You Have the Power to Become the Master of Your Own Reality—and One Neuroscientist Knows How to Unlock It

6 min readHere’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:To the late neuroscientist James Doty, “manifestation” may be more than just pseudoscience. Instead of the mysticism commonly associated with the term, Doty theorized that manifestation works by embedding an intention into your subconscious mind, which passively drives you toward accomplishing a goal.This method not only shaped Doty’s life, but perhaps the lives of other figures, too. When Dolly Parton was a poor, young girl growing up in rural Tennessee, she would fashion a fake microphone out of sticks and tin cans and sing to her siblings while dreaming of being on stage at the Grand Ole Opry. “That little microphone just brought me all the way to the top of the world from the top of the Smoky Mountains,” she told People magazine in 2025. Could Parton have manifested these dreams into reality? According to the late James Doty, MD, it’s possible.Doty’s idea of manifestation is not rooted in New Age spiritual practices popular on social media that posit all you need to do is put dreams out into the world and they will come true. Instead, Doty’s method is based in real, practical science. In fact, in his 2024 book on the subject—Mind Magic: The Neuroscience of Manifestation and How It Changes Everything—Doty opens with a firm declaration that negates any mysticism that might be associated with the term: “The universe does not give a fuck about you.”Doty was a neuroscientist and was also the founder and director of the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education (CCARE) at the Stanford University School of Medicine until he died in 2025. He said that the power to produce change lies in our own minds. In his book, Doty explains manifesting as “defining an intention such that it gets embedded into our subconscious, which functions below the level of consciousness.” This action engages various brain networks involved in how we approach tasks associated with achieving specific objectives. In other words, the more you dream about running a marathon, the more your subconscious mind wills you to go on your daily run, which will eventually help you achieve the goal.For example, as a starting point, Doty recommends focused breathing before bed, after which you visualize a simple activity you want to achieve, such as avoiding soda. Once you focus for five minutes on the activity, write it down, think of your intention as you fall asleep, and read your goal again when you wake up. Each time you achieve the goal–either daily or throughout the day–congratulate yourself for completing the task you chose to focus on. This smaller habit formation can help engage processes associated with embedding intention that could lead to bigger goal achievement.But, like most phenomena with the brain, this sort of engagement isn’t immediately visible. So what exactly is going on? Drawing on existing neuroscience research, including brain imaging, Doty was able to propose a framework of how manifestation could work in the brain.“Neuroimaging allows us to uncover the brain mechanisms that allow us to manifest,” neuroscientist Stephanie Balters, PhD, Director of Research at Stanford CCARE says in an email. “Understanding these mechanisms helps us develop more targeted interventions that create meaningful change in people’s lives.”Here’s how Doty laid out the neuroscience in Mind Magic: Groups of neurons in the brain combine to form large-scale brain networks, four of which play key roles in manifesting. Interaction between these circuits—the default mode, central executive, salience, and attention networks—help the brain embed intentions and put them at the forefront of your mind.These networks give us the tools needed to tamp down inner critics, clarify what we really want to achieve, elicit positive emotions when visualizing the future, identify beliefs that might be holding one back, and much more, Doty explained in Mind Magic. He also describes simple practices for visualizing intentions in ways that can create new neural pathways. This may look like thinking and writing about your goal in vivid detail, repeatedly, with relaxation techniques built into the process to achieve deeper focus.These pathways can give you a heightened ability to notice cues and tools in your environment that are relevant to fulfilling your wishes. The ability of the brain to change and adapt in this way is called neuroplasticity, and it can be a powerful tool for manifesting our goals, according to Doty.“This superpower, molded by experience, repetition, and intention, enables the brain to form new circuits, and to prune away old ones which no longer serve us,” Doty told the Stanford Report in 2024.But this isn’t as simple as it may sound. Crucial to developing and maintaining positive adaptations in the brain is the ability to shift the mind from a chronic stress, or from “fight or flight” mode to a state of peaceful relaxation, Doty writes in his book. He explains in Mind Magic that a calm and composed brain is needed to “reclaim our attention, access the power of our imagination, and unlock our subconscious”—a state that is arguably difficult to come by in the busy world we live in.However, when ambitions drop from an intention or goal to purely a wish, people begin to achieve less, warns Gabriele Oettingen, PhD, professor of psychology at NYU. Oettingen’s experiments, which have spanned more than two decades, suggest that positively fantasizing about a desired future feigns success in the mind and relaxes people, hampering their motivation and effort; one “enjoys the future in the mind and leaves it there,” she says. In light of this, she notes that mentally confronting obstacles that stand in your way can help you to find the energy and the way to reach your wish..“The obstacle is not in the way of the wish; the obstacle is the way to the wish,” she says.Another key factor for finding success using Doty’s method that may be surprising to some: compassion.“When you are caring and focused on others, this actually is when your brain networks function at their best,” he noted in the Stanford Report article.In fact, Doty also believed his manifestation process doesn’t work for just any old wish, but that there must be good intention behind it—either for yourself or others. Like Parton, poverty marked Doty’s childhood. When he was 12, he met a woman named Ruth who taught him many of the techniques for manifesting that he believes led him to success as a neurosurgeon and later informed his framework for successful goal achievement. But along the way, he forgot her lessons on compassion and suffered financial ruin, losing a massive fortune of $75 million in the dot-com crash of 2000. When Doty realized that he had lost the connection between his brain and his heart, he began to focus on manifestation as a practice of well-being and engaging with the world in a positive manner.“Compassion reminds us that we are more than our achievements, our mistakes, or the expectations placed upon us,” says Balters. “It allows us to meet ourselves with kindness, to listen to what truly matters, and to find the courage to live in alignment with who we are. And importantly, compassion is a skill we can train and cultivate.”We will never know the exact recipe for success that Parton followed, but she certainly centered compassion in her lifetime, donating tens of millions of dollars and advocating for causes she believed in, like early childhood literacy and pediatric healthcare. And in "Celebrate the Dreamer in You," she offered some salient advice that seems to be aligned with Doty’s beliefs about manifesting and feels like a good place for anyone to start in their quest for a better future: “Dream more, learn more, care and be more.”Special Digital IssuesOctober/November 2026Download HereThis issue is optimized for mobile/tablet viewing.➡ America’s Radioactive Graveyard Is Quietly Leaking. Scientists Are Racing to Defuse the Threat.➡ It Flies Like a Plane, Lands Like a Helicopter—and Left 20 Service Members Dead. Why Does This Strange Aircraft Keep Crashing?➡ The Wild West’s Most Famous Missing Treasure May Be Hidden in Texas: Inside the Search for Sam Bass’s Gold➡ After 107 Years, Explorers Found History’s Most Legendary Shipwreck Beneath the Ice. 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This Weapon Can Save It.October/November 2022Download HereThis issue is optimized for mobile/tablet viewing.It's also available on Apple News+.Featuring:➡ Can America's M1 Abrams Still Compete With China's and Russia's Latest Battle Tanks?➡ Inside the Final Minutes of the Concorde Disaster—and How It Doomed Supersonic Travel for Decades➡ How the Massive Cargo Ship Felicity Ace Sank, Taking $400 Million Worth of Exotic Supercars With It➡ I Turned My Old Gas-Guzzler Into a Zippy EV for $15,000August/September 2022Download HereThis issue is optimized for mobile/tablet viewing.It's also available on Apple News+.Featuring: ➡ Cosmic Secrets of the 17 Most Powerful Mega-Telescopes on Earth—and Beyond➡ Can the Air Force's Secret, Hypersonic Jet Reclaim the Skies From Russia and China?➡ For 50 Years, the Zodiac Killer's 340 Cipher Stumped the FBI—Then Three Amateurs Cracked the Code➡ America's Most Fearsome Howitzer Has Entered the War in UkraineJune/July 2022DOWNLOAD HEREThis issue is optimized for mobile/tablet viewing.It's also available on Apple News+.Featuring:➡ Every Single Drone Fighting in the Skies Over Ukraine➡ How to Buy a New Car in 2022 Without Getting Fleeced➡ This Megastructure Could Keep Us Alive Forever➡ The Race to Revolutionize EV BatteriesKatie Neith is a science writer based in Los Angeles. Her favorite celebrity sightings are the great horned owls that live in her hillside neighborhood. A recent graduate of the Johns Hopkins MA in Science Writing program, her work has appeared in Nautilus and Live Science, among other publications. Connect: www.katieneith.com