I ran across an interesting article that inferenced that imagining great things/outcomes can be just like experiencing the real thing–under certain conditions of course.

Every time I come back from my beach vacations I go into withdrawal within around two weeks of my return–booking another beach vacation only leads to temporary relief so I mope around a lot and look at videos and photos of others having a good time on their beach vacations.  While I am fortunate enough to live within driving distance of many beach areas, I don’t have the time to be driving to the beach just to get my “fix” on any sort of frequent schedule.  And so this leaves me with the question of how to recreate my “at the beach” experiences more effectively since using imagery/visualization alone only goes so far in providing the “aaahhh” experience I am looking for.

The article I read was a rather quick synopsis of research done by Nadine Dijkstra, Peter Kok, and Stephen M. Fleming at the University College London and published in the June 2025 scientific journal Neuron.  I have provided the link here in case someone wants to read about the actual experiment–how it was performed, under what conditions, and their conclusions. Ever since my grad school days and completion of my dissertation I have developed an aversion to the reading of actual experiments and now I only roll my eyes and pretend I still know how to effectively discern what makes for a great experiment and then look for the best summary.  I know, a far cry from a scientist’s mind.

But I digress.  Here’s the info from this research:

• A specific area of the brain called the fusiform gyrus becomes activated when you are doing some higher level visual processing like identifying faces or objects.  The fusiform gyrus is activated both in reality or when imagining something–say, imagining yourself at the beach (now where did I get that idea…).
• The activity level of the fusiform gyrus is weaker during episodes of imagination thus allowing a person to differentiate between reality and fantasy.
• Increasing the activity level of the fusiform gyrus past a certain threshold will allow a person to mistake fantasy for reality.  (While this has certain implications for more serious mental health issues involving psychosis, I’m not delving that deep here.  Just take me to the beach please).  To sum up, a strong signal = real experience in the mind’s eye.
• What are the ways in which to increase the signal?  Now that is for another experiment or series of experiments.  Other scientists have postulated that telling yourself you are actually in the situation and feeling what you would feel in that situation (along with visual, auditory, and other sensory stimuli) may increase the signal enough to create the sense of having a more real experience.

So where does that leave my mental beach experience?   If I add how I actually have felt while relaxing or having fun on the beach I may be able to raise my signal enough to have an almost real beach experience while doing an imagery/visualization session of being at the beach.  Sounds like I have my own experiment to perform…

What do you think of this approach?  If it doesn’t work for me, looks like I will be taking another beach vacay very soon.