This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris.

Hello, my fellow suffering beings, how we doing?

Anybody who's listened to this show for a minute probably knows that I've got a long-running

beef with the concept of manifestation.

I associate manifestation with the power of positive thinking, the law of attraction, or

that book, The Secret, the idea that you can get or achieve whatever you want purely through the power of

your thoughts. So like make a vision board and you can get a diamond necklace or cure your

cancer or whatever, all of which is very clearly bullshit. Back when I was a news reporter, I

interviewed some of the proponents of this hogwash and many of their followers who spent

tons of money trying

to make this stuff real for themselves. And usually, in my experience, it didn't work out so well,

except, of course, for the gurus who made a ton of money. My friends Jeff Warren and Sevene-A.

Salasi are both meditation teachers who I deeply trust and admire, and they have long tried to

convince me that there's a more subtle and legit

version of manifestation, and for a long time, they had minimal success at this. But then I met

today's guest, James Doty, who's a neurosurgeon who's just written a whole book about the

science of manifestation. And I've got to tell you, he definitely opened my mind. But I also have to

tell you, his version of manifestation bears almost no resemblance to the secret or the power of positive thinking or junk like that.

Dr. Doty recently put out a book called Mind Magic, although as you will hear him admit, there's very little magic involved in this process.

Let me just say a little bit about Dr. Doty. He's a Stanford

neurosurgeon, neuroscientist, compassion, researcher, inventor, entrepreneur, author, and philanthropist.

He's the founder and director of the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education,

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