Mind Magic Quotes

“Neuroplasticity is the umbrella term for the brain’s ability to modify, change, and adapt both structure and function throughout life and in response to experience, as well as through repetition and intention, enabling the brain to form new circuits and to prune away”
― James R. Doty, Mind Magic: The Neuroscience of Manifestation and How It Changes Everything

“Essentially, the DMN is responsible for brain activity when a person is focused inward, including during wakeful rest, daydreaming, mind-wandering, and reminiscing. It allows us to carry out self-referential processing, or the ability to reflect on ourselves. In a sense, it is what lets us narrate the “story of oneself,” retrieving and integrating our autobiography stored in our long-term memory and enabling us to take the first-person perspective on that information. It is involved in mental time travel, from recalling past events to envisioning possible events in the future. And it plays a role in how we think about others: considering their thoughts, understanding and empathizing with their emotions, judging whether a behavior is right or wrong, and even perceiving a sense of isolation when we lack social interaction. In our ordinary lives, we experience the workings of the DMN mostly as the incessant chitter-chatter of the mind when it is not occupied with a specific task.”
― James R. Doty, Mind Magic: The Neuroscience of Manifestation and How It Changes Everything

“Although the rest-and-digest response is much more appropriate to flourishing in today’s world, it is engaged in a constant struggle for control over the body and mind.”
― James R. Doty, Mind Magic: The Neuroscience of Manifestation and How It Changes Everything

“Visualization works because, amazingly, the brain does not distinguish between an actual physical experience and one that is intensely imagined.”
― James R. Doty, Mind Magic: The Neuroscience of Manifestation and How It Changes Everything

“more you are in fear mode, the more your internal thoughts are clouded, and instead of seeing the world through a clear window, that window is opaque.”
― James R. Doty, Mind Magic: The Neuroscience of Manifestation and How It Changes Everything

“Manifestation is about cultivating a fierce belief in possibility.”
― James R. Doty, Mind Magic: The Neuroscience of Manifestation and How It Changes Everything

“Positive emotions increase the salience around an experience and teach the brain that experiences like these are important and worth pursuing. They then become the compass, or north star, for where to direct your intention.”
― James R. Doty, Mind Magic: The Neuroscience of Manifestation and How It Changes Everything

“attention, drain our energy, and discourage our spirits. For many of us the path is challenging, and it can take years if not decades to gain the insights to know the difference between what we want and what we need.”
― James R. Doty, Mind Magic: The Neuroscience of Manifestation and How It Changes Everything

“Where I had once made a list of my material goals, I now made a new list of the ten things that open the heart: Compassion, Dignity, Equanimity, Forgiveness, Gratitude, Humility, Integrity, Justice, Kindness, and Love (CDEFGHIJKL).”
― James R. Doty, Mind Magic: The Neuroscience of Manifestation and How It Changes Everything

“It is important to remember that attachment to results is just another form of fear,”
― James R. Doty, Mind Magic: The Neuroscience of Manifestation and How It Changes Everything

“to envision and seek only material gain is to dream too small.”
― James R. Doty, Mind Magic: The Neuroscience of Manifestation and How It Changes Everything

“Sadly, the power of manifesting has been somewhat distorted by the false narrative of our culture, which promises that achieving material success will fill a sense of emotional emptiness.”
― James R. Doty, Mind Magic: The Neuroscience of Manifestation and How It Changes Everything

“There is no favorable wind for the sailor who does not know where to go. —Seneca the Younger”
― James R. Doty, Mind Magic: The Neuroscience of Manifestation and How It Changes Everything

“Every day is an opportunity to change how you perceive and react to the world.”
― James R. Doty, Mind Magic: The Neuroscience of Manifestation and How It Changes Everything

“the most powerful place to cultivate the sense of inner power, and the most ready-to-hand, is in learning to detach emotionally from our thoughts.”
― James R. Doty, Mind Magic: The Neuroscience of Manifestation and How It Changes Everything

“Inner power arises when a person learns to discern between their negative conditioning and their inner awareness, and thereby discovers that the emotional reaction is conditioned and not hardwired.”
― James R. Doty, Mind Magic: The Neuroscience of Manifestation and How It Changes Everything

“there is a term—completion bias—that describes the powerful motivation to finish a task that comes from the release of dopamine stimulating our reward centers. The downside of this incentive is that when we do not complete the task, our critical inner voice flares up and leads to rumination, worry, and suffering. These thoughts interrupt our ability to keep our attention focused on our intention and can make it impossible to manifest effectively.”
― James R. Doty, Mind Magic: The Neuroscience of Manifestation and How It Changes Everything

“Other times, you may encounter what you believe you desire, but be surprised by a strong sensation of fear that is prompting you to push away what you thought you wanted. This, too, is not unusual, because fear is the brain’s way of guarding against the novelty of experiencing your desire.”
― James R. Doty, Mind Magic: The Neuroscience of Manifestation and How It Changes Everything

“Similarly, research has shown that as we scroll through our phone, we are essentially manifesting the Vegas Effect: notifications produce a sense of anticipation that activates the reward system, which then captures our attention in an endless loop. As we incessantly check our messages or doomscroll through content for the one piece of information that will make us feel OK or will flood us with horror and empathy fatigue at the suffering of the world, we helplessly watch our attention slipping away from us. When we lose the power to direct our attention, we can sink into despair and feel we do not have influence over the course or quality of our lives. Deep down, we know that selective attention is the key investment in building the lives we desire. That is why we say we “pay” attention. Our inner power rests in our ability to make conscious decisions about our investment. If we cannot direct our attention as we choose, it is as if we are giving away the capital we possess to change our circumstances. We are giving away our self-agency.”
― James R. Doty, Mind Magic: The Neuroscience of Manifestation and How It Changes Everything

“There is a quote attributed to Viktor Frankl (although it’s only documented in the writings of self-help authors Stephen R. Covey and Wayne Dyer) that says, “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” It is our ability to choose that allows us to focus our attention and influence our unlocked subconscious to manifest our intention.”
― James R. Doty, Mind Magic: The Neuroscience of Manifestation and How It Changes Everything

“only when we have shifted into the rest-and-digest response of the nervous system will our brains allow us to reclaim our attention, access the power of our imagination, and unlock our subconscious. There is a quote attributed to Viktor Frankl (although it’s only documented in the writings of self-help authors Stephen R. Covey and Wayne Dyer) that says, “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” It is our ability to choose that allows us to focus our attention and influence our unlocked subconscious to manifest our intention.”
― James R. Doty, Mind Magic: The Neuroscience of Manifestation and How It Changes Everything

“disappear; and, most precious of all, the”
― James R. Doty, Mind Magic: The Neuroscience of Manifestation and How It Changes Everything

“the heart that beats dynamically in response to a sense of connection with others produces a coherence that measurably improves physical and mental well-being, while the heart that feels disconnected beats rigidly to its own isolated rhythm, leading to poor cardiovascular and respiratory health and other illnesses.”
― James Doty, Mind Magic: The Neuroscience of Manifestation and How It Changes Everything

“Experiences of grief over a lost loved one, financial deprivation, loneliness, or military conflict cause the body to go into fight, flight, or freeze mode, the pattern of the nervous system that reflects threat, separation, and disconnection. When the body stays caught in the sense of threat, it triggers a gene pattern with two distinct features: the genes responsible for inflammation increase in activity, while the genes involved in antiviral responses decrease their functioning. In other words, when a body anticipates adversity and isolation, it prepares itself to face bacterial infections, while when it is doing well and feeling connected socially, it prepares to face viruses.”
― James Doty, Mind Magic: The Neuroscience of Manifestation and How It Changes Everything

“Happiness tends to be focused on the here and now, while meaning comes from reflecting on the evolving relationship between past, present, and future.”
― James Doty, Mind Magic: The Neuroscience of Manifestation and How It Changes Everything

“Most people live their lives driving in fog. They may have been told of possibilities or seen a bit of the valley, but imagine if they had a crystal-clear view.”
― James Doty, Mind Magic: The Neuroscience of Manifestation and How It Changes Everything

“manifesting is defining an intention such that it gets embedded into our subconscious, which functions below the level of consciousness. By doing so, we activate brain networks associated with goal orientation that make an intention important, salient, or noteworthy. In practice, this means that regardless of whether or not that intention is present on a conscious level, brain mechanisms that remain focused on the goal are activated around the clock. Our inner intention now guides our life. By using our inner power to tap the vast resources of our own brain, we gradually decrease the impact of our external environment and begin living from our deepest intentions.”
― James R. Doty, Mind Magic: The Neuroscience of Manifestation and How It Changes Everything