You Are the Placebo

by Joe Dispenza, Dr.

  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.4 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.5 “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.6 The women also suffered beatings, starvation, untold humiliations, sexual abuse, torture, and 20-hour days of enforced labor. Although now they were safe, many of these women told the researchers that they preferred to stay in their homes, where they had to relive their memories of the atrocities over and over through recurring nightmares and intrusive thoughts.

  Documenting a total of 150 cases of psychosomatic blindness in Cambodian women in Long Beach—the largest known group of such victims anywhere in the world—van Boemel and Rozée presented their research at the 1986 American Psychological Association annual meeting in Washington, D.C. The audience was riveted.

  The women in this study became blind or nearly blind not because of some eye disease or physical malfunction, but because the events they lived through had such an emotional impact that they literally “cried until they could not see.”7 The heightened emotional amplitude from being forced to bear witness to the unbearable left them not wanting to see anymore. The event created physical changes in their biology—not in their eyes, but most likely in their brains—which altered their perception of reality for the rest of their lives. And because they kept replaying the traumatizing scenes over and over in their minds, their vision never improved.

  While this is certainly an extreme example, our past traumatic experiences probably have similar effects on us. If you’re having vision challenges, what things might you have chosen not to see because of painful or frightening past experiences? Similarly, if you’re having hearing challenges, what in your life might you be unwilling to hear?

  Figure 7.2 charts how all of this happens. The line in the chart reflects a relative measurement of a person’s state of being, which starts out at a more or less normal or baseline level before the event occurs. When the line spikes, it indicates a strong emotional reaction to an event—such as when the women experienced the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge soldiers. That horrific experience neurologically branded their brains and chemically changed their bodies, as well as altered their state of being—their thoughts, their feelings, their attitudes, their beliefs, and ultimately their perceptions. Specifically, the women no longer wished to look at the world anymore, so through neurological rewiring and chemical resignaling, their biology complied.

  A highly charged experience in our external reality will impress itself upon the circuitry of the brain and emotionally brand the body. As a result, the brain and body live in the past, and the event alters our state of being, as well as our perception of reality. We are no longer the same personality.

  Although the line in the graph eventually falls and levels off, the place where it ends up is a different place from where it began—indicating that the person remains chemically and neurologically altered by the experience. At that point for the Cambodian women, they were effectively living in the past, because they remained affected by the neurological and chemical branding that had come from the experience. They were no longer the same women; the event changed their state of being.

  The Power of the Environment

  Just changing your beliefs and perceptions once isn’t enough. You have to reinforce that change over and over. To see why, let’s return for a moment to the Parkinson’s patients mentioned earlier who improved their motor skills after receiving a saline injection that they thought was a powerful drug.

  As you’ll recall, the moment they moved into a state of better health, their autonomic nervous systems started to endorse this new state by producing dopamine in their brains. That didn’t happen because they were praying or hoping or wishing their bodies would make dopamine; it happened because they became people who made dopamine.

  Unfortunately, however, the effect doesn’t stick for everyone. In fact, for some, the placebo effect only lasts for a certain amount of time, because they go back to who they were before: their old states of being. In this case, when the Parkinson’s patients went back home and saw their caregivers, saw their spouses, slept in the same beds, ate the same food, sat in the same rooms, and maybe played chess with the same friends who complained about their pains, their same old environments reminded them of their same old personalities and their same old states of being. All of the conditions in their familiar lives reminded them of who they were before, so they just slipped right back into those identities, and their various motor problems recurred.8 They reidentified with their environments. The environment is that strong.

  The same thing happens with drug addicts who’ve been clean for many years. If you put them back in their same environments where they used to do drugs, even without their ingesting any drug, being there turns on the same receptor sites in their cells that the drugs did when they were using—and that in turn creates physiological changes in their bodies as if they’ve taken the drugs, increasing their cravings.9 Their conscious minds have no control over that. It’s automatic.

  Let’s examine this concept a bit further. You’ve learned that the conditioning process creates strong associative memories. You’ve also learned that associative memories stimulate subconscious automatic physiological functions by activating the autonomic nervous system. Think of Pavlov’s dogs again. Once Pavlov conditioned the dogs to associate the bell with getting fed, the dogs’ bodies were immediately physiologically changed, without much control from the conscious mind. It was the cue from the environment that (via associative memory) automatically, autonomically, subconsciously, and physiologically changed the dogs’ internal states. They began to salivate and their digestive juices turned on, because they were anticipating a reward. The dogs’ conscious minds couldn’t do that. It was the stimulus from the environment that created the associative memory from the conditioned response.

  Now let’s revisit the Parkinson’s patients and the former drug users. We could say that the instant any one of these individuals returned to the familiar environment, the body would automatically and physiologically return back to the old state of being—without the conscious mind having much control over it. In fact, that past state of being, which has been thinking and feeling the same way for years on end, has conditioned the body to become the mind. That is, the body is the mind that responds to the environment. That’s why it’s so hard for anyone in this situation to change.

  And the greater the addiction to the emotion, the greater the con
ditioned response is to the stimulus in the environment. For example, let’s say you were addicted to coffee and wanted to break your addiction to it. If you were visiting my house and I started making a java, and you heard the blast of the espresso machine, smelled the coffee brewing, and saw me drinking it, here’s what would happen: The moment your senses picked up those cues from the environment, your body, as the mind, would subconsciously, automatically respond without much help from your conscious mind—because you conditioned it to be that way. Your body-mind would then be craving its physiological reward, waging a war against your conscious mind, trying to convince you to take a sip or two.

  But if you truly broke the addiction to coffee and then I made a cup in front of you, you could have some or not, because you wouldn’t have the physiological response you had previously. You’d no longer be conditioned (your body would no longer be the mind), and the associative memory of your environment would no longer have the same effect on you.

  The same holds true for emotional addictions. For instance, if you have memorized guilt from your past experiences and unconsciously live that way every day in the present, then like most people, you’ll use someone or something at someplace in your external environment to reaffirm your addiction to guilt. Try as you might to be consciously greater than it, the moment you see your mother (whom you use to feel guilty) at the house where you grew up, your body will autonomically, chemically, and physiologically return to the same past state of guilt in the present moment, without your conscious mind being involved. Your body, which has been subconsciously programmed to be the mind of guilt, is already living in the past in that present moment. So it’s more natural to feel guilty when you’re with your mother than to feel any other way. And just as in the drug addict, a conditioned response has altered your internal state based on your association with your present-past external reality. Break the addiction to guilt by changing the subconscious programming, and you can be in the presence of the same conditions and remain free from your present-past reality.

  Researchers from the Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand examined the effect of environment using a group of 148 college students who were invited to take part in a study set in a bar-like atmosphere.10 The researchers told half the students that they would get vodka and tonic and told the rest they’d receive just tonic water. In reality, the bartenders in the study didn’t pour a single drop of vodka; all the students got just plain tonic. The bar-like atmosphere the researchers fashioned looked very realistic, right down to the resealing of the vodka bottles that had been cleverly filled with flat tonic water. The bartenders rimmed glasses with limes dunked in vodka for a more realistic effect, before proceeding to mix and pour drinks as though they were serving the real thing.

  The subjects became tipsy and acted drunk, with some even showing physical signs of intoxication. They didn’t get drunk because they drank alcohol; they got drunk because the environment, by associative memory, cued their brains and bodies to respond in the same old, familiar way.

  When the researchers eventually told the students the truth, many were amazed and insisted that they really did feel drunk at the time. They believed they were drinking alcohol, and those beliefs translated into neurochemicals, which altered their states of being.

  In other words, their beliefs alone were sufficient to fire up a biochemical change in their bodies that was equal to being drunk. That’s because the students conditioned themselves enough times to associate alcohol with a change in their internal chemical states. As the subjects expected or anticipated the future change in their inner states based on their past associative memories of drinking, they were cued by the environment to physiologically change, just as did Pavlov’s dogs.

  There’s a flip side, too, of course. The environment can also signal healing. Hospital patients in Pennsylvania who recovered from surgery in a room with a view of a stand of trees in a natural suburban setting needed less-potent pain medications and were released seven to nine days earlier than patients in rooms facing a brown brick wall.11 Our states of mind, created from the environment, can most definitely contribute to healing our brains and our bodies.

  So, then, do you need a sugar pill or a saline injection or a sham procedure or a picture window—something or someone or someplace in your external environment—to move into a new state of being? Or can you do it just by changing how you think and feel? Can you simply believe in a new possibility of health, without relying on any external stimulus, and make the thought in your brain a new emotional experience to the degree that it changes your body and you become greater than the conditioning in your external environment?

  If so, what you’ve just read suggests that it would be a good idea to change your internal state every day—before you get up and face your same old environment so that it won’t pull you, as it did the Parkinson’s patients, back to your old state of being. Remember Janis Schonfeld, from Chapter 1, who made physical changes in her brain by thinking she was taking an antidepressant? Part of the reason the placebo worked so well for her was that taking that inert pill was a daily reminder to change her state of being (because she associated taking the pill with her optimistic thoughts and feelings about getting better—as do more than 80 percent of people who take an antidepressant placebo).

  If you could access a new state of being through meditation by combining a clear intention with getting in touch with that heightened state of emotion that was mentioned earlier, and you got up jazzed and on fire about what you were creating every day, you’d finally start coming out of your resting state. You’d then be in a new state of being, with a different attitude, belief, and perception, no longer reacting to the same things in the same way, because now your environment would no longer control how you think and feel. You’d then be making new choices and demonstrating new behaviors, which would lead to new experiences and new emotions. And so you’d then turn into a new and different personality—a personality that doesn’t have the arthritic pain or the Parkinson’s motor issues or the infertility or whatever other condition you want to change.

  I want to take a moment to point out here that not all sickness and disease starts in our minds, of course. Certainly, babies are born with genetic defects and conditions that clearly couldn’t have been triggered by their thoughts, feelings, attitudes, and beliefs. And trauma and accidents do indeed happen. Furthermore, exposure to environmental toxins can definitely wreak havoc in the human body. My point is not that when these things come up, we’ve somehow asked for them—although it’s true that our physical bodies can be weakened by stress hormones and made more susceptible to disease when our immune systems shut down. My point is that no matter what the source of our ills, there’s a possibility that we can change our condition.

  Changing Your Energy

  So now we can see that if we want to change our beliefs and create a placebo effect to improve our health and our lives, we have to do the exact opposite of what the Cambodian women did by default. By holding a clear and firm intention and heightening our emotional energy, we have to create a new internal experience in our minds and bodies that’s greater than the past external experience. In other words, when we decide to create a new belief, the amplitude or energy of that choice must be high enough that it’s greater than the hardwired programs and emotional conditioning in the body.

  To see what happens when we do just this, take a look at Figure 7.3 on the following page. Here, the energy of the choice in this new experience is greater than the energy of the trauma in the past experience (as we saw in Figure 7.2), which is why the peak in this graph is higher than the peak in the first graph. And as a result, the effects of this new experience override the residue of the neural programming and emotional conditioning from the past experience.

  This process, if we do it right, actually repatterns our brains and changes our biology; the new experience will reorganize the old programming, and in so doing, it will remove the neurological evidence of that pa
st experience. (Think of how a bigger wave breaking farther up on the beach erases any sign of whatever shell, seaweed, sea foam, or sand pattern was there before.) Strong emotional experiences create long-term memories. So this new internal experience creates new long-term memories that override our past long-term memories, thus the choice becomes an experience that we never forget. There should be no evidence of our pasts in our brains and bodies any longer, and the new signal then rewrites the neurological program and genetically changes the body.

  In order to change a belief or perception about yourself and your life, you have to make a decision with such firm intention that the choice carries an amplitude of energy that is greater than the hardwired programs in the brain and the emotional addiction in the body, and the body must respond to a new mind. When the choice creates a new inner experience that becomes greater than the past outer experience, it will rewrite the circuits in your brain and resignal your body emotionally. Since experiences create long-term memories, when the choice becomes an experience that you never forget, you are changed. Biologically, the past no longer exists. We could say that your body in that present moment is in a new future.

  Now look at Figure 7.3 again and notice how the slope of the line in the graph goes all the way back down (whereas in Figure 7.2, it descended but still remained higher than it was at the point where it started). That shows there’s no trace left of the past experience; it no longer exists in this new state of being.

  In addition to reorganizing your neurocircuitry, this new signal also begins to rewrite the body’s conditioning by breaking the emotional attachment to the past. When that happens, in that second, the body is living fully in the present; it is no longer a prisoner of the past. That heightened energy is felt within the body and translated as a new emotion (which is just another way of saying “energy in motion,” or “e-motion”), whether that emotion is feeling invincible, courageous, empowered, compassionate, inspired, or whatever. And it’s energy that’s changing our biology, our neurocircuitry, and our genetic expression—not chemistry.