The Imagination Advantage: A Conversation with Cassandra Vieten

In an age when information can be had at the click of a button, Einstein’s famous quote that “imagination is more important than knowledge” may be truer than ever before. At the University of California San Diego Qualcomm Institute (QI), The Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination is exploring the science behind our ability to dream big and innovate. On the occasion of her new book, “Imagine That: Transform How You Think, Feel, and Live with the Science of Imagination” (S&S/Simon Element, 2026), QI caught up with Clarke Center Director of Research Cassandra Vieten, who is also a clinical professor in the UC San Diego School of Medicine Department of Family Medicine, director of the UC San Diego Center for Mindfulness and clinical psychology director at the university’s Center for Psychedelic Research, to talk about the neuroscience behind imagination and the importance of letting your mind wander.

QI: You wear a lot of hats! How did you end up in so many different roles and in such unique research areas?

Cassandra Vieten: I landed at the trifecta of mindfulness and consciousness research, imagination research, and psychedelic research. The thread that ties them together is a deep interest in the inner world, our subjective landscape, and how our beliefs and attention affect our life and biology.

The reality you perceive is partially sensory – what you see, touch and can measure – but it’s also what’s going on inside of you that weaves together with the physical world to create our experience. We spend a lot of time in science looking at the external, physically measurable world, but less time looking into the inner world – that’s my jam.

QI: When would you say that first captured your interest? What did young Cassandra dream of being when she grew up?

CV: My dad was a professor at UC Riverside, so I grew up in the lab – he’d perch me on a lab stool and have me concoct potions in a beaker – and my mom was a therapist. She was interested in dreams and Jungian psychology, symbolism, metaphor and mythology. That formed my sense of awe and wonder at both the natural world, from galaxies to microscopic cells, and what happens inside of us.

When I was a teenager, like most adolescents, I had a lot of big feelings. I decided I wanted psychology to be my career, so I could help people feel better. As time went on, I realized that, while helping people individually was important, I also wanted to make discoveries that could make lots of people feel better collectively, and that took me into research.

QI: Is there a specific event that led you to study imagination as a research topic?

CV:In my freshman year of college, I was a participant in a study where they hooked us up to a video display that showed our stress levels, heart rate, and galvanic skin response as we were led through a meditation exercise. I was amazed to see my physiology would change based on how I was paying attention or breathing, or what I was visualizing. That led me to study meditation, mind-body interactions, consciousness, and now imagination and psychedelics, which are also windows into the inner world.

QI: Now you’ve put some of the knowledge you’ve gained into a new book about imagination called “Imagine That: Transform How You Think, Feel, and Live with the Science of Imagination.” Who do you hope will read it?

CV: It’s for the general public. I want to rekindle people’s imaginations in their own lives and collectively in society. We suffer from relegating imagination to art, entertainment and creative things when, in fact, you use your imagination all day, every day. For example, if your boss walks by your office, looks in with a frown and moves on, you could tell yourself, “They must be having a rough day” or “Oh no! what have I done?” Dozens of imaginings might come from that situation, and the rest of your day can be colored by your thoughts. It’s not really the event [your boss frowning] impacting your day, it’s the story you tell yourself about the event.

Once you realize that you’re imagining all day long, you can decide if you want to continue in the same way, because you have a choice about how you think about the world and other people.

QI: In your book, you talk about imagination as a health practice and a skill that can be honed, and you recently submitted a grant proposing an educational curriculum for imagination training. How important is that in a modern world full of AI tools ready to think and imagine for us?

CV: There’s almost nothing more important. When we give students multiple-choice exams, we are teaching them that everything is in a box, there are only four possible answers, and only one is right. If you want to nurture out-of-the-box thinking, you need not only to hone thinking that deals with realistic and feasible constraints, but also the part of you that is unrealistic and impractical, because that’s where innovations come from. [Science fiction writer] Arthur C. Clarke, our center’s namesake, has a great quote that says, “The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.”

QI: Your book also talks about the “Great Flattening.” Is technology doing our imaginations more harm than good?

CV: Both. I sometimes call AI “augmented imagination,” but it depends on how you use it. If you partner with AI by prompting it to ask you questions about a project rather than asking it to give you the answers or do the work for you, it can expand your imagination tremendously. On the other hand, a side effect of having an answer for everything at your fingertips is the Great Flattening — literally the flatness of the screens we now look at all the time, but also the dampening, or flattening, of imagination. Rely too much on AI, and you start to have trouble thinking of ideas yourself. Science and technology are powerful tools, but to get to a hypothesis, you must first create an original idea you want to explore. To think “I wonder if this happens, because…” is a powerful element of science and engineering.

QI:Is it difficult to explain imagination as a hard science rather than as something related only to creativity?

CV: One way is to use neuroscience. When someone’s imagining something visual, you can see the visual cortex in their brain light up, even if they’re blindfolded. When someone imagines moving, their motor cortex lights up. And when they imagine hearing something, their auditory cortex lights up. Simply imagining something has a physical impact. It can trigger the release of chemicals, neurotransmitters and hormones like cortisol. You might get chills. You might get tingling. You might get that sinking sensation. Your body produces a similar effect to experiencing it for real.

One of the symptoms of anxiety or depression is imagining the worst all the time, but it is possible to retrain the brain so it’s doing the opposite, keeping you in a nice rest-and-digest mode, which is more conducive to relationships, creativity, productivity and focus.

QI: If people wanted to incorporate an imagination health routine into their daily lives, what would you recommend?

CV: I do recommend that! I suggest that for five minutes every morning, as part of your regular routine after you brush your teeth or have your coffee, you imagine your whole day: I’m going to get in my car, drive to work or go to my home office, turn on my Zoom screen, and have meetings. Picture yourself in each situation and ask yourself, “How do I want to feel in those situations?”

While you can’t control other people’s actions, you can choose how you want to show up. You can imagine whatever you need to feel more empowered, productive or creative. For example, if you have to have a tough conversation, you might imagine your best friend will be sitting on the other side of the Zoom screen cheering you on. Or maybe you imagine you have the heart of a lion, and you can feel that in you as you have your conversation. While these tactics may sound silly, people find they really help.

QI: When you imagine the future of the Clarke Center at the Qualcomm Institute what do you see?

CV: The Clarke Center is super excited to be at the Qualcomm Institute, because QI has always been a future-making, forward-thinking aspect of UC San Diego. Our director, Erik Viirre, is working to position the Clarke Center as a world leader in rekindling the public imagination and conducting neuroscience on imagination. We want to continue our explorations of where ideas come from, how to grab and make something out of them, and what tools can be developed to help people access their best ideas. The Center’s umbrella is broad, but what brings it all together is using imagination to move us forward in ways that help individuals and humanity.

For more information on Vieten and her book, visit The Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination or Simon & Schuster websites.

This interview was conducted by Molly Wofford, a grant writer available to support projects submitted through QI Sponsored Programs or other offices and organizations. For more information, contact her at [email protected].

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