drug will help your condition can actually have an impact on it — so much so that its potential has to be included on the label.
Emily noted that the placebo effect also has a negative opposite called the "nocebo" effect. In essence, the fact that believing a treatment won't work can hinder its efficacy. And we're talking about actual drugs and biology here — so imagine the impact this can have on every other aspect of your life.
Unintentional blindness and confirmation bias also impact our brain biology.
"Unintentional blindness is the concept that we don't notice things unless we are looking for them," Emily explained. To illustrate this, she mentioned the famous "invisible gorilla experiment," in which research subjects were shown a video of people playing basketball, and most failed to notice when a man walked through the background in a gorilla suit.
Then there's confirmation bias, where your brain is constantly searching for things that confirm a belief you already have. Combine this with unintentional blindness, and you have a group of research subjects so focused on basketball that when a man in a gorilla suit walks by, they miss him entirely. He doesn't confirm the "bias" that they're there to watch basketball, after all.
So extrapolate this to your life: If you accept it as a fundamental truth that you're always doomed to be broke, your brain is locked and loaded to view everything about money as dangerous or threatening and dismiss everything that doesn't accord with that view. Money problems get your full attention, but, say, the $100 bill on the sidewalk — or the fact you're spending an extra $100 on takeout every week without even realizing it — is completely off your radar.
"We really go through life not noticing most things," Emily said, which is "why priming the brain is so important." Pushing back against your unintentional blindness and confirmation bias by shifting your attitudes really can make a difference.
The neuroscientist said the notion that your thoughts become a 'self-fulfilling prophecy' is also true.
"Your beliefs are a self-fulfilling prophecy," Emily said. "When you believe that you can succeed, your brain primes itself to look for ways to make it happen." The opposite is true as well. If self-doubt is your default, your brain primes itself to basically sabotage you. "This is why the likelihood of success is much higher for people who believe in themselves," Emily said.
It's all related to something my former therapist explained to me. As she put it, "brains work on quantity, not quality," and they literally construct neural pathways based on whatever the most dominant thoughts and beliefs are.
If you think to yourself, "I'm so ugly" every time you look in the mirror for years on end, your brain burns a neural pathway that will direct you through your daily life accordingly — avoiding social situations or holding yourself back at work because you feel ugly and unconfident, for example.
One of the wonders of neuroplasticity, however, is that you can, with enough time and repetition, replace this neural pathway with another simply by telling yourself the opposite: "I'm beautiful" or "I love the way I look." Again, it takes time and commitment, but it can be done. Neuroscientist Dr. James R. Doty, whose work focuses on these concepts, suggests that even just writing these new thoughts down can have a major impact.
Changing your thoughts isn't going to magically change your life overnight like the waving of a magic wand, but time and commitment to those changed thoughts will — again, "quantity, not quality." So the next time you feel doomed and hopeless, just remember you have more power than you think — and that's not spiritual mumbo jumbo; it's literal neuroscience!
John Sundholm is a writer, editor, and video personality with 20 years of experience in media and entertainment. He covers culture, mental health, and human interest topics.