Demystifying the Mysticism of Manifestation with Neuroscience

by Dr. Jeffrey DeSarbo

“Isn’t it weird?” someone says. “I was just talking about how I never see that, and now I’m seeing it everywhere.”

It’s one of the most common experiences people use as evidence that manifestation is real. You mention a goal, travel to Patagonia, publish a book, buy a specific type of home, meet a partner with purple hair, and then the world seems to answer back. In a crowd of hundreds of people, there she is, the girl with the purple hair! Just like that! It can feel as though the universe is listening. But there is a much closer, more powerful explanation: your brain is listening differently. Your brain has shifted what it tags as important, and once that happens, your reality changes, not because reality reorganized itself, but because your nervous system stopped filtering those cues out.

That’s the core of what manifestation is when you remove the mysticism. It is not a wish granted. It is a neurobiological reorientation. A bucket list goal, often a “reach goal” that feels unlikely, isn’t just an idea on paper. When you repeatedly think about it, speak it out loud, imagine it vividly, or attach emotion to it, your brain begins to treat it as relevant. Relevance is everything. Relevance determines what you notice, what you remember, what you pursue, what you focus on, and what you ignore. Manifestation is the word people use when they feel this internal reorientation and mistake it for an external mystical force.

The brain is not a passive recorder of the world. It is a prediction machine, a relevance engine, and a gatekeeper. It is constantly deciding what information deserves entry into consciousness, and what gets filed away as noise. Most of your day is not shaped by what exists around you, but by what your brain decides is worth attention. In that sense, you are always living inside a curated version of reality, built from your priorities, your fears, your desires, your expectations, and the story you carry about who you are and where you are going. Bucket list goals, when they are emotionally meaningful, don’t simply sit on the list. They start pulling on that curation process.

The Reticular Activating System: The Gatekeeper That Makes “Coincidence” Feel Like Fate

A central player in this experience is the reticular activating system (RAS), a network involving the brainstem and its connections that regulates arousal, attention, and the filtering of incoming information. People often describe the RAS like a gate at the front of awareness. You cannot consciously process everything you see, hear, taste, smell, and feel at any given moment, so the brain must decide what gets through. That decision is heavily influenced by what you consciously and unconsciously deem important.

This is why a goal can feel like it “summons” opportunities. It isn’t summoning anything. It is changing what crosses the threshold into awareness. The moment a travel goal becomes personally meaningful, the brain begins to tag travel-related cues as relevant: a friend’s comment about a tour company, a documentary that sparks a route idea, a news story about a flight sale, a professional event in a destination you’ve dreamed about. Those cues were not absent before. They were simply filtered out. Once the RAS begins letting them through, it feels like the world has changed. In reality, the filter has changed.

The same phenomenon explains why people buy a certain car and suddenly see that model everywhere. The car did not multiply. Your brain simply stopped treating it as background. That experience of “I see it everywhere now” is the subjective feeling of attention being recalibrated.

The Salience Network: The Brain’s “What Matters?” System

The salience network is the next layer that makes manifestation feel alive. Heavily anchored in regions such as the anterior insula and anterior cingulate cortex, this network determines what is flagged as significant. It works like a prioritization system that decides which internal sensations and external cues deserve action. It is intimately involved in switching the brain between internal modes (reflection, imagination) and outward-focused modes (problem solving, goal pursuit).

When you commit to a goal, you are not only making an intellectual decision, you are assigning salience. You are telling your brain, “This matters now.” And once something matters, the brain begins scanning for it in an automatic, focused, efficient way. People often label this as “manifesting” because it feels as though opportunities have suddenly appeared, but what has increased is vigilance for relevance. The nervous system starts searching the environment for pathways that align with the goal.

This vigilance does not need to be obsessive to be powerful. It can be a quiet tightening of perception, a subtle shift toward noticing what could help you, a gradual inclination to explore rather than dismiss. In clinical terms, it’s an attentional bias that is goal-congruent rather than threat-driven. It is the brain’s way of aligning what you see with what you say you want.

This also explains how the brain can be primed to “see” the world with a certain viewpoint. One who primes their attention network, often through news and social media, to be vigilant towards everything that is going wrong in life or in the world, will find themselves flooded with examples to support this belief system. Another who is exposed to and focuses on ideas that life is amazing and filled with wonderful things, will, in like manner, find themselves surrounded with examples to support that belief system. It can be the same world for both, but what manifests in their perception is what their brain and thoughts have been exposed to and trained to pay attention to.

And this is where bucket lists become far more than self-help exercises. A bucket list is a structured way to teach the salience network what to prioritize. It is a way of moving meaningful goals out of the vague mental fog and into the brain’s active priority map.

The Default Mode Network: Turning Goals Into Identity and Inner Narrative

If the salience network flags what matters, the default mode network (DMN) helps decide what fits inside the narrative of the self. The DMN is involved in self-referential thinking, autobiographical memory, future imagining, and meaning construction. It is the neural architecture of “who I am,” “what my life is,” and “where I’m headed.”

This matters because people do not persistently pursue goals that feel inconsistent with identity. The reach goal that initially feels unrealistic often stays unrealistic until it becomes incorporated into the inner storyline. Once the DMN begins repeatedly simulating that future by picturing the trip, imagining the graduation, rehearsing the moment, t starts to feel less like fantasy and more like a legitimate branch of the self.

That shift is subtle, but it changes behavior. When a goal becomes identity-consistent, you do not need constant external motivation to keep it alive. You start making small decisions that match the person who would eventually achieve it. The travel goal becomes the person who “goes places.” The master’s degree becomes the person who “finishes what they start.” Manifestation is often the subjective experience of this identity shift, the feeling that the goal has moved from wishful thinking into the category of “this is real for me.”

Mental Rehearsal: The Brain Practices Before Life Requires Performance

Visualization and mental rehearsal can sound like pop psychology until you remember what the brain is doing when it imagines. Imagining activates many of the same circuits involved in doing. Planning regions, emotional systems, and even action-related networks participate. The brain cannot fully treat imagination as “nothing.” It treats it as a simulation, and simulation is rehearsal.

Repeated rehearsal strengthens neural pathways. It reduces uncertainty. It decreases the threat response that tends to arise when something feels unfamiliar or too big. In practical terms, mental rehearsal can reduce the friction of starting. It can make the first step feel less like leaping into the unknown and more like continuing a storyline already underway.

This is one reason bucket list goals benefit from being revisited rather than written once and forgotten. Each revisit is another round of rehearsal. Each emotional connection is another layer of salience. Each imagined detail is another reduction in the brain’s sense of unpredictability.

Dopamine and Motivation: Not Reward, But Pursuit

People often think dopamine is the chemical of pleasure. But dopamine is more accurately the chemistry of pursuit: energy, drive, curiosity, and motivation to move toward something. When a goal is meaningful and feels within the realm of possibility, dopamine systems become engaged. The brain starts to anticipate progress. That anticipation is motivating. It makes effort more tolerable and setbacks less fatal.

This is why reach goals, paradoxically, can be energizing rather than discouraging when framed correctly. A reach goal that feels like a dream can light up motivation because it gives the brain direction, a target, a “north star.” It can pull someone out of stagnation. It can shift time perception from aimless drifting to purposeful movement. You feel more alive not because the goal is guaranteed, but because the brain is organized around a compelling pursuit.

Executive Networks: Turning Desire Into Strategy

None of this matters without the brain’s executive control systems, prefrontal networks that support planning, impulse control, persistence, and goal maintenance. Manifestation becomes real in the moments nobody posts about: choosing the less comfortable option because it serves the goal, sending the email you would have avoided, saving money when you want to spend it, making time when you feel too busy, practicing the skill when you’d rather escape.

Here, a bucket list becomes a behavioral tool. It keeps goals active enough in working memory that the executive systems can coordinate behavior around them. It nudges your brain toward the kinds of micro-decisions that change outcomes over months and years. That’s not magic. That’s compounding.

Why It Can Feel Like the Universe Is Listening

This is the experience people describe most often: “I was just thinking about that and now it’s everywhere.” It’s worth naming directly, because it is both ordinary and profound.

People often say, "I was just thinking about that, and now I’m seeing it everywhere. It’s like the universe is listening." In reality, something closer to home is at work. Your default mode network has brought the idea into your inner narrative, and your salience network has flagged it as important. Your brain begins to notice what was always there but had previously been ignored. The RAS, acting as the gatekeeper of awareness, stops filtering out relevant cues. The world hasn’t become enchanted. Your attention has become aligned.

Negative Manifestation: The Same Machinery Can Build the Reality You Fear

The most clinically important part of this topic is that these systems not only amplify what we want, but also amplify what we don't. They can also amplify what we fear. The brain does not tag “positive” or “negative.” It tags “important.” And anxiety is an intense marker of importance.

When someone repeatedly focuses on feared outcomes such as failure, rejection, illness, humiliation, the salience network flags threat-related cues as priority. The RAS begins letting in evidence that confirms danger. The DMN begins constructing a narrative in which the feared outcome feels inevitable. Executive networks become organized around avoidance instead of action. Dopamine systems can become blunted, not because the person is lazy, but because pursuit feels unsafe.

That is how people “manifest” negative outcomes without realizing they are doing it. They do not will the negative event into existence through cosmic forces. They build a threat-organized perception that nudges behavior toward withdrawal, procrastination, missed opportunities, and self-fulfilling loops.

Consider the student in a master’s program who is quietly terrified of failing. If the internal rehearsal is dominated by catastrophe such as falling behind, being exposed as inadequate, disappointing others, the brain begins treating the entire program as a threat landscape. The salience network scans for overwhelm. The RAS admits every cue that proves “this is too much.” The DMN turns the story into, “I’m not someone who finishes.” The executive system responds with avoidance because it reduces short-term distress. Unconscious behaviors and decisions begin to take place to support the belief. Deadlines slip. The gap widens. Shame grows. Eventually, the feared outcome arrives. It feels like fate, but it is actually neurobiology, plus fear, plus time.

Now compare that to someone who wants to travel to a far-off exotic destination that feels unrealistic. If the brain rehearses possibility rather than threat, if the internal narrative is “this could be part of my life that I want,” the salience network begins to notice pathways rather than barriers. A conversation about a conference abroad becomes meaningful. An advertised flight deal becomes noticeable and actionable. A professional opportunity with travel becomes appealing rather than inconvenient. The brain begins shaping behavior toward the goal in dozens of micro-ways that accumulate. The trip happens one day, and it feels like manifestation worked. It did, but not because the universe delivered it. Because the brain made it more likely with a change in attention.

The Reality of Manifestation

The most honest definition of manifestation is this: a goal becomes “manifested” when it becomes neurologically prioritized enough to alter what you notice, what you rehearse, what you choose, how you feel about it, and how persistently you pursue. It is not certain. It is a probability. It shifts odds. It changes the path's slope.

A bucket list approach in life is powerful because it is a deliberate way of feeding your brain healthier priorities than fear, rumination, and survival-only thinking. It gives the salience network something worth scanning for. It gives the DMN a future worth simulating. It gives the RAS a new set of cues to admit into awareness. It gives executive networks a reason to stay engaged. It gives dopamine systems a direction for pursuit.

In that sense, you are always manifesting something. The question is whether you are doing it intentionally, consciously, with intention, clarity, and meaning, or unconsciously, through fear, avoidance, and the repetition of worst-case narratives.

The manifestation phenomenon happens, not because the universe is listening, but because your brain is.