Imagining your success greatly increases the probability of your achieving it.

“Imagine yourself passing the exam or scoring a goal and it will happen.” You may think it’s a bunch of newage bunk, yet in a new study in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, psychologists Christopher Davoli and Richard Abrams from Washington University conclude that the imagination may be more effective than we think in helping us reach our goals.

Through a series of ingenious experiments, the authors showed that simply imagining a posture may have effects that are similar to actually assuming the pose. Previous research has shown that we spend more time looking at items close to our hands (items close to us are usually more important than those further away), but this is the first study suggesting that merely imagining something close to our hands will cause us to pay more attention to it.

The researchers conclude that their findings indicate that our “peripersonal space” (the space around our body) can be extended into a space where an imagined posture would take us. They note there may be advantages to having this ability, such as determining if an action is realistic (e.g., “Can I reach the top shelf?”) and helping us to avoid collisions.

The authors conclude that the present study confirms “an idea that has long been espoused by motivational speakers, sports psychologists, and John Lennon alike: The imagination has the extraordinary capacity to shape reality.”

Article “Reaching Out With the Imagination” by Barbara Isanski, Association for Psychological Science