We know that hypnotherapy that engages as many of the 5 senses as possible is much more powerful and that imagining one is playing a sport well makes muscles activate as if it were true. Here is a fascinating article on the power of pretend.
Here’s a fascinating article, The Neuroscience of Your Brain on Fiction, showing how “the brain. . . does not make much of a distinction between reading about an experience and encountering it in real life. . . the same neurological regions are stimulated.”
I love it when something I have learned to do in my training is explained by neuroscience! I know it works, I’m just the kind of person that also likes to know why and how.