You Are the Placebo

by Joe Dispenza, Dr.

  For this next phase of the experiment to be valid, Santiago couldn’t know what was being staged; he couldn’t make any connection between the experiments he was taking part in and the scene in front of the hotel next to where the study was taking place. As part of the plan, the television producers in charge of filming the experiments told him he hadn’t been selected to continue in the program, although they wanted him to return the next day for a short exit interview. Before Santiago left, he was told he wouldn’t be put under hypnosis again.

  Santiago returned the following day. While he was chatting with a producer, the team went to work staging the scene outside. The stuntman strapped on blood packs; the Airsoft prop gun (which had the blast and recoil action of a real firearm) was placed inside a red backpack and laid on the seat of a parked motorcycle right outside the entrance to the building. A velvet rope line was set up outside the hotel service entrance, right next door, and staged paparazzi were in place with their film and video cameras. Two SUVs were parked on the street, looking ready to drive off with the “foreign dignitary” and his entourage.

  Back upstairs, Santiago happily answered questions in his “exit interview,” until the producer excused herself for a moment, saying she’d be right back. Soon after she left the room, Silver entered, saying he wanted to say good-bye to Santiago. As Silver shook Santiago’s hand, he gave a little tug on his arm that prompted Santiago, by now well conditioned to this cue, to drop immediately into a hypnotic trance. He went limp on the couch.

  Silver told him “a bad guy” was downstairs, adding, “He’s gotta be erased. We’ve got to get rid of him, and you’re the one to do it.” He told Santiago that once he exited the building, he’d see a red backpack on a motorcycle, and inside would be a gun. He told Santiago that he was to grab the red backpack and walk over to the velvet rope, where he’d wait for the dignitary, who’d be carrying a briefcase, to emerge from the hotel. He told Santiago, “As soon as he comes out the doors, you’re going to point the gun at his chest and fire that gun: Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! But as soon as you do it, you’ll simply, completely, totally forget that it ever happened.”

  Finally Silver implanted both an audible and a physical stimulation trigger that would send Santiago back into a hypnotic state, under which he’d follow the posthypnotic suggestion Silver had given him: He told Santiago that he’d recognize a segment producer outside the building, and the man would shake his hand and say, “Ivan, you did a spectacular job.” Silver told Santiago to nod “yes” if he’d do what Silver had instructed, and Santiago complied. Then Silver brought him out of the trance and acted as if he were truly just saying good-bye.

  The producer returned to the room after Silver left and thanked Santiago, telling him the exit interview was over and he could leave. Soon after, Santiago left the building, thinking he was going home.

  Once he was outside, the segment producer walked up to him, shook his hand, and said, “Ivan, you did a spectacular job.” That was the trigger. Immediately, Santiago looked around, saw the motorcycle, walked over to it, and calmly picked up the red backpack sitting on the seat. Seeing the velvet rope line and the paparazzi, he walked over next to them and slowly unzipped the bag.

  In moments, a man carrying a briefcase strode out the door. Without flinching, Santiago pulled the gun out of the backpack and shot the man in the chest several times. The blood bags under the “dignitary’s” shirt erupted, and he dramatically collapsed to the ground.

  Silver almost immediately appeared on the scene and had Santiago close his eyes. The stuntman made a hasty exit as Silver then brought Santiago out of his trance. The psychologist Jeffery Kieliszewski appeared and suggested Santiago follow him inside with the others for a debriefing. Once inside, the researchers told a surprised Santiago what had happened and asked him if he had any memory of what he’d done or what had just unfolded outside. Santiago didn’t remember a thing—that is, until Silver suggested to him that he would.

  Programming the Subconscious

  In the first few chapters, you read about many different individuals who accepted a possible imagined scenario, and like magic, their bodies responded to that picture in their minds: individuals who’d been trapped for years by the involuntary tremors of Parkinson’s disease but increased their dopamine levels by thought alone, only to see their spastic paralysis mysteriously vanish; a chronically depressed woman who, over time, physically changed her brain and transmuted her debilitating emotional state into joy and well-being; asthmatics who experienced a full-blown bronchial episode brought on by nothing more than water vapor, but then reversed their bronchial constriction in seconds by inhaling exactly the same water vapor; and, of course, the men with severe knee pain and compromised range of motion who miraculously improved after having sham knee surgery and remained healed years later.

  In all of these cases and more, it could be said that each subject first accepted and then believed in the suggestion of better health, and then surrendered to the outcome without further analysis. When these people accepted the potential of recovery, they aligned themselves with a future possible reality—and changed their minds and brains in the process. As they believed in the outcome, they emotionally embraced the idea of better health, and as a result, their bodies, as the unconscious mind, were living in that future reality during the present moment.

  They conditioned their bodies to a new mind and so began to signal new genes in new ways and express new proteins for better health—and they moved into a new state of being. Once they surrendered to a new possible scenario, they no longer analyzed how it was going to happen or when it would manifest; they simply trusted in a better state of being and maintained that new state of mind and body for an extended period of time. It was that sustained state of being that switched on the right genes and programmed them to stay on.

  Whether they took a regimen of daily sugar pills lasting weeks or even months, received a single saline injection, or submitted to fake surgery, these individuals reaffirmed their acceptance, belief, and surrender for the duration of the study they participated in. If they were taking a pill daily to relieve pain or depression, the pill was a constant reminder for them to condition, expect, and assign meaning to their intentional activity, thus reinforcing the internal process over and over again. If it was a weekly visit to the hospital to see a doctor and be interviewed about their improvement, the choice to interact in a particular environment with doctors, nurses, equipment, and waiting rooms triggered a host of sensory responses, and through associative memory, they were reminded of a possible new future. They were conditioned from past experiences that the place called “a hospital” was where people went to get well. They began to anticipate their future changes and, therefore, assigned intention to the whole healing process. Because all these factors had meaning, they helped make the placebo patients more suggestible to the outcomes they experienced.

  So now let’s address the elephant in the room: No real physical, chemical, or therapeutic mechanisms made these changes happen. None of these people had actual surgery, took active medication, or received any real treatment to create these significant alterations in health. The power of their minds so influenced their bodies’ physiology that they became healed. It’s safe to say that their real transformation happened independent of their conscious minds. Their conscious minds may have initiated the course of action, but the real work happened subconsciously, with the subjects remaining totally unaware of how it happened.

  The same is true of Ivan Santiago. The power of his mind under hypnosis so influenced his physiology that even when he was sitting in a freezing ice-cube bath, he didn’t so much as flinch. It was the power of his subconscious mind altered by a mere suggestion, however, not his conscious mind, that was responsible for this feat. If he hadn’t accepted the suggestion, the outcome would have been very different. In addition, he did what he did without thinking about how he was able to do it; in fact, in his mind, he wasn’t sitting in an ice b
ath. He was sitting in a perfectly pleasant tub of warm water.

  So just as with hypnosis, the placebo effect is created by a person’s consciousness somehow interacting with the autonomic nervous system. Quite simply, the conscious mind merges with the subconscious mind. Once the placebo patients accept a thought as a reality, and then believe and trust in the end result emotionally, the next thing that happens is that they get well.

  A cascade of physiological events automatically carries out the whole biological change—without their conscious minds being involved. They’re able to enter the operating system where these functions already happen routinely, and when they do, it’s as if they’ve planted a seed in fertile ground. The system automatically takes over for them. In fact, it’s not anyone’s job to do anything. It just happens.

  None of the subjects could consciously spike dopamine levels by 200 percent and control involuntary tremors with the mind, manufacture new neurotransmitters to combat depression, signal stem cells to morph into white blood cells to mount an immune response, or restore knee cartilage in order to reduce pain—just as Santiago couldn’t have consciously avoided flinching when he lowered his body into that tub. Anyone trying to accomplish any of these feats would certainly be unsuccessful. These people would have to get help from a mind that already knows how to initiate all of these processes. To succeed, they’d have to activate the autonomic nervous system, the subconscious mind, and then assign it the task of making new cells and healthy new proteins.

  Acceptance, Belief, and Surrender

  I have mentioned the word suggestibility throughout this book as if being suggestible were something that all of us could simply do voluntarily on command. As you read in the story at the beginning of the chapter, it turns out that it’s not that easy. Let’s face it. Some of us—certainly Ivan Santiago—are more suggestible than others. And even those who are more suggestible respond to certain suggestions better than other suggestions.

  For example, some of the hypnotism test subjects had no problem stripping to their underwear in public when given that posthypnotic suggestion, yet they were unable to subconsciously accept the idea that a tub of frigid ice water was really a warm Jacuzzi. This was true even though posthypnotic suggestions (including the suggestion that Santiago shoot the stranger) are generally more difficult to make stick, compared to suggestions that alter someone’s state temporarily during the hypnotic trance itself.

  And like hypnosis, the placebo response also doesn’t just work for everyone. The placebo patients you’ve read about who were able to make positive changes last for years (like the men who had the sham knee surgery) respond much like hypnotherapy subjects who’ve been given posthypnotic suggestions. For some, like these men, such suggestions work beautifully. For others, not much happens.

  For instance, when they’re sick or suffering from a disease, many people simply can’t accept the idea that even a drug, procedure, treatment, or injection can help them—let alone that a placebo might work. Why not? It takes thinking greater than how they feel—in turn allowing those new thoughts to drive new feelings, which then reinforce those new thoughts—until it becomes a new state of being. But if familiar feelings have become the means of familiar thinking and the person can’t transcend that habituation, he or she is in the same past state of mind and body, and everything stays the same.

  However, if those same people who can’t accept that a drug or procedure could make them well could reach a new level of acceptance and belief, and then surrender to that end without constantly fretting, worrying, and analyzing, then they could reap greater rewards from the process. That’s what suggestibility is: making a thought into a virtual experience and having our bodies consequentially respond in a new manner.

  Suggestibility combines three elements: acceptance, belief, and surrender. The more we accept, believe, and surrender to whatever we’re doing to change our internal state, the better the results we can create. Similarly, when Santiago was under hypnosis and his subconscious mind was in control, he could totally accept what Silver told him about the “bad guy” who needed to be eliminated, he could believe that Silver was telling the truth, and he could surrender to carrying out the detailed instructions Silver gave him, without ever analyzing or thinking critically about what he was about to do. There was no hand-wringing and asking for proof. There was no second-guessing. He just did it.

  Adding in Emotion

  So when we are presented with the idea of better health, and we can associate that hope or thought—that something outside of us is going to change something inside of us—with emotional anticipation of the experience, we’re becoming suggestible to that end result. We condition, expect, and assign meaning to the whole delivery system.

  But the emotional component is key in this experience; suggestibility isn’t just an intellectual process. Many folks can intellectualize being better, but if they can’t emotionally embrace the result, then they can’t enter into the autonomic nervous system (as Santiago did using hypnotism), which is vital because that’s the seat of the subconscious programming that’s been calling all the shots (as discussed in Chapter 3). In fact, it’s generally accepted in psychology that a person who experiences intense emotions tends to be more receptive to ideas and is therefore more suggestible.

  The autonomic nervous system is under the control of the limbic brain, which is also called the “emotional brain” and the “chemical brain.” The limbic brain, depicted in Figure 6.1, is responsible for subconscious functions like chemical order and homeostasis, for maintaining the body’s natural physiological balance. It’s your emotional center. So as you experience different emotions, you activate this part of the brain, and it creates the corresponding chemical molecules of emotion. And since this emotional brain exists below the conscious mind’s control, the moment you feel emotion, you activate your autonomic nervous system.

  When you feel an emotion, you can ultimately bypass your neocortex—the seat of your conscious mind—and activate your autonomic nervous system. Therefore, as you get beyond your thinking brain, you move into a part of the brain where health is regulated, maintained, and executed.

  So if the placebo effect requires you to embrace an elevated emotion ahead of the actual experience of healing, then when you amplify your emotional response (and come out of your normal resting state), you’re activating your subconscious system. Allowing yourself to feel emotions is a way to enter the operating system and program a change, because you’re now automatically instructing the autonomic nervous system to begin creating the corresponding chemistry as if you were getting better. And the body receives a blend of those natural alchemical elixirs from the brain and mind. As a result, the body is now becoming the mind emotionally.

  As we’ve seen, these can’t be just any emotions. The survival emotions that we already explored in the last chapter knock the brain and body out of balance and so downregulate (or shut off) the genes needed for optimal health. Fear, futility, anger, hostility, impatience, pessimism, competition, and worry won’t signal the proper genes for better health. They actually do the opposite. They turn on the fight-or-flight nervous system and prepare your body for emergency. You’re now losing vital energy for healing.

  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. Remember in The Empire Strikes Back, when Yoda said to Luke Skywalker that there is no try, only do (or do not)? The same is true with the placebo response: There is no try; there’s only allow.

  All those negative and stressful emotions are so familiar to us and connect to so many past known events that when we focus on them, those familiar emotions keep the body conn
ected to the same past conditions—which, in this case, is poor health. No new information can then program your genes in any new ways. Your past reinforces your future.

  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. Look at Figure 6.2 to review the difference between the expression of survival emotions and the expression of elevated emotions.

  Survival emotions are derived primarily from the stress hormones, which tend to endorse more selfish and more limited states of mind and body. When you embrace elevated, more creative emotions, you lift your energy to a different hormonal center, your heart begins to open, and you feel more selfless. This is when your body starts to respond to a new mind.

  If you can bring up the emotion of appreciation or thankfulness, and combine it with a clear intention, you’re now beginning to embody the event emotionally. You’re changing your brain and body. Specifically, you’re chemically instructing your body to know what your mind has philosophically known. We could say that you’re in a new future in the present moment. You’re no longer using familiar, primitive emotions to keep you anchored to the past; you’re now using elevated emotions to drive you into a new future.

  Two Faces of the Analytical Mind