Can I really manifest the future?

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1:06Caroline Steel:So I'm stood outside a beautiful house in Ireland, overlooking a huge lake surrounded by trees which are teeming with birds. I mean, there's just tens of birds flying from tree to tree all around us. It's a dream. I would love to live here. And this is your house, is that right? Yes, and I manifested this house on the lake. So you manifested your dream home? I did, indeed. And you're also a scientist? Absolutely. Interesting. You're listening to CrowdScience from the BBC World Service. I'm Caroline Steele, and this episode is all about manifesting. You might have come across manifesting on social media.

1:53Caroline Steel:It's the idea that you can make your goals and dreams come true by putting them out into the universe and believing that somehow the universe will pay attention and then make them happen. You may be thinking, hang on, I thought I was listening to a science show. Well, don't worry, you are. Bear with me. We're looking into manifesting thanks to a question sent in by listener Cassie. I am Kasturi, but people can call me Cassie. I am from Pune, India. I am an engineer by occupation. My question that I asked was, what is the power of manifestation and journaling and how does it work? This basically arose from my work because there it is a big deal.

2:38Caroline Steel:Could you talk me through, like paint a picture so you're all sat in a room together? Let's say if one of us, one of the employees, they want to buy a purse and they are going to put that in their goal book or in their journal. So there's a particular manner, a grammar of writing that. They will have to write that I have bought this bag on a particular date. But in reality, they actually have not bought the bag yet because the day hasn't actually arrived. The idea is that by writing down that you've already bought this bag, by visualising that you have it already, you're somehow going to work harder to actually acquire it.

3:16Now, I believe that we already have to work hard to achieve something. Just thinking that we have achieved it, my belief system does not align with them. So that's why my question came. I just wanted to know if there is any kind of scientific reasoning behind this. Does it actually work in a scientific manner? Or is it just a psychological way of boosting someone, giving someone confidence?

3:41Caroline Steel:Do you come across manifestation outside of work as well? Do you come across it in your personal life? No. It's just a work thing? Because I notice it a lot on social media, people talking about, oh, I'm going to manifest myself a new car. Yeah, I have heard those terms. Friends telling friends that manifested it will happen. But it's not like somebody actually telling you that, believe in it, make it a practice like that. As you can probably tell, Cassie and I are both a bit sceptical. I can see why writing down your goals can be a useful exercise. It might help you identify what you want to achieve and then you can work out the steps you need to take to get there.

4:23Caroline Steel:But writing down your goals as if you've already achieved them, I'm not so sure. The people Cassie works for are encouraging a particular flavour of manifesting. But there are others. Some people believe in sending out messages for the universe to hear, while other people consider manifesting as a purely practical technique for setting and achieving your goals. To me, they all sound like totally different things. So what exactly is manifesting? Yeah, that's the hundred million dollar question. People mean lots of different things by manifesting. This is Lucas Dixon, researcher at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, Australia.

5:09Caroline Steel:He's been studying manifesting, in particular what you might call the more mystical version, the version that kicked off this whole trend. That's the idea that your mind is very, very powerful, so powerful that it can attract things to you in your life. And we define it as a kind of cosmic collaboration. So you send out messages with your thoughts and with your intentions. They're like vibrations that get picked up by the universe or God or a higher power, like a radio transmitter. And then somehow through that cosmic collaboration, events and opportunities start to happen for you that are aligned with those thoughts that you have.

5:55And so you've manifested those events.

5:58Caroline Steel:It really is everywhere, all over social media, people manifesting something as simple as like finding a parking space or getting a green light, you know, things that kind of don't feel worth thinking about, but it does seem to be absolutely everywhere. If we think through what's kind of going on there for people, it's this classic cognitive bias called confirmation bias. And that's something we all have. and what it means is that when you have a belief about something, you're more likely to see evidence of things in the environment that align with that belief and you're more likely to actually be a little bit easier on yourself when it comes to seeing evidence that confirms what you already believe.

6:53Caroline Steel:We're probably all guilty of confirmation bias. Once we have a hypothesis, one of mine is my partner chews loudly, we look for data to support it and ignore all the times our partners chew quietly. And it might be that people who send out wishes into the universe and then notice them coming true are just falling victim to confirmation bias and they're not noticing all the times that the universe isn't responding. This version of manifesting is what you might call the most woo, which is a slang term used to describe things which people consider to have no scientific basis. But there is a version of manifestation that draws on techniques that can be backed up by science.

7:40Hello.

7:41Caroline Steel:You are so welcome. Lovely to meet you. I'm Caroline. Hi, Caroline. Thank you. The letting was into your beautiful home. You're welcome. Sabina Brennan is a neuroscientist and psychologist. We started the show outside her beautiful house in Ireland. We're recording here in our new home, which we moved to four years ago. And I think it's a good example of explaining how manifesting works. So we started looking for potential places to live. And I lived by the sea and I knew that was really important. So I took my trusty Excel file out and said, here's what I want. Must be near the sea. Must either be a really nice, modern, unique house or very old period house.

8:23And the list went on, OK?

8:25Caroline Steel:But eventually, Sabina found the perfect home. The algorithms on my computer knew that the articles I was reading were about those kind of houses. So it was my clarity, my focus, my understanding, my needs and myself that brought us to this house. Sabina's version of manifesting isn't about magical or wishful thinking. It's more about developing thought processes and behaviours that really do help you achieve your goals. You can't, you know, magic things into being, but you can change your reality through focused attention and clear action. And I suppose really my mission, you know, with that and around the neuroscience of manifesting was to kind of weed out the woo, because definitely, you know, there are things that just jumped out at me as totally grounded in science.

9:17You know, take cognitive behavioral therapy. You can't get further from Wu than that because it is very much grounded in science and there is a lot of research, you know, into its benefits across multiple mental health issues, etc. And really, you know, cognitive behavioral therapy is grounded on the idea that our thoughts and beliefs influence our behavior and manifesting. Really, it's the same. It's about, you know, understanding the importance of your thoughts and your beliefs in shaping the reality that you perceive. I think there's a fabulous example that illustrates how your thinking, your beliefs really narrow your reality and shape your reality.

10:04Caroline Steel:Sabina is referring to a famous psychology experiment where people were asked to watch a group passing a basketball to each other. Some were wearing white T-shirts, others were in black. and participants were asked to pay attention to the number of passes made to the white team or the black team. At the end of the study, they are asked, how long was the gorilla on screen? Nearly half of the participants failed to notice a person in a gorilla costume walk through the shot. I've watched the video myself and have to admit, I also totally missed the gorilla. I think it's a fantastic way to illustrate blindness.

10:44Something can be right under your nose and you don't see it. And actually that's a key to why manifesting works, because you are giving your brain very clear instructions as to what's relevant and important to you in attaining your goal, and that activates the salience network in your brain.

11:04Caroline Steel:The salience network is a large network of neurons in our brains that detects, filters and prioritises information to guide our attention and behaviour. And so your brain will filter in information that is really important to your goals and therefore some of that information can include opportunities that you may never have noticed before. One of the techniques aimed at focusing attention involves keeping a journal, a bit like our listener Cassie was talking about, but more on that later. First, is it possible for a scientist to study if manifestation actually leads to results? So we started off by thinking, how are we going to measure people's belief in manifestation?

11:53So our first step was to create the manifestation scale.

11:57Caroline Steel:This is Lucas, who we heard from earlier in the show. He studies the type of manifesting where people believe that the universe can help make their wishes come true. That meant doing a series of studies where we develop scale items that people can respond to. We ask people, to what degree do you believe each of these statements? From not at all to, you know, very strongly. So we created these items around, first of all, personal power. So visualizing a successful outcome causes it to be drawn closer to me, or I can speak success into existence through positive self-talk. and then other items to do with cosmic collaboration.

12:39So I attract success into my life with the help of the universe or a higher power. When you average that together, you get an overall manifestation belief score.

12:50Caroline Steel:1 ,000 people in the US took part in this study and fascinatingly, Lucas found one third of participants believed in manifesting. So our next study looked at how people who scored higher on the scale also scored higher on risk propensity. You know, they're more likely to have investments in kind of risky financial opportunities like cryptocurrency rather than sort of standard stocks. And importantly, they also reported they were more likely to have been bankrupt in their life. So people who believed in manifesting were more likely to have been bankrupt. That goes against, I guess, what the aim of manifestation is here.

13:35Caroline Steel:But I guess it's hard to untangle whether believing in manifestation makes you more likely to have gone bankrupt or if going bankrupt makes you more likely to believe in manifestation. Exactly. And that's the one thing we can't really ascertain from the study with the type of design because we're doing it at one point in time. Lucas also found that people who believed in manifesting had unrealistic expectations of success. For example, thinking that they could up their salary to$300 ,000 in a relatively short period of time. We didn't find evidence that if you scored higher on the scale that you also had a higher income, you didn't have a higher kind of job or higher education attainment.

14:17If they were somehow metrics of success, there wasn't a relationship there.

14:23Caroline Steel:So Lucas didn't find any link between manifesting and success. but as he says his research was a snapshot and didn't follow people over time. Perhaps manifestors from his study will go on to have more success in the future but his research does show that believing in manifestation is associated with risky behavior and even bankruptcy so it isn't looking good for the kind of manifestation where you believe that sending out your goals into the universe might make them come true. I will definitely be giving it a myth. Coming up next, we take a look at a different type of manifesting, one backed up by science.

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16:08Caroline Steel:You're listening to CrowdScience from the BBC World Service, the show that manifests answers to your science questions. I'm Caroline Steele, and today we're investigating manifesting, thanks to a question from listener Cassie in India, who's asked to practice a kind of manifesting at work, where you write down your goals as if you've already achieved them. Cassie wants to know if there is any science to suggest that this could be helpful. So we're back with neuroscientist Sabina, who has looked into which areas of manifesting are backed up by research. OK, I'd like to give manifesting a go. So could you kind of talk me through a technique I can try, something sort of grounded in science that might help me achieve my goals?

16:55I think if we think about gratitude journaling, because it's quite a nice thing to do, but gratitude with traction. So if you maybe take six or eight minutes every day and if you just write down three specific things that you're grateful for and then one effort. And here's the gratitude with traction bit. Something that you did well, a choice that you made that is aligned with, say, ultimate goals that you have or things that matter to you. And then the other thing is one opportunity that you noticed. So that's about training your attention. So one opportunity that you noticed because you were looking for good, because you were looking for positive things.

17:36Caroline Steel:So I understand the sort of looking for opportunity, how that clearly ties in with manifesting. How exactly does being grateful tie in with manifesting? Because me, that's kind of looking backwards rather than looking forwards, if you see what I mean. Yeah, I do get what you mean. First of all, it's about training attention. And as we said earlier, attention is key. It's giving that message to your brain that these things are important, you know, going forward. Overall, gratitude has kind of got this general mental health benefit. so over the next few weeks most evenings i made a note of things i was grateful for and i made a note of an opportunity that i noticed because i was looking for good that's a way of training my attention to see the positive and i scored my mood stress levels and sleep here are some highlights something good i spotted because i was looking for it this is the one i really struggle with because I'm not looking for good things.

18:42Caroline Steel:Trying to think. Sorry. Ah, OK. Now I've got an easy one. So very boring. My supermarket delivery was arriving yesterday evening. And because I was working late, I didn't quite get there in time. And the guy trying to deliver rang me and I was like, oh, I'm really sorry. I'm running a bit late from work. And he was like, no worries. you're my last delivery of the evening and I'm getting paid until 10 so you know as long as you're here before then that's totally fine I'm happy to just chill in my van and then when he arrived he came into the kitchen and helped me like literally unpack my groceries into my cupboards and we just had a really nice chat.

19:21Caroline Steel:We'll check in on how my daily gratitude practice went shortly but it's quite far from what listener Cassie has been told to do at work. Write down her goals as if she's already achieved them so she can better visualise her desired future. Luckily, this kind of behaviour, picturing the future you want, has also been studied by scientists. What we found is the more positively people indulged in these fantasies about the future, the less success they have in the present. This is Gabriella Ertingen, professor of psychology at New York University in the US. So for example, people in a weight reduction program, the more positively they fantasized about success in the program, the less pounds they shed.

20:14Caroline Steel:So the more people trying to lose weight fantasized about it, the less likely they were to actually achieve that goal. so why do you think this is the case because it's sort of the opposite of what i would expect right i'd think that having a goal makes you more likely to be successful because you've got some direction rather than sort of floating so we experimentally induced these positive fantasies about the future and what we see is that people already feel arrived they feel accomplished and what do I do if I feel accomplished? I relax. So if you fantasise about running a marathon, it could make you less likely to chase that goal and more likely to actually chill out.

21:02So the energy goes down. And we can measure that actually the blood pressure goes down as compared to the control group in the positive fantasy group. And these relatively low energy then predict how much they actually do in order to reach their positive fantasies.

21:22Caroline Steel:So Gabriella found that indulging in positive fantasies is associated with lower blood pressure, lower energy and taking fewer steps to achieve your goal. So what it is, in simple words, is positive fantasies sap the energy. So what should we do instead? What's the solution? Yeah, exactly. That's what we asked ourselves too. And we said, maybe we need to give people a really kind of sound dose of reality in the form of the obstacle that stands in the way of accomplishing these positive fantasies. And that's what we did. And that's what we call mental contrasting of the positive future with the obstacle of reality that stands in the way of reaching to the positive future.

22:18Caroline Steel:Mental contrasting involves thinking of obstacles that are in the way of your wish for the future. So if I want to be the boss of crowd science, for example, I might think of obstacles like I have no management experience. Sometimes mental contrasting brings up obstacles so big that you abandon the goal entirely. But that's OK. It may well not have been worth pouring time and energy into anyway. Or mental contrasting can lead to forming a strategy to overcome obstacles. Gabriela actually found that people had more energy when they were focusing on the obstacles. And she also measured their brain activity while they were doing it.

22:57What we found is that during mental contrasting, very different areas of the brain are active. And as opposed to, for example, indulging in the positive future, people had active areas that speak for intention formation, for holistic thinking, for autobiographical memory and for high visual activities. So interesting because we didn't expect that.

23:34Caroline Steel:So our listener, Cassie, at work has been asked to kind of keep a journal and write down her goals as if she's already achieved them. What are your thoughts on that as a method? Well, it has two sides. One is by thinking about sending off a message. You have it in your mind and that's already better than not thinking about it, forgetting about it. Yes, it might make you remember the thing you need to do, yeah. So you activate that task in your mind. I think that's something probably which is helpful. But most of these wishes in our lives that are really dear wishes, they are more complex. They have obstacles in the way.