In a previous article, I talked about why roleplaying can feel like art therapy. This time, I want to lift the hood and explain what’s actually happening in your brain when you pretend to be a wizard.
Because the truth is simple and fascinating: when you roleplay, your brain doesn’t just observe the story—it joins it. It reacts as if the things happening at the table are happening to you. And this isn’t poetic exaggeration. It’s measurable. It’s neurological. It’s real.
Some of the most memorable experiences I’ve had as a Game Master are the emotional ones. When everyone at the table bursts into laughter at the same time, the moment doesn’t feel like something happening only in the fiction. It feels shared and real. The same thing happens in sad moments. When a character the group loves dies, the mood in the room shifts. People fall quiet, lean back, or sigh in a way that isn’t performative. It’s not simply acting; the emotion is genuine.
That happens because, neurologically, imagined emotions aren’t fully separate from real ones. One key player in this process is what’s known as the mirror neuron system. Mirror neurons are cells in the brain that fire both when we perform an action and when we see someone else perform it. They’re also involved when we imagine actions or emotions. When someone laughs, winces, or expresses sadness, these neurons respond as if we were experiencing the feeling ourselves. In a tabletop game, the group’s emotional reactions reinforce each other through this system, making the emotions feel authentic and shared.
Imagination itself is powered by a network of brain regions called the default mode network. This network activates when we daydream, remember past experiences, imagine future events, or construct fictional scenarios. It’s not just “thinking about” a story from the outside. It runs a mental simulation. Brain imaging studies show that imagining a situation recruits many of the same regions that are active during real-life experiences. When your character walks into danger, your brain engages the same systems it would use to anticipate and react to real danger. The fictional and the emotional overlap in the neural architecture itself.
Another important part of this process involves the limbic system—the emotional core of the brain. This system, which includes structures like the amygdala and hippocampus, responds to emotional significance, not to whether something is technically “real.” When something important happens in the story, whether it’s a loss or a big victory, the limbic system reacts. It can trigger changes in heart rate, muscle tension, and emotional arousal. It also helps encode the event in memory. This is why people can vividly recall critical moments in a campaign years later. Those memories aren’t superficial; they’re stored through the same mechanisms the brain uses for real experiences.
This is one of the major differences between watching a story and living it. Films and books can create strong emotions too, but they’re usually experienced passively. In a tabletop game, players participate in shaping the story. Their decisions matter. The brain tends to encode participatory events more deeply than passive ones. Because players help build the story, it becomes personal. And when that story is shared with others, the resulting emotional reactions create a sense of collective experience. The brain remembers those sessions not as simple entertainment, but as shared events.
Imagination also serves as a form of cognitive exercise. Engaging in shared storytelling activates multiple systems at once: memory recall, future simulation, perspective-taking, language, and emotional processing. Research on creative cognition shows that imagination strengthens neural flexibility and connectivity, helping people think more adaptively and empathetically. These processes involve interactions between the default mode network, the executive control network, and the salience network—systems responsible for imagination, decision-making, and emotional significance. When you play, your brain is doing complex, coordinated work. It’s not “just pretending.”
This matters because roleplaying games are often dismissed as escapism, as if escaping were something trivial. But the brain doesn’t treat them that way. When you sit around a table with friends and imagine together, multiple systems in your brain are engaged: mirror neurons fire in response to others, the default mode network simulates the story, the limbic system processes the emotion, and other networks manage decision-making and attention.
What results is not just a game but a meaningful neurological event: a shared, imagined experience that the brain processes as emotionally real. This is why the laughter feels genuine, why the silence after a character’s death feels heavy, and why old campaigns linger in memory. Imagination isn’t a lesser form of reality. It’s one of the oldest and most powerful ways the human brain makes sense of the world.