A minute for your imagination
Can a thought change something in your body even though nothing around you has happened?
Try it. Take a minute and read slowly. Leave a little space between sentences so the words can become your own images.
Hold out one hand, palm facing upwards.
Imagine a ripe lemon resting in it.
Bright yellow. Heavy enough to feel its weight in your hand. Its skin is cool and slightly uneven. Your thumb moves over its tiny pores.
Now, in your imagination, place the lemon on a board and cut it open.
The skin gives way under the knife. The juicy flesh opens beneath it. Little drops emerge and run onto the board. The cut surface glistens.
Take one half back into your hand.
Slowly bring your hand towards your nose. Imagine the fresh lemon scent rising. Clear, sharp, intense. Perhaps you remember the scent that stays on your fingers after cutting a lemon.
Hold that image for a moment.
And now imagine bringing the lemon to your mouth and biting into it.
Your teeth press into the juicy flesh. Lemon juice touches your tongue. That intense sourness spreads through your mouth.
What do you notice right now?
Perhaps you have produced more saliva. Perhaps your mouth puckers a little. Perhaps you need to swallow.
Yet there is no lemon in your hand.
An image in the mind. A response in the body.
How remarkable that an imagined experience can become so immediately tangible.
If you have not noticed a change, that is equally fine. Mental images vary in vividness, and physical responses differ from person to person.
The experiment offers an experience of a connection: what we imagine can influence how we feel physically. It does not prove that thoughts alone determine our lives.
Which thoughts do you keep making room for?
You may recognise this in everyday life: you rehearse a difficult conversation in your mind, and your shoulders tense. You think of someone familiar and notice a smile.
Thoughts can influence feelings. Feelings can help shape our actions. What we repeatedly do can become a habit. And habits shape our everyday lives, and over time, our lives more broadly.
Our bodies, experiences and circumstances play a part, too. The connection works in both directions.
That makes noticing what is happening inside you all the more valuable.
Observing begins with a pause
You do not have to control every thought. Thoughts appear, often on their own. In meditation, we practise noticing them and relating to them consciously.
You can ask yourself:
What am I thinking right now?
What does this thought bring up in me?
Is it a fact, a fear or a memory?
How would I like to act now?
That brief pause alone can open another possibility.
Think of the lemon again. Perhaps it was in your imagination for only a few seconds, and yet you could feel something.
Which thoughts accompany you every day?
What research says
Studies show that imagining eating can increase salivation under certain conditions. Findings for imagination alone are inconsistent. This exercise invites self-observation; it is not a diagnostic test.
- Consumption Simulations Induce Salivation to Food Cues (2016). The study examined imagined eating in the presence of food cues; its findings do not establish the same effect for a purely mental exercise.
- Drummond (1995): Effect of imagining and actually tasting a sour taste on one side of the tongue. Salivation did not increase significantly during imagination in this study.