What if the most overlooked key to improved mental health, innovation, and human connection was your own imagination?
In Imagine That, psychologist, imagination scientist and Director of Research at the Center for Human Imagination at the University of California, San Diego, Dr. Cassandra Vieten makes a radical claim: imagination is not just for artists and dreamers, it’s the operating system behind how all of us think, act, and live.
Drawing on her groundbreaking scientific research, Vieten takes readers inside the living,
dynamic brain of imagination, revealing how it works, and how it can be intentionally harnessed to reshape the way we think, feel, and live. She introduces the concept of imagination neurodiversity: the game-changing insight that each of us possesses a distinct pattern of imaginative strengths, tendencies, and untapped capacities that can be understood, cultivated, and activated.
Having been associated with the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination since its beginning in 2013, I’m delighted to see Vieten’s new book, which builds on that decade of work and then goes well beyond it, by collating all the latest results in cognitive science to make a new synthesis. The result is fascinating, a stimulus to change one’s mind and life for the better.
What a treasure! This book made me fall in love with the human capacity for imagination all over again.
In Imagine That, Cassandra Vieten offers a deeply integrative exploration of the human mind, illuminating how imagination is not merely a creative act but a fundamental process shaping our experience, relationships, and well-being. Drawing on science and lived insight, she reveals how we can harness the mind’s capacity to envision and embody new patterns of being. This book is a wise and practical guide to cultivating integration and transforming our lives from the inside out.
When it’s so easy these days to feel helpless and stuck, this is a scientifically-grounded guide to the power and freedom of your own mind. Cassi Vieten is brilliant, funny, and heartfelt as she offers fascinating research, practical suggestions, and deep insight. Really a gem.
In Imagine That, Cassandra Vieten masterfully bridges science and soul, revealing imagination as one of our most powerful tools for healing, growth, and transformation. With clarity, compassion, and deep wisdom, she shows us how to move beyond limiting narratives and consciously create lives of meaning and possibility. This book is both a guide and an invitation: to remember who we are and to imagine who we can become.
Wise, practical, and inspiring, Imagine That reveals the transformative power of imagination grounded in science and guided by compassion. Cassandra Vieten offers a roadmap for creating a life aligned with our deepest values and highest possibilities.
In Imagine That, we realize imagination isn’t a fixed trait — it’s a skill we can sharpen, and this book shows us how. Blending cutting-edge science with practical insights, Cassi Vieten helps us uncover our unique imaginative strengths and intentionally grow them. In a world where screens and routines often dull our curiosity, this book offers a way to rekindle creativity, deepen our sense of curiosity, and reconnect with what inspires us. By the end, we don’t just think differently about imagination — we feel its possibilities more vividly in our own lives.
Imagine That is essential reading for anyone who wants to rediscover the wild and wonderful powers of human imagination. Cassandra Vieten gives us an accessible user’s guide to the interior world of human consciousness and a rich history of the strange and beautiful science that bridges perception, invention, and inspiration.
Cassi Vieten’s book is a powerful introduction to the developing marriage of imagination and science, which is a dawning superpower in the world today. That superpower is accessible to us all and this book shows us many ways to embrace it and incorporate its magic.
In a moment when imagination and creativity feel both urgently needed and too often out of reach, Imagine That offers a timely and inspiring guide. Drawing on cutting-edge science and her own imaginative endeavors, Cassandra Vieten shows us how to unlock our creative capacities, expand our sense of possibility, and harness our deepest potential.
Cassandra Vieten uncovers a highly effective way to free yourself from a rut or a jam, through a method that is playful, delightful and full of surprising opportunities. Namely, by embracing our natural gift of imagination, we can be liberated and even elevated. Imagination is not only for the accomplished writer or renowned painter, it belongs to all of us. In a guided and stepwise way, Vieten help us unlock this treasure chest. [and/or] Cassandra Vieten shows us how to pull back the curtain and open the window to our greater mind. Each of us can be touched by the muse!
A disciplined argument for treating imagination not as indulgence, but as an epistemic tool. Vieten integrates history, cognitive science, and neuroscience with philosophical clarity, showing that imagination can be constrained, interrogated, and made accountable to evidence. The result is a reframing: imagination not as woo, nor fantasy, but as a generative engine that proposes hypotheses reality can then accept or veto. Valuable for scientists and educators who want to expand the boundary of creativity without sacrificing rigor.
Lost somewhere between the pursuit of gruelling goals and screen-mediated oblivion, we often forget how essential imagination is to human survival. Dr. Vieten’s book is here to remind us and to provide strategies for restoring imagination back to its rightful place.
In the age of AI is human imagination irrelevant? Hardly, this engine of foresight, empathy, and innovation is undergoing a high octane boost and Vieten’s research and practices help us all to upgrade this uniquely human superpower.
Cassandra Vieten has done something rare. She’s brought genuine scientific rigor to a subject most researchers treat as too slippery to study, and emerged with findings that are both illuminating and immediately useful. At a moment when so many feel trapped by limits they can’t quite name, Imagine That makes a compelling case that imagination is not just a frivolous luxury but an essential survival skill. Exhilarating, grounded, and urgently needed.
This is your superpower: the imagination—not the imaginary, but the imagination, which is way beyond anything we imagine as imaginary. This is a book about how to realize those further reaches. Go further!
Based on her work at the Center for Human Imagination at UCSD and decades of careful discovery about human potential, Dr. Vieten has brought powerful electricity to our understanding of imagination. Through clear examples and fun exercises, she makes it easy to understand and use the power of our inner worlds to create, solve problems, and heal ourselves through time. ‘Imagine that!’ is a command, a suggestion, but most of all — magic.
Well argued and beautifully written, this book bridges laboratory findings and lived practice. It illuminates how imagination rewires perception, soothes suffering, and expands possibility — indispensable for clinicians, researchers, and curious minds alike.
In Imagine That, Cassandra Vieten offers a deeply humane invitation to reclaim one of our most powerful—and neglected—human capacities: imagination. A compassionate clinician with the skills of a seasoned teacher and the precision of a rigorous scientist, Vieten shows how imagination can help us move beyond anxiety, burnout, and limitation into lives of greater meaning, resilience, creativity, and wonder. Intellectually expansive and emotionally generous, Imagine That is a groundbreaking guide to healing the “diseases of disenchantment” of modern life. Whether helping readers deepen empathy, unlock creativity, improve well-being, or envision better futures for themselves and society, Vieten writes with extraordinary care for the human condition. This is a wise, hopeful, and scientifically grounded book for anyone longing to feel more alive, more connected, and more capable of shaping what comes next.
Vieten creatively unpacks the process of creativity. Her book is as fun to read as it is helpful to understand. We take wonder in the value of wonder, and reimagine imagination. An important read for anyone who values generating good ideas… and who doesn’t?
This is the quintessential and life changing guide to mind and imagination for anyone interested in living more deeply. Dr. Cassandra Vieten, a world expert in the science of transformation takes us on a phenomenal tour of imagination that bridges lab and life with an abundance of easily accessible paths for tapping directly into innate wisdom, intuition, and empowerment.
Spiritual and Religious Competencies in Clinical Practice: Guidelines for Psychotherapists and Mental Health Professionals
Spirituality lies at the heart of many clients’ core values, and helps shape their perception of themselves and the world around them. In this book, two clinical psychologists provide a much-needed, research-based road map to help professionals appropriately address their clients’ spiritual or religious beliefs in treatment sessions.
More and more, it has become essential for mental health professionals to understand and competently navigate clients’ religious and spiritual beliefs in treatment. In Spiritual and Religious Competencies in Clinical Practice, you’ll find sixteen research-based guidelines and best practices to help you provide effective therapy while being conscious of your clients’ unique spiritual or cultural background.
Mindful Motherhood: Practical Tools for Staying Sane During Pregnancy and Your Child's First Year
From hormones to stretch marks, labor pains to diaper changes, motherhood is an adventure like none other. The rapid changes in your body, your lifestyle, and your very identity call for a certain mental agility. Mindfulness can help you meet the challenge and approach every experience with your new baby with open eyes and an open heart.
Easy ten-minute meditation exercises and yoga poses throughout this book will help you cultivate greater flexibility and mindful awareness during pregnancy, childbirth, and your baby’s first year. Whenever you have a moment to spare, open Mindful Motherhood and discover a skill that will help you find balance and fulfillment during those times when you feel most overwhelmed.
Living Deeply: The Art & Science of Transformation in Everyday
Living Deeply transcends any one approach by focusing on common elements of transformation across a variety of traditions, while affirming and supporting the diversity of approaches across religious, spiritual, scientific, academic, and cultural backgrounds. Each chapter in the book ends with Experiences of Transformation, exercises drawn from wisdom traditions or scientific investigations meant to enhance your direct experience of the material.
Opportunities to actively engage in your own transformation and that of our world are woven into the fabric of your everyday life. Learning more about the terrain of consciousness transformation can not only give you a map, but can help you become the cartographer of your own transformative journey. Research over the last decade at the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) has systematically surveyed hundreds of people’s stories of their own transformations, as well as conducting over 50 in-depth interviews with teachers and masters of the world’s spiritual, religious, and transformative traditions.
Welcoming All That We Are: 52 Activities for Women's Groups
Silver Award Winner 2023 Midwest Book Awards. Gathering with other women is empowering―whether you are a daughter, sister, mother, leader, change-maker, teacher, seeker, or healer. Women’s groups are safe harbors to share your hopes, fears, dreams and aspirations―where your authentic self is welcomed and witnessed by other women. You will find this book full of inspirational ideas for women groups of all ages and backgrounds.
The book’s 52 activities are arranged across four seasons or can be used any time. Each includes step-by-step guidelines, materials, and recommended books, media, poetry, and music for your group members to explore their strengths, discover new aspects of themselves, come to terms with the past, connect with their spirituality, and support one another. This collection of powerful practices and explorations is designed to enliven groups of women who meet in living rooms, spiritual or religious settings, retreats, community organizations, treatment centers, and anywhere women gather.
