So when the placebo effect is at work, and you create the right level of mind with a clear intention and combine it with a nurturing, elevated emotion, the right type of signal can reach the cell’s DNA. The message will not only influence the production of healthy proteins for better structure and function of the body, but also make brand-new, healthy cells from latent stem cells that are just waiting to be activated by the right message.
You could even think of these stem cells as “get out of jail free” cards, as in the game Monopoly, because once they’re picked up or activated, they replace cells in damaged areas of the body, allowing for a fresh, clean start. In fact, stem cells help explain how healing occurs in at least half the placebo cases involving sham surgery, whether it’s for an arthritic knee or a coronary bypass (as described in Chapter 1).
How Intention and Elevated Emotion Change Our Biology
We’ve already mentioned emotions and how they play a vital role in healing the body, but now let’s take a deeper look at the subject. If we have a heightened emotional response to the new thoughts we’re concentrating on in mental rehearsal, it’s like turbocharging our efforts, because the emotions help us make epigenetic changes much faster. We don’t need the emotional component; after all, the subjects who strengthened their muscles by imagining they were lifting weights didn’t need to get blissed out to change their genes. However, they inspired themselves by using their imaginations with each mental lift, saying, “Harder! Harder! Harder!” The consistent emotion was the energetic catalyst that truly enhanced the process.11 Maintaining such an elevated emotion allows us to get far more dramatic results much more quickly—the same kind of amazing results as we see in the placebo response.
Remember the laughter study from Chapter 2? Japanese researchers found that watching an hour-long comedy show upregulated 39 genes, 14 of which were related to natural killer cell activity in the immune system. Several other studies have shown increases in various antibodies after subjects watched a humorous videotape.12 Research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill further showed that increased positive emotions produced increases in vagal tone, a measure of the health of the vagus nerve, which plays a major part in regulating the autonomic nervous system and homeostasis.13 In a Japanese study, when baby rats were tickled for five minutes a day for five days in a row to stimulate positive emotion, the rats’ brains generated new neurons.14
In each of these cases, strong positive emotions helped the subjects trigger real physical changes that improved their health. Positive emotions cause the body and brain to flourish.
Now look at the pattern of many of the placebo studies: The moment someone starts getting a clear intention of a new future (wanting to live without pain or disease) and then combines it with a heightened emotion (excitement, hope, and anticipation of actually living without pain or disease) is the moment the body is no longer in the past. The body is living in that new future, because as we’ve seen, the body doesn’t know the difference between an emotion created by an actual experience and one created by thought alone. So that heightened state of emotion in response to the new thought is a vital component of that process, because it’s new information coming from outside the cell—and to the body, the experience from the outer environment or inner environment is the same.
Remember Mr. Wright from Chapter 1? He got very excited when he thought about taking the powerful new drug he’d heard about and imagined how it might cure him. He was so excited that he badgered his doctor to allow him to take it. When he actually did, he had no idea that it was inert. But because his brain didn’t know the difference between his highly emotionally charged mental images of being well and actually being well, his body emotionally responded as if what he had imagined had already happened. His mind and his body were then working together to signal new genes in new ways, and that, rather than the “powerful new drug” he took, was what shrank his tumors and restored his health. That’s what created his new state of being.
Then, when Mr. Wright learned that the drug trials showed that the drug didn’t work, he reverted back to his old thoughts and old emotions—to his old programming—and not surprisingly, his tumors returned. His state of being changed once again. But when his doctors told him that he could get an improved version of the drug that had worked before, he got excited all over again. He really believed that this new version of the drug could work, because he’d seen it do so before (or at least that’s what he thought he’d seen).
Naturally, when he reembraced the intention of health and started thinking new thoughts about possibility again, his brain went back to firing and wiring new neural connections, and he created a new mind. All his excitement and hope returned, and that emotion created the very chemicals in his body that supported his new thoughts. And so once more, his body didn’t know the difference between his thoughts and feelings about being well and actually being well. And once more, his brain and body responded as if what he’d imagined had already happened—and his tumors disappeared again.
Once he read in the news that his “miracle drug” truly was a bust, he reverted to his old thinking and old emotions one final time—and his old personality-self, along with his tumors, returned. There was no miracle drug—he was the miracle. And there was no placebo—he was the placebo.
So it makes sense that we should concentrate not merely on avoiding negative emotions, like fear and anger, but also on consciously cultivating heartfelt, positive emotions, such as gratitude, joy, excitement, enthusiasm, fascination, awe, inspiration, wonder, trust, appreciation, kindness, compassion, and empowerment, to give us every advantage in maximizing our health.
Studies show that getting in touch with positive, expansive emotions like kindness and compassion—emotions that are our birthright, by the way—tends to release a different neuropeptide (called oxytocin), which naturally shuts off the receptors in the amygdala, the part of the brain that generates fear and anxiety.15 With fear out of the way, we can feel infinitely more trust, forgiveness, and love. We move from being selfish to selfless. And as we embody this new state of being, our neurocircuitry opens the door to endless possibilities that we never could have even imagined before, because now we’re not expending all our energy trying to figure out how to survive.
Scientists are finding areas in the body—like the intestines, the immune system, the liver, and the heart, as well as many other organs—that contain receptor sites for oxytocin. These organs are highly responsive to oxytocin’s major healing effect, which has been linked to growing more blood vessels in the heart,16 stimulating immune function,17 increasing gastric motility,18 and normalizing blood-sugar levels.19
Let’s return to mental rehearsal for a moment. Remember how the frontal lobe is our ally in mental rehearsal? That’s true because, as we established earlier, the frontal lobe helps us unplug from the body, the environment, and time—the three main focuses of someone who’s living in survival mode. It helps us get past ourselves to a state of pure consciousness, where we have no ego.
In this new state, as we envision what we desire, our hearts are more open, and positive emotion can flood through us so that now the loop of feeling what we’re thinking and thinking what we’re feeling is finally working in our favor. The selfish mind-set we were in when we were in survival mode no longer exists, because the energy we channeled toward survival needs has now been freed up for us to create. It’s as though someone paid our rent or mortgage payment for the month so that we have extra cash to play with.
Now we can understand exactly why it is that if we hold a clear intention of a new future; marry it to a state of expansive, elevated emotion; and repeat that over and over until we’ve created a new state of mind and a new state of being, these thoughts will seem more real to us than our previous, limited view of reality. We’re finally free. And once we truly embrace that emotion, we can more easily fall in love with the possibility that we’ve been envisioning.
The symphony conductor (
frontal lobe) feels like a kid in a candy store—excitedly and joyfully seeing all sorts of creative possibilities for new neural connections that can combine to form new neural nets. And as the conductor unplugs us from the old state of being and switches on the circuits in this new state of being, our neurochemicals begin delivering new messages to our cells, which are now prepared to make epigenetic changes that signal new genes in new, empowering ways—and because we’ve used heightened emotions to make it seem as though it’s already happened, we’re signaling the gene ahead of the environment. Now we’re no longer waiting for the change and hoping for the change—we are the change.
Back to the Monastery
Let’s revisit the study from the beginning of the last chapter, where the elderly men pretended to be younger and actually got physically younger. The question of how they did it has now been answered, and we’ve solved the mystery.
When these men arrived at the monastery, they retreated from their familiar lives. They were no longer reminded of who they thought they were based on their external environments. Then they began their retreat by holding a very clear intention: to pretend they were young again (using physical and mental rehearsal, because both change the brain and the body) and to make it as real as possible. As they watched the movies, read the magazines, and listened to radio and television programs from when they were 22 years younger, without modern-day interruptions, they were able to let go of the reality of being in their 70s and 80s.
They actually started living as though they were young again. As they experienced new thoughts and feelings about being younger, 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.
A cascade of physical improvements ensued as the men made more epigenetic changes and switched on more genes, until finally, the men who waltzed back out through the monastery gates were no longer the same men who had shuffled through those gates just one week earlier.
And if the process worked for these guys, I assure you that it can work for you, too. What reality do you choose to live in, and who are you pretending to be (or not be)? Could it be that simple?
Chapter Six
Suggestibility
Thirty-six-year-old Ivan Santiago stood patiently on a New York City street, along with a handful of paparazzi gathered behind a velvet rope outside a service entrance to a four-star Lower East Side hotel. They were awaiting a foreign dignitary who was about to exit the building and jump into one of two black SUV limos waiting at the curb. But Santiago wasn’t clutching a camera. One hand held a brand-new red backpack, while the other reached inside the partially unzipped bag and took hold of the grip of a pistol outfitted with a silencer. Santiago, an imposing Pennsylvania corrections officer with a bald head that would make Vin Diesel proud, knew a thing or two about deadly weapons. He’d never had to fire one while on duty, but he was ready to fire one today.
Moments before, Santiago had been on his way home, without a single thought of guns, backpacks, foreign dignitaries, or assassination. But now here he was, finger on the trigger, brow knit into an intimidating scowl, and mere seconds from turning into a killer. The hotel door opened, and out sauntered his mark in a crisp, white dress shirt, sporting shades and carrying a leather briefcase. The man took only two or three strides toward the waiting limo before Santiago whipped his gun out of the backpack and fired three times. The man fell to the sidewalk, motionless, his shirt stained red.
Seconds later, a man named Tom Silver appeared out of nowhere, calmly put one hand on Santiago’s shoulder and his other on Santiago’s forehead, and said, “On the count of five, I’ll say, ‘Fully refreshed.’ Open your eyes and wake up. One, two, three, four, five! Fully refreshed!”
Santiago had been hypnotized to shoot a stranger (actually a stuntman) using what turned out to be a harmless Airsoft prop gun in an experiment run by a handful of researchers who set out to test the unthinkable: Using hypnosis, was it possible to program a law-abiding, all-around good person to become a cold-blooded assassin?1
Hidden inside the SUV, eyes riveted to the scene, were the researchers working with Silver: Cynthia Meyersburg, Ph.D., then a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard specializing in experimental psychopathology; Mark Stokes, Ph.D., a neuroscientist at Oxford who studies the neural pathways of decision making; and Jeffery Kieliszewski, Ph.D., a forensic psychologist with Human Resource Associates in Grand Rapids, Michigan, who’s done work in super- maximum-security prisons and hospitals for the criminally insane.
The day before, the researchers had started out with a group of 185 volunteers. Silver (a certified clinical hypnotherapist and forensic-hypnosis investigation expert who once helped the Taiwan Department of Defense bust open a $2.4 billion international arms-trading scandal) screened all 185 participants to determine how suggestible they were to hypnosis. Only about 5 to 10 percent of the population are considered very susceptible to hypnosis. In the test group, 16 passed muster and were given a psychological evaluation to weed out those who might suffer permanent psychological harm from the experiment. Eleven progressed to the next test, which determined whether, under hypnosis, they would reject deeply rooted social norms; this would show which were the most suggestible.
Divided into smaller groups, the subjects were taken to a fairly busy restaurant for lunch, but unbeknownst to them, they’d been given a posthypnotic suggestion that once they sat down, their chairs would feel very hot, to the point where they’d quickly become so warm that they’d strip to their underwear—right there in the restaurant. While all of the subjects complied with the instructions to varying degrees, the researchers eliminated seven who they felt either were playing along or just weren’t suggestible enough to fully follow the prompt. The others stripped to their underwear within seconds; they really thought their chairs were extremely hot.
The four who progressed to the next level were invited to take a test no one would be able to fake. The subjects were to step into a deep metal bathtub filled with 35°F ice water, just 3° above freezing. One at a time, the subjects were wired to devices that monitored their heart rate, breathing rate, and pulse, while a special thermo-imaging camera monitored both their body temperature and the temperature of the water. Hypnotizing them, Silver told the subjects they would feel no discomfort from the cold water and, in fact, would feel as though they were stepping into a nice, warm bath. Anesthesiologist Sekhar Upadhyayula administered the test as emergency medical technicians stood by.
This test would make or break the experiment. Normally, when someone is exposed to water this cold, an involuntary gasping reflex happens as the water reaches nipple level. The heart rate and respiratory rate climb, the person starts to shiver, and the teeth begin to chatter. It’s the autonomic nervous system taking over in an automatic attempt to main
tain internal balance—something that’s not under conscious control. Even if a person were in a deep state of hypnosis, the amount of sensation being sent to the brain under these extreme circumstances would normally be too overwhelming to maintain a hypnotic state. If any of the subjects passed this test, they were indisputably suggestible to a very high degree.
Three of the subjects were indeed in deep states of hypnosis, but not deep enough to withstand this kind of intense cold without their bodies losing homeostasis. The longest any of them could stay in the bath was 18 seconds. But the fourth subject, Santiago, stayed in for just over two full minutes before Dr. Upadhyayula called a halt to the test.
Although Santiago’s heart rate was high before the experiment, once he stepped into the water, his heart rate calmed down immediately. There wasn’t so much as a flutter on his EKG or a single blip in his respiratory rate. Santiago sat among ice cubes as though he were soaking in a warm bathtub; indeed, that’s exactly what he believed he was doing. The man never flinched nor did his body fall into hypothermia, and the researchers knew they’d found the subject they were looking for.
Because Santiago was so suggestible under hypnosis that his body could overcome such an extreme environment for this amount of time and his mind could control his autonomic functions, he was ready for the final test.
Santiago’s background check had shown he was a great guy, the researchers noted. He was a trusted employee, a devoted son, and a loving uncle. He was certainly not the type of man who would agree to kill somebody in cold blood. Would Silver succeed in getting such a man to turn into an assassin?
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