You Are the Placebo: Making Your Mind Matter

Your personality is made up of how you think, act, and feel. It is your state of being.
Therefore, your same thoughts, actions, and feelings will keep you enslaved to the same past personal reality. However, when you as a personality embrace new thoughts, actions, and feelings, you will inevitably create anew personal reality in your future.
You must observe and pay attention to those emotions that you’ve memorized and that you live by on a daily basis, and decide if living by those emotions over and over again is loving to you. You see, most people try to create anew personal reality as the same old personality, and it doesn’t work. In order to change your life, you have to literally become someone else. Stay tuned for some sound science to support this process.
Take a glance at Figure 3.4
and follow the sequence again.
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How we create a new reality by thought alone.
So if you understand this model, then you should agree with me that your new thoughts should lead to new choices. New choices should lead to new behaviors. New behaviors should lead to new experiences. New experiences should create new emotions, and new emotions and feelings should inspire you to think in new ways. That’s called evolution And your personal reality and your biology—your brain circuitry, your internal chemistry, your genetic expression, and ultimately your health—
should change as a result of this new personality, this new state of being.
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And it all seems to start with a thought.
A Quick Look at How the Brain Works
Up to this point, I’ve briefly mentioned terms like brain circuitry, neural
networks, brain chemistry, and genetic expression without giving you much explanation of what they mean. So for the rest of the chapter, I want to outline some simple scientific understandings of how the brain and bodywork together in order to build a complete model of how you really can become your own placebo.
Your brain, which is at least 75 percent water and is the consistency of a soft-boiled egg, is made up of some 100 billion nerve cells, called neurons,
that are seamlessly arranged and suspended in this aqueous environment.
Each nerve cell resembles a leafless but elastic oak tree, with wiggly branches and root systems that connect and disconnect to other nerve cells. The number of connections a particular nerve cell might make can range from 1,000 to more than 100,000, depending on wherein the brain the nerve cell resides. For example, your neocortex—your thinking brain
—has about 10,000 to 40,000 connections per neuron.
We used to think of the brain as a computer, and while there are certainly some similarities, we now know there’s much more to the story.
Each neuron is its own unique biocomputer, with more than megabytes of RAM. It’s capable of processing enormous amounts of data
—up to hundreds of thousands of functions per second. As we learn new things and have new experiences in our lives, our neurons make new connections, exchanging electrochemical information with each other.
Those connections are called synaptic connections, because the place where the cells exchange information—the gap between the branch of one neuron and the root of another—is called a synapse.
If learning is making new synaptic connections, then remembering is keeping those connections wired together. So in effect, a memory is a long-term relationship or connection between the nerve cells. And the creation of these connections, and the ways they changeover time, alters the physical structure of the brain.
As the brain makes these changes, our thoughts produce a blend of various chemicals called neurotransmitters (serotonin, dopamine, and acetylcholine area few examples you may recognize. When we think thoughts, neurotransmitters atone branch of one neuron tree cross the synaptic gap to reach the root of another neuron tree. Once they cross that gap, the neuron fires with an electrical bolt of information. When we continue thinking the same thoughts, the neuron keeps firing in the same
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ways, strengthening the relationship between the two cells so that they can more readily convey a signal the next time those neurons re. As a result, the brain shows physical evidence that something was not only learned, but also remembered. This process of selective strengthening is called synaptic potentiation.
When jungles of neurons rein unison to support anew thought, an additional chemical (a protein) is created within the nerve cell and makes its way to the cell’s center, or nucleus, where it lands in the DNA. The protein then switches on several genes. Since the job of the genesis to make proteins that maintain both the structure and function of the body,
the nerve cell then quickly makes anew protein to create new branches between nerve cells. So when we repeat a thought or an experience enough times, our brain cells make not only stronger connections between each other (which affects our physiological functions, but also a greater number of total connections (which affects the physical structure of the body. The brain becomes more enriched microscopically.
So as soon as you think anew thought, you become changed—
neurologically, chemically, and genetically. In fact, you can gain thousands of new connections in a matter of seconds from novel learning,
new ways of thinking, and fresh experiences. This means that by thought alone, you can personally activate new genes right away. It happens just by changing your mind it’s mind over matter.
Nobel laureate Eric Kandel, MD, 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.
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Figure 3.5
will help you become familiar with neurons and neural networks.
To get an idea of how vast this system really is, imagine a nerve cell connecting to 40,000 other nerve cells. Let’s say it’s processing bits of information per second and sharing that information with other neurons that are also processing 100,000 functions per second. This network, formed from clusters of neurons working together, is called a

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