Top Quotes: “You Are the Placebo: Making Your Mind Matter” — Joe Dispenza
Introduction
“In the same decade that Kandel and others measured neuroplasticity, other scientists discovered that few of our genes are static. The majority of genes (estimates range from 75 to 85 percent) are turned off and on by signals from our environment, including the environment of thoughts, beliefs, and emotions that we cultivate in our brains. One class of these genes, the immediate early genes (IEGs), takes only three seconds to reach peak expression. IEGs are often regulatory genes, controlling the expression of hundreds of other genes and thousands of other proteins at remote sites in our bodies. That kind of pervasive and rapid change is a plausible explanation for some of the radical healings you’ll read about in these pages.
Joe is one of the few science writers to fully grasp the role of emotion in transformation. Negative emotion may literally be an addiction to high levels of our own stress hormones, like cortisol and adrenaline. Both these stress hormones and relaxation hormones like DHEA and oxytocin have set points, which explains why we feel uncomfortable in our skin when we think thoughts or countenance beliefs that drive our hormonal balance outside of that comfort zone. This idea is at the very frontier of the scientific understanding of addictions and cravings.
By changing your internal state, you can change your external reality. Joe masterfully explains the chain of events that starts with intentions originating in the frontal lobe of your brain and then translating into chemical messengers, called neuropeptides, that send signals throughout your body, turning genetic switches on or off. Some of these chemicals, like oxytocin, the “cuddle hormone” that’s stimulated by touch, are associated with feelings of love and trust. With practice, you can learn to quickly adjust your set points for stress hormones and healing hormones.”
“Joe began to push the envelope, wondering just how fast radical healing might occur if people applied the body’s placebo effect with complete conviction. Hence, the title You Are the Placebo reflects the fact that it’s your own thoughts, emotions, and beliefs that are generating chains of physiological events in your body.”
“In the middle of my meditations on creating the life I wanted with a fully healed spine, I would all of a sudden become aware that I’d been unconsciously thinking about what the surgeons had told me a few weeks prior: that I would probably never walk again. I would be in the midst of inwardly reconstructing my spine, and the next thing I knew I was stressing over whether I should sell my chiropractic practice. While I was step-by-step mentally rehearsing walking again, I would catch myself imagining what it would be like to live the rest of my life sitting in a wheelchair — you get the idea.
So every time I lost my attention and my mind wandered to any extraneous thoughts, I would start from the beginning and do the whole scheme of imagery over again. It was tedious, frustrating, and, quite frankly, one of the most difficult things I’d ever done. But I reasoned that the final picture that I wanted the observer in me to notice had to be clear, unpolluted, and uninterrupted. In order for this intelligence to accomplish what I hoped, what I knew it was capable of doing, from start to finish I had to stay conscious and not go unconscious.
Finally, after six weeks of battling with myself and making the effort to be present with this consciousness, I was able to make it through my inward reconstruction process without having to stop and start over from the beginning. I remember the day I did it for the first time: It was like hitting a tennis ball on the sweet spot. There was something right about it. It clicked. I clicked. And I felt complete, satisfied, and whole. For the first time, I was truly relaxed and present in mind and body. There was no mental chatter, no analyzing, no thinking, no obsessing, no trying; something lifted, and a kind of peace and silence prevailed. It was as if I no longer cared about all of the things I should have been worried about in my past and future.
And that realization solidified the journey for me, because right around that time, as I was creating this vision of what I wanted, reconstructing my vertebrae, it started to get easier every day. Most important, I started to notice some pretty significant physiological changes. It was in that moment that I began to correlate what I was doing inside of me to create this change with what was taking place outside of me — in my body.”
“I had quite a bit of time on my hands. So I started to think about what it would be like to see a sunset again from the water’s edge or eat lunch with my friends at a table in a restaurant, and I thought about how I would never take any of that for granted. In detail, I imagined taking a shower and feeling the water on mv face and body, or simply sitting up while using the toilet or taking a walk on the beach in San Diego, the wind blowing on my face. These were some things that I had never fully appreciated before the accident, but now they had meaning — and I took my time to emotionally embrace them until I felt as if I were already there.”
“As long as you’re thinking the same thoughts, they’ll lead to the same choices, which cause the same behaviors, which create the same experiences, which produce the same emotions, which in turn drive the same thoughts — so that neurochemically, you stay the same. In effect, you’re reminding yourself of who you think you are.”
“The key is making your inner thoughts more real than the outer environment, because then the brain won’t know the difference between the two and will change to look as if the event has taken place. If you’re able to do this successfully enough times, you’ll transform your body and begin to activate new genes in new ways, producing epigenetic changes — just as though the imagined future event were real. And then you can walk right into that new reality and become the placebo.”
“In order for you to change your beliefs and perceptions, you must combine a clear intention with an elevated emotion that conditions your body to believe that the future potential that you selected from the quantum field has already happened. The elevated emotion is vital, because only when your choice carries an amplitude of energy that’s greater than the hardwired programs in your brain and the emotional addiction in your body, will you be able to change your brain’s circuitry and your body’s genetic expression, as well as recondition your body to a new mind (erasing any trace of the old neurocircuitry and conditioning).”
Disease & Death
“A funny thing happened when the hospital performed Londe’s autopsy. The man’s liver was, in fact, not filled with cancer; he had only a very tiny nodule of cancer in its left lobe and another very small spot on his lung. The truth is, neither cancer was big enough to kill him. And in fact, the area around his esophagus was totally free of disease as well. The abnormal liver scan taken at the St. Louis hospital had apparently yielded a false positive result.
Sam Londe didn’t die of esophageal cancer, nor did he die of liver cancer. He also didn’t die of the mild case of pneumonia he had when he was readmitted to the hospital. He died, quite simply, because everybody in his immediate environment thought he was dying. His doctor in St. Louis thought Londe was dying, and then Dr. Meador, in Nashville, thought Londe was dying. Londe’s wife and family thought he was dying, too. And, most important. Londe himself thought he was dying.”
“The patients like Schonfeld, who had improved on the placebos, hadn’t just imagined feeling better; they had actually changed their brainwave patterns. The EEG recordings taken so faithfully over the course of the study showed a significant increase in activity in the prefrontal cortex, which in depressed patients typically has very low activity.
Thus the placebo effect was not only altering Schonfeld’s mind, but also bringing about real physical changes in her biology. In other words, it wasn’t just in her mind; it was in her brain. She wasn’t just feeling well — she was well. Schonfeld literally had a different brain by the end of the study, without taking any drug or doing anything differently. It was her mind that had changed her body. More than a dozen years later, Schonfeld still felt much improved.”
“Wright received his injection of Krebiozen on a Friday, and by Monday, he was walking around, laughing, and joking with his nurses, acting pretty much like a new man. Dr. West reported that the tumors “had melted like snowballs on a hot stove.” Within three days, the tumors were half their original size. In ten more days, Wright was sent home — he’d been cured. It seemed like a miracle. But two months later, the media reported that the ten trials showed that Krebiozen turned out to be a dud.
Once Wright read the news, became fully conscious of the results, and embraced the thought that the drug was useless, he relapsed immediately, with his tumors soon returning. Dr. West suspected that Wright’s initial positive response was due to the placebo effect, and knowing that his patient was terminal, he figured he had little to lose — and Wright had everything to gain — by testing out his theory. So the doctor told Wright not to believe the newspaper reports and that he’d suffered a relapse because the Krebiozen they’d given Wright was found to be part of a bad batch. What Dr. West called “a new, super-refined, double-strength” version of the drug was on its way to the hospital, and Wright could have it as soon as it arrived.
In anticipation of being cured, Wright was elated, and a few days later, he received the injection. But this time, the syringe Dr. West used contained no drug, experimental or not. The syringe was filled only with distilled water. Again, Wright’s tumors magically vanished. He happily returned home and did well for another two months, free of tumors in his body. But then the American Medical Association made the announcement that Krebiozen was indeed worthless. The medical establishment had been duped. The “miracle drug” turned out to be a hoax: nothing more than mineral oil containing a simple amino acid. The manufacturers were eventually indicted. Upon hearing the news, Wright relapsed a final time — no longer believing in the possibility of health. He returned to the hospital hopeless and two days later was dead.”
“Due to the severity of their conditions, many of these men had a noticeable limp, walked with a cane, or needed some type of assistance to get around.
The study was designed to look at arthroscopic surgery, a popular surgery that involved anesthetizing the patient before making a small incision to insert a fiber-optic instrument called an arthroscope, which the surgeon would use to get a good look at the patient’s joint. In the surgery, the doctor would then scrape and rinse the joint to remove any fragments of degenerated cartilage that were thought to be the cause of the inflammation and pain. At that time, about three-quarters of a million patients received this surgery every year.
In Dr. Moseley’s study, two of the ten men were to be given the standard surgery, called a debridement (where the surgeon scrapes strands of cartilage from the knee joint); three of them were to receive a procedure called a lavage (where high-pressured water is injected through the knee joint, rinsing and flushing out the decayed arthritic material); and five of them would receive sham surgery, in which Dr. Moseley would deftly slice through their skin with a scalpel and then just sew them back up again without performing any medical procedure at all. For those five men, there would be no arthroscope, no scraping of the joint, no removal of bone fragments, and no washing just an incision and then stitches.
The start of each of the ten procedures was exactly the same: The patient was wheeled into the operating room and given general anesthesia while Dr. Moseley scrubbed up. Once the surgeon entered the operating theater, he would find a sealed envelope waiting for him that would tell him which of the three groups the patient on the table had been randomly assigned to. Dr. Moseley would have no idea what the envelope contained until he actually ripped it open.
After the surgery, all ten of the patients in the study reported greater mobility and less pain. In fact, the men who received “pretend” surgery did just as well as those who’d received debridement or lavage surgery. There was no difference in the results – even six months later. And six years later, when two of the men who’d received the placebo surgery were interviewed, they reported that they were still walking normally, without pain, and had greater range of motion. They said that they could now perform all the everyday activities that they hadn’t been able to do before the surgery, six years earlier. The men felt as though they’d regained their lives.
Fascinated by the results, Dr. Moseley published another study in 2002 involving 180 patients who were followed for two years after their surgeries. Again, all three groups improved, with patients beginning to walk without pain or limping immediately after the surgery. But again, neither of the two groups who actually had the surgery improved any more than the patients who received the placebo surgery — and this held true even after two years.”
“This came right on the heels of another Mayo Clinic study that followed more than 800 people for 30 years, showing that optimists live longer than pessimists.
Researchers at Yale followed 660 people, aged 50 and older, for up to 23 years, discovering that those with a positive attitude about aging lived more than seven years longer than those who had a more negative outlook about growing older. Attitude had more of an influence on longevity than blood pressure, cholesterol levels, smoking, body weight, or level of exercise.
Additional studies have looked more specifically at heart health and attitude. Around the same time, a Duke University study of 866 heart patients reported that those who routinely felt more positive emotions had a 20 percent greater chance of being alive 11 years later than those who habitually experienced more negative emotions. Even more striking are the results of a study of 255 medical students at the Medical College of Georgia who were followed for 25 years: Those who were the most hostile had five times greater incidence of coronary heart disease.”
“According to the National Cancer Institute, a condition called anticipatory nausea occurs in about 29 percent of patients receiving chemotherapy when they are exposed to the smells and sights that remind them of their chemo treatments. About 11 percent feel so sick before their treatments that they actually vomit. Some cancer patients start feeling nauseated in the car on the way to get chemo, before they even set foot inside the hospital, while others throw up while still in the waiting room.
A 2001 study from the University of Rochester Cancer Center published in the Journal of Pain and Symptom Management concluded that expecting nausea was the strongest predictor that patients would actually experience it. The researchers’ data reported that 40 percent of chemo patients who thought they would get sick — because their doctors told them that they probably would be sick after the treatment went on to develop nausea before the treatment was even administered. An additional 13 percent who said they were unsure of what to expect also got sick. Yet none of the patients who didn’t expect to get nauseated got sick.”
“In one study, a group of researchers at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver informed a group of Parkinson’s patients that they were going to receive a drug that would significantly improve their symptoms. In reality, the patients received a placebo — nothing more than a saline injection. Even so, half of them who had no drug intervention, in fact, had much better motor control after receiving the injection.
The researchers then scanned the patients’ brains to get a better idea of what had happened and found that the people who responded positively to the placebo were actually manufacturing dopamine in their brains — as much as 200 percent more than before. To get an equivalent effect with a drug, you’d have to administer roughly a full dose of amphetamine — a mood-elevating drug that also increases dopamine.”
The Power of Belief
“In parts of Appalachia exist pockets of a 100-year-old religious ritual known as snake handling, or “taking up serpents.” While West Virginia is the only state where it’s still legal, that doesn’t stop the faithful, and local police in other states are known to turn a blind eye to the practice. In these small and modest churches, as congregations gather for the worship service, the preacher enters carrying one or more briefcase-shaped locked wooden boxes with hinged, clear-plastic doors perforated with air holes, and places the boxes carefully on the platform at the front of the sanctuary or meeting room, near the pulpit. Before long, the music starts, a high-energy blend of country-and-western and bluegrass melodies with deeply religious lyrics about salvation and the love of Jesus. Live musicians wail away on keyboards, electric guitars, and even drum sets that any teenage band would envy, while the parishioners shake tambourines as the spirit moves them. As the energy builds, the preacher might light a flame in a container on top of the pulpit and hold his hand in the fire, allowing the flames to lick his outstretched palm before he picks up the container to sweep the fire slowly over his bare forearms. He’s just getting “warmed up.”
The congregants soon begin swaying and laying hands on one another, speaking in tongues and jumping up and down, dancing to the music in praise of their savior. They are overcome with the spirit, what they call “being anointed.” Then it’s time for the preacher to flip open one of the locked boxes, reach a hand in, and pull out a deadly snake — usually a rattlesnake, cottonmouth, or copperhead. He, too, is dancing and working up quite a sweat as he holds the live serpent around its middle so that the snake’s head is frighteningly close to the preacher’s own head and throat.
He might hold the snake high in the air before bringing it back down closer to his body, dancing all the while, as the snake winds its lower half around his arm and gyrates its upper half in the air in whatever manner it pleases. The preacher might then get a second or even a third snake from additional wooden cases, and the congregants, men and women alike, might join him in handling the serpents as they feel the anointing coming over them. In some services, the preacher might even ingest a poison, like strychnine, from a simple drinking glass, without suffering any ill effects.
Although the snake handlers do sometimes get bitten, considering the thousands of services where feverish believers have reached into those hinged wooden boxes without a trace of doubt or fear, it doesn’t happen often. And even when it does, they don’t always die — even though they don’t rush to the hospital, preferring instead to have the congregation gather around them in prayer. Why are these people not bitten more often? And why aren’t there more deaths when they do get bitten? How can they get into a state of mind where they are not afraid of such venomous creatures, whose bite is known to be deadly, and how can that state of mind protect them?
Then there are the displays of extreme strength in emergency situations, known as “hysterical strength.” In April 2013, for example, 16-year-old Hannah Smith and her 14-year-old sister, Haylee, of Lebanon, Oregon, lifted a 3,000-pound tractor to free their father, Jeff Smith, who was trapped underneath.”
“In 1938, a 60-year-old man in rural Tennessee spent four months getting sicker and sicker, before his wife brought him to a 15-bed hospital at the edge of town. By this time, Vance Vanders (not his real name) had lost more than 50 pounds and appeared to be near death. The doctor, Drayton Doherty, suspected that Vanders was suffering from tuberculosis or possibly cancer, but repeated tests and x-rays came up negative. Dr. Doherty’s physical examination showed nothing that could be causing Vanders’ distress. Vanders refused to eat, so he was given a feeding tube, but he stubbornly vomited whatever was put down the tube. He continued to get worse, repeating the conviction that he was going to die, and eventually he was barely able to talk. The end seemed near, although Dr. Doherty still had no idea what the man’s affliction was.
Vanders’s distraught wife asked to speak to Dr. Doherty privately and, swearing him to secrecy, told him that her husband’s problem was that he’d been “voodoo’d.” It seems that Vanders, who lived in a community where voodoo was a common practice, had had an argument with a local voodoo priest. The priest had summoned Vanders to the cemetery late one night, where he put a hex on the man by waving a bottle of malodorous liquid in front of Vanders’s face. The priest told Vanders that he would soon die and that no one could save him. That was it. Vanders was convinced that his days were numbered and thus believed in a new, dismal future reality. The defeated man returned home and refused to eat. Eventually, his wife brought him to the hospital.
After Dr. Doherty had heard the whole story, he came up with a rather unorthodox plan for treating his patient. In the morning, he summoned Vanders’s family to his bedside and told them that he was now certain that he knew how to cure the sick man. The family listened intently as Dr. Doherty spun the following fabricated tale. He said that on the previous night, he had gone to the cemetery, where he’d tricked the voodoo priest into meeting with him and divulging how he had voodoo’d Vanders. It hadn’t been easy, Dr. Doherty said. The priest had understandably not wanted to cooperate, although he finally relented once Dr. Doherty had pinned him against a tree and choked him.
Dr. Doherty said that the priest had told him that he’d rubbed some lizard eggs onto Vanders’s skin and that the eggs had found their way to Vanders’s stomach, where they’d hatched. Most of the lizards had died, but a large one had survived and was now eating Vanders’s body from the inside out. The doctor announced that all he had to do was remove the lizard from Vanders’s body and the man would be cured.
He then called for the nurse, who dutifully brought a large syringe filled with what Dr. Doherty claimed was a powerful medicine. In truth, the syringe was filled with a drug that induced vomiting. Dr. Doherty carefully inspected the syringe to make sure it was working right and then ceremoniously injected his frightened patient with the fluid. In a grand gesture, he left the room, not saying another word to the stunned family.
It wasn’t long before the patient began to vomit. The nurse provided a basin and Vanders heaved, wailed, and retched for a time. At a point that Dr. Doherty judged to be near the end of the vomiting, he confidently strode back into the room. Nearing the bedside, he reached into his black doctor’s bag and scooped up a green lizard, hiding it in his palm beyond anyone’s notice. Then just as Vanders vomited again, Dr. Doherty slipped the reptile into the basin.
“Look, Vance!” he immediately cried out with all the drama he could muster. “Look what has come out of you. You are now cured. The voodoo curse is lifted!”
The room was buzzing. Some family members fell to the floor, moaning. Vanders himself jumped back away from the basin, in a wide-eyed daze. Within a few minutes, he’d fallen into a deep sleep that lasted more than 12 hours.
When Vanders finally awoke, he was very hungry and eagerly consumed so much food that the doctor feared his stomach would burst. Within a week, the patient had regained all his weight and strength. He left the hospital a well man and lived at least another ten years.”
“A group of children were all extremely allergic to poison ivy. Researchers rubbed one forearm of each child with a poison-ivy leaf but told them the leaf was harmless. As a control, they rubbed the child’s other forearm with a harmless leaf that they claimed was poison ivy. All the children developed a rash on the arm rubbed with the harmless leaf that was thought to be poison ivy. And 11 of the 13 children developed no rash at all where the poison had actually touched them.”
“Are we more likely to suffer from arthritis, stiff joints, poor memory, flagging energy, and decreased sex drive as we age, simply because that’s the version of the truth that ads, commercials, television shows, and media reports bombard us with? What other self-fulfilling prophecies are we creating in our minds without being aware of what we’re doing? And what “inevitable truths” can we successfully reverse simply through thinking new thoughts and choosing new beliefs?”
The History of Placebos
“A groundbreaking study in the late ‘70s showed for the first time that a placebo could trigger the release of endorphins (the body’s natural painkillers), just as certain active drugs do. In the study, Jon Levine, M.D., Ph.D., of the University of California, San Francisco, gave placebos, instead of pain medication, to 40 dental patients who had just had their wisdom teeth removed. Not surprisingly, because the patients thought they were getting medicine that would indeed relieve their pain, most reported relief.
But then the researchers gave the patients an antidote to morphine called naloxone, which chemically blocks the receptor sites for both morphine and endorphins (en-dogenous morphine) in the brain. When the researchers administered it, the patients’ pain returned! This proved that by taking the placebos, the patients had been creating their own endorphins — their own natural pain relievers. It was a milestone in placebo research, because it meant that the relief the study subjects experienced wasn’t all in their minds; it was in their minds and their bodies — in their state of being.”
“In a conditioned response, we could say that a subconscious program, which is housed in the body, seemingly overrides the conscious mind and takes charge. In this way, the body is actually conditioned to become the mind because conscious thought is no longer totally in control.
In the case of Pavlov, the dogs were repeatedly exposed to the smell, sight, and taste of the food, and then Pavlov rang a bell. Over time, just the sound of the bell caused the dogs to automatically change their physiological and chemical state without thinking about it consciously. Their autonomic nervous system — the body’s subconscious system that operates below conscious awareness — took over. So conditioning creates subconscious internal changes in the body by associating past memories with the expectation of internal effects (what we call associative memory) until those expected or anticipated end results automatically occur. The stronger the conditioning, the less conscious control we have over these processes and the more automatic the subconscious programming becomes.
Ader started out attempting to study how long such conditioned responses could be expected to last. He fed lab rats saccharine-sweetened water that he’d spiked with a drug called cyclophosphamide, which causes stomach pain. After conditioning the rats to associate the sweet taste of the water with the ache in their gut, he expected they’d soon refuse to drink the spiked water. His intention was to see how long they’d continue to refuse the water so that he could measure the amount of time their conditioned response to the sweet water would last.
But what Ader didn’t know initially was that the cyclophosphamide also suppresses the immune system, so he was surprised when his rats started unexpectedly dying from bacterial and viral infections. Changing gears in his research, he continued to give the rats saccharine water force-feeding them with an eyedropper) but without the clophosphamide. Although they were no longer receiving the immune-suppressing drug, the rats continued to die of infections (while the control group that had received only the sweetened water all along continued to be fine). Teaming up with University of Rochester immunologist Nicholas Cohen, Ph.D., Ader further discovered that when the rats had been conditioned to associate the taste of the sweetened water with the effect of the immune-suppressing drug, the association was so strong that just drinking the sweetened water alone produced the same physiological effect as the drug signaling the nervous system to suppress the immune system.
Ader’s rats died by thought alone.”
“Cousins’ doctor had diagnosed him with a degenerative disorder called ankylosing spondylitis — a form of arthritis that causes the breakdown of collagen, the fibrous proteins that hold our bodies’ cells together — and had given him only a 1-in-500 chance of recovery. Cousins suffered from tremendous pain and had such difficulty moving his limbs that he could barely turn over in bed. Grainy nodules appeared under his skin, and at his lowest point, his jaw nearly locked shut.
Convinced that a persistent negative emotional state had contributed to his illness, he decided it was equally possible that a more positive emotional state could reverse the damage. While continuing to consult with his doctor, Cousins started a regimen of massive doses of vitamin C and Marx Brothers movies (as well as other humorous films and comedy shows). He found that ten minutes of hearty laughter gave him two hours of pain-free sleep. Eventually, he made a complete recovery. Cousins, quite simply, laughed himself to health.
How? Although scientists at the time didn’t have a way to understand or explain such a miraculous recovery, research now tells us it’s likely that epigenetic processes were at work. Cousins’ shift of attitude changed his body chemistry, which altered his internal state, enabling him to program new genes in new ways; he simply downregulated (or turned off the genes that were causing his illness and upregulated (or turned on) the genes responsible for his recovery.
Many years later, research by Keiko Hayashi, Ph.D., of the University of Tsukuba in Japan showed the same thing. 12 In Hayashi’s study, diabetic patients watching an hour-long comedy program upregulated a total of 39 genes, 14 of which were related to natural killer cell activity. While none of these genes were directly involved in blood-glucose regulation, the patients’ blood-glucose levels were better controlled than after they listened to a diabetes health lecture on a different day. Researchers surmised that laughter influences many genes involved with immune response, which in turn contributed to the improved glucose control. The elevated emotion, triggered by the patients’ brains, turned on the genetic variations, which activated the natural killer cells and also somehow improved their glucose response — probably in addition to many other beneficial effects.”
“In researching a 1998 meta-analysis of published studies on antidepressant drugs, psychologist Irving Kirsch, Ph.D., then at the University of Connecticut, was shocked to find that in 19 randomized, double-blind clinical trials involving more than 2,300 patients, most of the improvement was due not to the antidepressant medications, but to the placebo.
Kirsch then used the Freedom of Information Act to gain access to the data from the drug manufacturers’ unpublished clinical trials, which by law had to be reported to the Food and Drug Administration. Kirsch and his colleagues did a second meta-analysis, this time on the 35 clinical trials conducted for four of the six most widely prescribed antidepressants approved between 1987 and 1999. Now looking at data from more than 5,000 patients, the researchers found again that placebos worked just as well as the popular antidepressant drugs Prozac, Effexor, Serzone, and Paxil — a whopping 81 percent of the time. In most of the remaining cases where the drug did perform better, the benefit was so small that it wasn’t statistically significant. Only with severely depressed patients were the prescription drugs clearly better than placebo.”
“An astonishing new twist to placebo research came in a 2010 pilot study led by Harvard’s Ted Kaptchuk, D.O.M., that showed that placebos worked even when people knew they were taking a placebo. In the study, Kaptchuk and his colleagues gave 40 patients with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) a placebo. Each patient received a bottle clearly labeled “placebo pills” and was told it contained “placebo pills made of an inert substance, like sugar pills, that have been shown in clinical studies to produce significant improvement in IBS symptoms through mind-body, self-healing processes.” A second group of 40 IBS patients, given no pills, served as a control group.
After three weeks, the group taking the placebos reported twice as much symptom relief as the no-treatment group — a difference that Kaptchuk noted is comparable to the performance of the best real IBS drugs.”
“A 2007 study at Harvard by psychologists Alia Crum, Ph.D., and Ellen Langer, Ph.D., involving 84 hotel maids is a perfect example.
At the start of the study, none of the maids knew that the routine work they performed in their jobs exceeded the Surgeon General’s recommendation for a healthy amount of daily exercise (30 minutes). In fact, 67 percent of the women told the researchers that they didn’t exercise regularly, and 37 percent said they didn’t get any exercise. After this initial assessment, Crum and Langer divided the maids into two groups. They explained to the first group how their activity related to the number of calories they burned and told the maids that just by doing their jobs, they got more than enough exercise. They didn’t give any such information to the second group (who worked in different hotels from the first group and so wouldn’t benefit from conversations with the other maids).
One month later, the researchers found that the first group lost an average of two pounds, lowered their percentage of body fat, and lowered their systolic blood pressure by an average of 10 points — even though they hadn’t performed any additional exercise outside of work or changed their eating habits in any way. The other group, doing the same job as the first, remained virtually unchanged.”
“Expectation, the second element, comes into play when we have reason to anticipate a different outcome. So, for example, if we have chronic pain from arthritis and get a new medication from the doctor, who enthusiastically explains to us that it’s supposed to alleviate our pain, we accept his suggestion and expect that when we take this new medication, something different will happen (we won’t be in pain anymore). Then, in effect, our doctor has influenced our level of suggestibility.
Once we become more suggestible, we’re naturally associating something outside of ourselves (the new medication) with the selection of a different possibility (being pain-free). In our minds, we are picking a different future potential and hoping, anticipating, and expecting that we’ll get that different result. If we emotionally accept and then embrace that new outcome we’ve selected, and the intensity of our emotion is great enough, our brains and our bodies won’t know the difference between imagining that we’ve changed our state of being to being pain-free and the actual event that caused the change to a new state of being. To the brain and the body, they are the same.”
“When we learn and understand something new, we put more of our conscious, purposeful energy into it. So, for example, in the study about the hotel maids, once the maids understood how much physical exercise they were doing every day just by performing their jobs, as well as the benefits of that exercise, they assigned more meaning to those actions. They weren’t just vacuuming, scrubbing, and mopping; they realized they were working their muscles, increasing their strength, and burning calories. Because the vacuuming, scrubbing, and mopping had more meaning after the researchers educated them about the physical advantages of exercise, the maids’ intention or aim as they worked wasn’t just to complete their tasks — it was also to get physical exercise and become healthier.”
Patterns
“We are creatures of habit. We think somewhere between 60,000 to 70,000 thoughts in one day, and 90 percent of those thoughts are exactly the same ones we had the day before.”
“Nobel laureate Eric Kandel, M.D, showed that when new memories are formed, the number of synaptic connections in the sensory neurons that are stimulated doubles, to 2,600. However, unless the original learning experience is repeated over and over again, the number of new connections falls back to the original 1,300 in a matter of only three weeks.
Therefore, if we repeat what we learn enough times, we strengthen communities of neurons to support us in remembering it the next time. If we don’t, then the synaptic connections soon disappear and the memory is erased. This is why it’s important for us to continually update, review, and remember our new thoughts, choices, behaviors, habits, beliefs, and experiences if we want them to solidify in our brains.”
“Now the body is being trained by the mind. If this process continues for years and years because the same signals outside of the cell are coming from the same level of mind in the brain (because the person is thinking, acting, and feeling the same every day), then it makes sense that the same genes will be activated in the same ways, because the body is receiving the same data from the environment. There are no new thoughts ignited, no new choices made, no new behaviors demonstrated, no new experiences embraced, and no new feelings created. When the same genes are repeatedly activated by the same information from the brain, then the genes keep getting selected over and over again, and just like gears in a car, they start to wear out. The body makes proteins with weaker structures and lesser functions. We get sick and we age.”
“Once the cell is overwhelmed by the bombardment and the receptors become desensitized, then just as a drug addict does, the body will require a greater chemical thrill to turn on the cell. In other words, in order for the body to become stimulated and get its fix, you’ll need to get angrier, more worried, guiltier, or more confused than last time. So you might feel the need to start a bit of drama by yelling at your dog for no reason, just to give the body its drug of choice. Or maybe you can’t help talking about how much you despise your mother-in-law just so the body has even more chemicals available with enough strength to arouse the cell. Or you start obsessing about some horrible imagined outcome just so the body can get a rush of adrenal hormones. When the body isn’t getting its emotional chemical needs met, it will signal the brain to make more of those chemicals — the body is controlling the mind. That sounds very much like an addiction. So now when I use the term emotional addiction, you’ll understand what I mean.”
“When your body makes these autonomic physiological changes, it’s because you have associated the future thought of standing in front of an audience delivering a presentation with the past emotional memory of your flawed public-speaking experience. And when that future thought, idea, or possibility is consistently associated with the past feelings of anxiety, failure, or embarrassment, in time the mind will condition the body to respond automatically to that feeling.”
“When the first group of men arrived at the monastery, they found themselves surrounded by all sorts of environmental cues to help them re-create an earlier age. They flipped through old issues of Life and the Saturday Evening Post, they watched movies and television shows popular in 1959, and they listened to recordings of Perry Como and Nat King Cole on the radio. They also talked about “current” events, such as Fidel Castro’s rise to power in Cuba, Russian premier Nikita Khrushchev’s visit to the United States, and even the feats of baseball star Mickey Mantle and boxing great Floyd Patterson. All of these elements were cleverly designed to help the men imagine that they were really 22 years younger.
After each five-day retreat, the researchers took several measurements and compared them to those they’d taken before the start of the study. The bodies of the men from both groups were physiologically younger, structurally as well as functionally, although those in the first study group (who pretended they were younger) improved significantly more than the control group, who’d merely reminisced.
The researchers discovered improvements in height, weight, and gait. The men grew taller as their posture straightened, and their joints became more flexible and their fingers lengthened as their arthritis diminished. Their eyesight and hearing got better. Their grip strength improved. Their memory sharpened, and they scored better on tests of mental cognition (with the first group improving their score by 63 percent compared to 44 percent for the control group). The men literally became younger in those five days, right in front of the researchers’ eyes.
Langer reported, “At the end of the study, I was playing football — touch, but still football — with these men, some of whom gave up their canes.” How did that happen? Clearly, the men were able to turn on the circuits in their brains that reminded them of who they had been 22 years ago, and then their body chemistry somehow magically responded. They didn’t just feel younger; they physically became younger.”
Genes
“Genes are unique little structures. If you were to take the DNA out of the nucleus of just one cell in your body and stretch it out from end to end, it would be six feet long. If you took all the DNA out of your entire body and stretched it out from end to end, it would go to the sun and back 150 times. But if you took all the DNA out of the almost seven billion people on the planet and scrunched it together, it would fit in a space as small as a grain of rice.”
“We actually express only about 1.5 percent of our DNA, while the other 98.5 percent lies dormant in the body. (Scientists called it “junk DNA,” but it’s not really junk — they just don’t know how all of that material is used yet, although they do know that at least some of it is responsible for making regulatory proteins.)
“In reality, genes contribute to our characteristics but do not determine them,” writes Dawson Church, Ph.D., in his book The Genie in Your Genes. “The tools of our consciousness — including our beliefs, prayers, thoughts, intentions, and faith — often correlate much more strongly with our health, longevity, and happiness than our genes do.” The fact is, just as there’s more to our bodies than a sack of bones and flesh, there’s more to our genes than just stored information.”
“A Spanish study illustrates this perfectly. Researchers at the Cancer Epigenetics Laboratory at the Spanish National Cancer Center in Madrid studied 40 pairs of identical twins, ranging in age from 3 to 74. They found that younger twins who had similar lifestyles and spent more years together had similar epigenetic patterns, while older twins, in particular those with dissimilar lifestyles who spent fewer years together, had very different epigenetic patterns. For example, researchers found four times as many differentially expressed genes between one pair of 50-year-old twins as they did between a pair of 3-year-old twins.
The twins were born with exactly the same DNA, but those with different lifestyles (and different lives) ended up expressing their genes very differently especially as time went on. To use another analogy, the older twin pairs were like exact copies of the same model of a computer. The computers came loaded with some similar starter software, but as time went on, each downloaded very different additional software programs. The computer (the DNA) stavs the same, but depending on what software a person has downloaded (the epigenetic variations), what the computer does and the way it operates can be quite different.”
“The speed of these changes can be truly remarkable. In just three months, a group of 31 men with low-risk prostate cancer were able to upregulate 48 genes (mostly dealing with tumor suppression) and downregulate 453 genes (mostly dealing with tumor promotion) by following an intensive nutrition and lifestyle regimen. The men, enrolled in a study by Dean Ornish, M.D., at the University of California at San Francisco, lost weight and reduced their abdominal obesity, blood pressure, and more.”
“Even more impressive are the number of epigenetic changes made over a six-month period in a Swedish study of 23 slightly overweight, healthy men who went from being relatively sedentary to attending spinning and aerobics classes an average of just under twice per week. Researchers at Lund University discovered that the men had epigenetically altered 7,000 genes — almost 30 percent of all the genes in the entire human genome!
These epigenetic variations may even be inherited by our children and then passed on to our grandchildren. The first researcher to show this was Michael Skinner, Ph.D., who was director of the Center for Reproductive Biology at Washington State University. In 2005, Skinner led a study that exposed pregnant rats to pesticides. The male pups of the exposed mother rats had higher rates of infertility and decreased sperm production, with epigenetic changes in two genes. These changes were also present in about 90 percent of the males in each of the four generations that followed, even though none of these other rats were exposed to any pesticides.”
“It’s like living in a country where 98 percent of the resources go toward defense, and nothing is left for schools, libraries, road building and repair, communication systems, growing of food, and so on. Roads develop potholes that aren’t fixed. Schools suffer budget cuts, so students wind up learning less. Social welfare programs that took care of the poor and the elderly have to close down. And there’s not enough food to feed the masses.
Not surprisingly, then, long-term stress has been linked to anxiety, depression, digestive problems, memory loss, insomnia, hypertension, heart disease, strokes, cancer, ulcers, rheumatoid arthritis, colds, flu, aging acceleration, allergies, body pain, chronic fatigue, infertility, impotence, asthma, hormonal issues, skin rashes, hair loss, muscle spasms, and diabetes, to name just a few conditions (all of which, by the way, are the result of epigenetic changes). No organism in nature is designed to withstand the effects of long-term stress.”
“The researchers reported that wounds of stressed patients took 40 percent longer to heal and that “stress tilted the genomic balance towards genes [that were] encoding proteins responsible for cell-cycle arrest, death, and inflammation.””
“If we can anticipate a possible known future scenario and then focus on that thought to the exclusion of everything else even for just one moment, the body will physiologically begin to change in order to prepare itself for that future event. The body is now living in that known future in the present moment. As a consequence of this phenomenon, the conditioning process begins to activate the autonomic nervous system, and it creates the corresponding stress chemicals automatically. This is how the mind-body connection can work against us.”
“When you’re truly focused on an intention for some future outcome, if you can make inner thought more real than the outer environment during the process, the brain won’t know the difference between the two. Then your body, as the unconscious mind, will begin to experience the new future event in the present moment. You’ll signal new genes, in new ways, to prepare for this imagined future event.
If you continue to mentally practice enough times this new series of choices, behaviors, and experiences that you desire, reproducing the same new level of mind over and over again, then your brain will begin to physically change – installing new neurological circuitry to begin to think from that new level of mind – to look as if the experience has already happened. You’ll be producing epigenetic variations that lead to real structural and functional changes in the body by thought alone-just as do those who respond to a placebo. Then your brain and body will no longer be living in the same past; they’ll be living in the new future that you created in your mind.
This is possible through mental rehearsal. This technique is basically closing your eyes and repeatedly imagining performing an action, and mentally reviewing the future you want, all the while reminding yourself of who you no longer want to be (the old self) and who you do want to be. This process involves thinking about your future actions, mentally planning your choices, and focusing your mind on a new experience.”
“You consciously marry your thoughts and intentions with a heightened state of emotion, such as joy or gratitude. Once you can embrace that new emotion and you get more excited, you’re bathing your body in the neurochemistry that would be present if that future event were actually happening. It could be suggested that you’re giving your body a taste of the future experience. Your brain and body don’t know the difference between having an actual experience in your life and just thinking about the experience – neurochemically, it’s the same. So your brain and body begin to believe they’re actually living in the new experience in the present moment.
By keeping your focus on this future event and not letting any other thoughts distract you, in a matter of moments, you turn down the volume on the neural circuits connected to the old self, which begins to turn off the old genes, and you fire and wire new neural circuits, which initiates the right signals to activate new genes in new ways. Thanks to the neuroplasticity discussed previously, the circuits in your brain begin to reorganize themselves to reflect what you’re mentally rehearsing. And as you keep coupling your new thoughts and mental images with that strong, positive emotion, then your mind and body are working together and you’re in a new state of being.”
“In a similar experiment, ten volunteers each imagined flexing one of their biceps as hard as they could five times a week. Researchers recorded the subjects’ electrical brain activity during the sessions and measured their muscle strength every two weeks. Those who only imagined flexing increased their bicep muscle strength by 13.5 percent in just a few weeks, and they maintained the gain for three months after the training stopped. Their bodies responded to a new mind.
A final example is a French study that compared subjects who either lifted or imagined lifting dumbbells of different weights. Those who imagined lifting heavier weights activated their muscles more than did those who imagined lifting lighter weights. In all three of these studies on mental rehearsal, the subjects were able to measurably increase their body strength using only their thoughts. specialized. They’re raw potential. When these blank slates are activated, they morph into whatever kind of cell the body needs – including muscle cells, bone cells, skin cells, immune cells, and even nerve cells in the brain – in order to replace injured or damaged cells in the body’s tissues, organs, and systems. Think of stem cells as scoops of shaved snow-cone ice before the flavored syrup is pumped on top; lumps of clay waiting on the potter’s wheel for their turn to be fashioned into plates, bowls, vases, or mugs; or maybe even a roll of silver duct tape that can fix a leaking pipe one day and be cleverly fashioned into a prom dress the next.
Here’s an example of how stem cells work. When you cut your finger, the body needs to repair the break in the skin. The local physical trauma sends a signal to your genes from outside the cell. The gene turns on and makes the appropriate proteins, which then instruct stem cells to turn into healthily functioning skin cells. The traumatic signal is the information the stem cell needs to differentiate into a skin cell. Millions of processes like this occur all over our bodies all the time. Healing attributable to this type of gene expression has been documented in the liver, muscles, skin, intestines, bone marrow, and even the brain and the heart.
In wound-healing studies where the subject is in a highly emotional, negative state like anger, the stem cells don’t get the message clearly. When there’s interference in the signal, as with static on the radio, the potential cell doesn’t get the right stimulation in a coherent fashion to turn itself into a useful cell. The healing will take longer because most of the body’s energy is busy dealing with the angry emotion and its chemical effects. It’s just not the time for creation, growth, and nurturing – it’s the time for an emergency.”
“Their brains started firing neurons in new sequences, new patterns, and new combinations – some of which hadn’t been fired for 22 years. Because everything around the men, as well as their own excited imaginations, joyfully supported them in making the experience feel real, their brains couldn’t tell the difference between actually being 22 years younger and just pretending that they were. So the men, in a matter of days, were able to start signaling the exact genetic changes to reflect who they were being.
In doing that, their bodies produced neuropeptides to match their new emotions, and when the neuropeptides were unleashed, they delivered new messages to the cells in their bodies. As the appropriate cells allowed those chemical messengers in, they ushered them straight to the DNA deep inside each cell. Once they arrived there, new proteins were created, and these proteins looked for new genes according to the information they were carrying. When they found what they were looking for, the proteins unwrapped the DNA, switching on the gene that was lying in wait and triggering epigenetic changes. These epigenetic changes resulted in the production of new proteins that resembled the proteins of men 22 years younger. If the men’s bodies didn’t happen to have the necessary parts to create whatever the epigenetic changes required, the epigenome simply called upon stem cells to make what was needed.”
“It’s a similar situation with trying to make something happen, by the way. The moment you’re trying, you’re pushing against something because you’re endeavoring to change it. You’re struggling, attempting to force an outcome, even if you don’t realize that’s what you’re actually doing. That knocks you out of balance, just as the survival emotions do, and the more frustrated and impatient you become, the more out of balance you get. There is no try; there’s only allow.”
“On the other hand, emotions like gratitude and appreciation open your heart and lift the energy in your body to a new place out of the lower hormonal centers. Gratitude is one of the most powerful emotions for increasing your level of suggestibility. It teaches your body emotionally that the event you’re grateful for has already happened, because we usually give thanks after a desirable event has occurred.
If you bring up the emotion of gratitude before the actual event, your body (as the unconscious mind) will begin to believe that the future event has indeed already happened or is happening to you in the present moment. Gratitude, therefore, is the ultimate state of receivership.”
“Everyone has his or her own level of susceptibility to thoughts, suggestions, and commands — from both outer and inner realities — based on many different variables. Think of your level of suggestibility as being inversely related to. your analytical thinking: the greater your analytical mind (the more you analyze), the less suggestible you are; and the lesser your analytical mind, the more suggestible you are.”
“In 1984, Gretchen van Boemel, M.D., then associate director of clinical electrophysiology at Doheny Eye Institute in Los Angeles, uncovered a striking example of this when she noticed a disturbing trend among Cambodian women referred to Doheny. The women, all between the ages of 40 and 60 and living in nearby Long Beach, California (known as Little Phnom Penh because of its roughly 50,000 Cambodian residents), were having severe vision problems, including blindness, in disproportionately high numbers.
Physically, the women’s eyes were perfectly healthy. Dr. van Boemel did brain scans on the women to evaluate how well their visual systems were functioning and compared them to how well their eyes were seeing. She found that each of the women had perfectly normal visual. acuity, often 20/20 or 20/40, although when they tried to read an eye chart, their vision tested at legally blind.
Some of the women had absolutely no light perception and couldn’t even detect any shadows even though there wasn’t anything physically wrong with their eyes.
When Dr. van Boemel teamed up with Patricia Rozée, Ph.D., of California State University, Long Beach, to do research on the women, they found that those who had the worst vision had spent the most time living under the Khmer Rouge or in refugee camps when communist dictator Pol Pot was in power. The genocide perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge was responsible for the deaths of at least 1.5 million Cambodians between 1975 and 1979.
Of the women studied, 90 percent had lost family members (some as many as ten) during that time, and 70 percent were forced to watch their loved ones — sometimes even their entire families being brutally murdered.
“These women saw things that their minds just could not accept,” Rozée told the Los Angeles Times. “Their minds simply closed down, and they refused to see anymore — refused to see any more death, any more torture, any more rape, any more starvation.”
One woman was forced to watch her husband and four children be killed right in front of her, and she lost her sight immediately afterward. Another woman had to watch a Khmer Rouge soldier beat her brother and his three children to death, which included seeing her three-month-old nephew being thrown against a tree until he died. She started losing her eyesight right after that.”
“She’d say “Change” to herself 20 times a day, whenever she noticed her mind drifting to her past. Although negative thoughts sneaked through a hundred times a day, little by little, Laurie created a few new thoughts, wrote them down, and attempted to believe them deeply.”
“She changed as many things as she possibly could. She changed gyms just for a different environment. She put her deodorant on the right side first instead of the left. She folded her arms left over right instead of the more natural right over left, whenever she could remember to do so. She sat in a different chair in her apartment. She slept on the other side of the bed (even though it meant walking all the way around to the far side of the room to get in and out of bed).”
