I was thrilled to see that the subject I've been writing about recently, manifesting, has been named the word of the year for 2024 by the Cambridge Dictionary. (The word was "manifest," to be precise.)
However, I wasn't aware of the manifest craze when I bought James Doty's book, Mind Magic: The Neuroscience of Manifestation and How It Changes Everything. And I don't agree with the magical thinking side of manifesting, as mentioned in The Guardian story about the word of the year.
“Manifest”, meaning to dream or will something into existence, has been named the word of 2024 by Cambridge Dictionary, after a surge of celebrity-inspired popularity on social media.
Though far from a new coinage – as an adjective meaning “clear” or “obvious”, the word dates back in English to at least the 1300s – the dictionary’s decision rests on its newest meaning as a verb, which attests to the power of visualisation and positive thinking in making fervently held dreams come to pass.
...Sander van der Linden, a professor of social psychology at Cambridge University, credited social media and the pandemic for popularising the term and practice of manifesting, but cautioned that it had no scientific validity.
“Manifesting is what psychologists call ‘magical thinking’ or the general illusion that specific mental rituals can change the world around us.
“Manifesting gained tremendous popularity during the pandemic on TikTok with billions of views, including the popular 3-6-9 method, which calls for writing down your wishes three times in the morning, six times in the afternoon and nine times before bed.
“This procedure promotes obsessive and compulsive behaviour with no discernible benefits. But can we really blame people for trying it, when prominent celebrities have been openly ‘manifesting’ their success?
“There is good research on the value of positive thinking, self-affirmation, and goal-setting … However, it is crucial to understand the difference between the power of positive thinking and moving reality with your mind – the former is healthy, whereas the latter is pseudoscience.”
Agreed.
That was the point of my previous post, "Manifesting comes in two varieties: scientific and New Age." Doty's book is almost wholly scientific, though sometimes he does express himself in a way that could give a different impression. But I found his chapter, "Step One: Reclaim Your Power to Focus Your Mind," to be in line with modern psychology and neuroscience.
Doty writes:
Within each of us is an incredible inner power that we limit by our own beliefs. It is the power to endure discomfort, to delay gratification, to decide what we let into our minds from our environment and what we don't, to control our response to any given situation, whether real in the moment or replaying in our minds from the past.
This is the power of choice. It is this power that allows us to focus our attention where we choose, no matter how loud or frightening or seductive the external stimuli trying to distract us... This is the power we can call upon ourselves to direct our attention toward inner intentions that produce powerful positive emotions strong enough to break us out of the emotional addictions that have kept us living small.
...In the end, it's not about the universe: it's about you. We may have come to believe that our inner power is limited by our external circumstances or our past conditioning, but it starts in our own minds.
Now, it sure sounds like Doty is expressing a belief in free will here. But actually what he's talking about is the sense that we are agents with the capacity to control our mind and actions.
The sense of self-agency is essentially the feeling of being in the driver's seat when it comes to intending, initiating, and carrying out our actions. This gives us the reassuring sense that we can control the outcome of a given situation through our own actions or our will.
...The sense of agency is just that: a sense that is constructed by our brains from a combination of cues in our experience. The brain examines whether our actions appear to be causing the results we intend them to and influencing our environment as we choose, and then uses that data to assess whether we have agency in the situation.
The humbling truth is that our conscious mind does not have access to most of the subconscious processes by which we carry out actions (such as our ability to perform movements), and therefore it can only set an intention, watch its effect, and then interpret them accordingly. In other words, our sense of agency is a story our brain tells us about our experience.
Doty goes on to say that it doesn't matter whether we actually possess free will. What matters is that we have the sense of being an agent who is able to focus the mind, form intentions, and carry out actions that lead to the attainment of meaningful goals. In other words, it's good to feel like we have free will, even if we don't.
The important point here is that the sense of agency is really a perceived subjective experience that can be influenced by our own thought processes. Therefore, the depth and efficacy of our sense of inner power comes down to the story we tell ourselves about our ability to express that power.
As we will explore in future chapters, the feeling of inner power is ultimately the feeling of being able to direct the full capacity of our brain toward an intention we choose, in particular harnessing the power of our subconscious. And the strange thing about the subconscious is that it runs on beliefs. What we subconsciously believe is often what limits the possibilities of a given situation.
...One may get confused that self-agency implies free will. The nature of free will is a much deeper discussion that brings into play what we know about brain science, psychology, philosophy, and religion. Some hold that we lack free will because so much of our behavior is governed by forces and influences not apparent to the conscious mind, while others argue that all actions are predicated on the interaction of molecules, atoms, and particles, and therefore every event is predetermined -- we just ignorantly think we are causing our own actions.
I am not intending to solve this age-old debate. And happily, for the purposes of our discussion of manifesting, we do not have to solve it. I am simply indicating that we do have choices regarding how we manipulate processes within ourselves to manifest our intentions. It is this cognitive control, rooted in the functioning of the CEN [central executive network], that enables our ability to adjust and direct cognitive resources to complete the goal-directed task of embedding our intention into the subconscious and therefore optimizing our ability to manifest.
...Our power to manifest the things and experiences we desire comes down to our ability to throw off the narrow mental habits that keep our perception shrouded in fog and tell us we are unable to influence a situation or resist a habitual reaction and instead to embrace our sense of inner power. In order to produce the results we want, we must first believe in our innate ability to affect the outcome of situations through our actions and will. This process starts with our attention.
I empathised with this article in the Guardian by Paul Daley. Not quite the Manifest theory of Doty, but quite reflective of my take on how we can choose to live more sanely and sympathetically: -
“A long walk in the mountains last weekend brought sudden perspective to just how heavily the shoutiness and anger was weighing.
Suddenly there was only birdsong, the rustling tree canopies, the gentle burbling of the Snowy River and the wind whispering through the trunks of ancient ghost gums. This was anything but a quiet quietness. But it was the sound of a serenity that only nature can gift – a noise of extreme unplugged-ness if you like.
In recent years, probably since the pandemic lockdowns, I’ve been a big advocate of walking with my own silence. That is, while being unconnected to the cybersphere. So, no news or music or even audiobooks or phone calls. My rhythmic breath and the dogs’ panting a beat along with their padding paws beside me, the cawing gulls and, of course, the sounds of my environment – aircraft, ferry horns, traffic, people talking.
It is an urban soundtrack of never pristine silence. But in it I could always salvage catharsis, an elusive calm, a restorative balm for an occasionally anxious mind that is easily drawn to the pain of others of which, distressingly, there’s no global shortfall.
This was intensive thinking time. Sometimes it was even non-thinking time. I often found I could walk for an hour-and-a-half in a state of tuned-out meditative stasis, reaching home with a sense of emotional and creative renewal after which I’d sometimes have to remind myself of the route taken.”
Posted by: Ron E. | November 22, 2024 at 06:33 AM
Without going into the free will sidebar, and focusing just on Doty’s manifestation thing:
I just now read your current post, and re-read your two previous posts. Your full set, so far, Brian, on the manifestation thing. And I’m afraid I don’t quite get how he actually gets to the manifestation part per se.
It is completely clear so far, in fact you’d made it very clear in your first post itself, that this isn’t some Rhonda Byrnes level nonsense.
But, while it isn’t that; and while his relaxation and mindfulness exercises are perfectly fine in and of themselves: but I’m not sure how they take one to actually “manifesting” anything.
(I realize you’ve only read, and reviewed, just the first portion of the book so far. No doubt all will be revealed by the end of it! …I’ll look forward to finding out, from your further posts, who it was that killed the scandalously undressed young lady whose body lies in the library, and how they did it.)
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Meantime, I looked around online myself, a bit, about Dr Doty’s manifestation idea, and came across this interview of his, that, the interviewer lady promises, will clearly explain his methods. Here’s the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-wONyk3RV0
It’s around 1 hour and 15 minutes. I’ve listened to around 45 minutes of it so far. And it’s interesting, very much so, and completely reasonable. But again, so far I still don’t see how the manifestation actually happens. Still another half hour to go, so I mustn’t be impatient. (I’ll watch the rest of it later, when I have time.)
Posted by: Appreciative Reader | November 22, 2024 at 09:07 AM