How to Manifest: Dr. James Doty’s Neuroscience of Intention

If you have an intention, you take a pencil, you write it down, you're actually doing something physical, tactile, then you read it silently, then you read it aloud, then you visualize that, and you do that over and over and over again, what that will do is then embed that into your subconscious, and then these different cognitive brain networks get activated. Now, can we unpack that just a minute? Because everyone that listens to this loves to make sure that they just got the instructions from you, Dr. Doty, because I'm like hanging on every word, and so there were a couple steps to that, because you had the physical pencil, you had the act of writing, you had this moment where if you're watching on YouTube, you saw it, but if you're listening, let me describe it. He sat back in his chair, he put his hands kind of in prayer at his chest, closed his eyes, and he started talking about repeating the thought. Is that the chain of events that you do to encode it in your mind? Yes, absolutely. So, will you walk us through it one more time? Yes. So, again, what you want to do is to use all of your sensory organs as much as possible to embed that intention. So, by writing it down, by reading it aloud, by reading it silently, by visualizing it, that creates the process where this gets embedded into your subconscious. And what happens is once you get this embedded, it activates different parts of your brain. And without getting too technical, I'll just mention four of them. One is something called the default mode network. This is what happens when your mind wanders or you're daydreaming. And it's self-referential because it's internally focused, but it's where you create the narrative of who you are or what you want. So, if you have negative self-talk, if you ruminate, if you are like, I'm never good enough, nothing works out for me, things like that don't happen to a person like me, I can never get it right. That is in the default mode network. Absolutely. And that gets really activated and results in rumination for some people. Can I ask you another question? Because one of the things that you said at the very, very beginning is you painted this gorgeous picture of the ability to leverage the remarkable power of your brain to help you get what you truly desire in life, to help you live in heart mode. And you said it's just about believing it. And part of the reason why we have trouble believing it is because of the default mode network and all of these stories you've repeated over and over and over again. Is that fair to say? No, that's exactly correct. And can we can reprogram or we can lay down a new track? Oh, absolutely. And it's available 24-7 and it doesn't matter what's happened to you before. You know, so many people get fixated, well, I don't deserve this because of, we all deserve it. So, once this gets embedded and you create the narrative of who you want to be or how you see yourself, what you're doing is you're creating salience, okay? What's that word mean? It means making it important, okay? Once something is important, this activates what we call our task positive network. And the task positive network has three parts. It has the salience network, it has the attention network, and then it has the executive control network. And once something is salient, what you're basically saying is this deserves my attention. And by doing it in a very specific way, then that becomes important to you. That gets embedded into your subconscious as something to pay attention to. Once that is defined as something important to you, then that activates your attention network so that then you cognitively focus your attention on whatever that intention is. Okay. Once those are activated, and I use the analogy in the book, it's as if you have a file cabinet and you put this file into the file cabinet that says, important stuff. And once that is there, then the attention network is activated, which is, as an example, a bloodhound that is, it says, okay, now there's something there. I need to track this down and figure out what's going on here. Then you activate the bloodhound and then that gets released. And then once that attention is focused, then it starts looking around through all the possibilities in your environment. And as soon as it identifies one, then your executive control network is activated, which in some ways is the thing that chases down what is in your subconscious. This is how it works. There is no magic here. This is fundamentally basic neuroscience. And it's something that we all have the ability to master by just doing these techniques whereby you were able to embed your intention. You do it over and over. And it's not as if one and done. And what I mean by that is some people wake up and this is like a new year's resolution. I'm going to do this January 1st. And then January 1st comes and you already fail the first day. You have to not have excessive expectations at first. What I mean by that is these are based on habit. What happens with habit? You start small. You don't sit there and say, I'm going to lose a hundred pounds in the next month. You say, I'm going to try to modify my diet where I'm not drinking sodas. That's the first little one. And each of these little wins strengthens you to actually then do the big thing ultimately. So you don't start by running a marathon on day one. You start by getting up out of bed and walking around the block.