You Are the Placebo: Making Your Mind Matter

of synaptic connections. We can also call them your neurocircuitry.
So as there are physical changes in the nerve cells that makeup your brain’s gray matter, and as neurons are selected and instructed to organize themselves into these vast networks capable of processing hundreds of millions of bits of information, the physical hardware of the brain also changes, adapting to the information it receives from the environment. In time, as the networks—converging and diverging propagations of electrical activity like a crazy lightning storm in thick clouds—are repeatedly turned on, the brain will keep using the same hardware systems (the physical neural networks) but will also create a software program (an automatic neural network. That’s how the programs are installed in the brain. The hardware creates the software,
and the software system is embedded into the hardware—and every time the software is used, it reinforces the hardware.
This is a simple graphic representation of neurons in a neural network. The minute space
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between the branches of individual neurons that facilitates communication between them is called the synaptic gap. About 100,000 neurons can fit into the same space as a grain of sand and will have more than a billion connections among them.
So when you’re thinking the same thoughts and having the same feelings all the time because you’re not learning or doing anything new,
your brain is firing its neurons and activating the neural networks inexactly the same sequences, patterns, and combinations. They become the automatic programs that you unconsciously use everyday. You have an automatic neural network to speak a language, to shave your face or put on makeup, to type on the computer, to judge your coworker, and soon, because you’ve performed those actions so many times that they’ve become practically unconscious. You no longer have to consciously think about it. It’s effortless.
You’ve reinforced those circuits so often that they’ve become hardwired. The connections between neurons become more glued together, additional circuits are formed, and the branches actually expand and become physically thicker—just as we might strengthen and reinforce abridge, build a few new roads, or widen a freeway to accommodate more traffic.
One of the most basic principles in neuroscience states, Nerve cells that fire together wire together As your brain fires repeatedly in the same manner, you’re reproducing the same level of mind. According to neuroscience, mind is the brain inaction or at work. Thus, we can say that if you’re reminding yourself of who you think you are on a daily basis by reproducing the same mind, you’re making your brain rein the same ways and you’ll activate the same neural networks for years on end. By the time you reach your mid-30s, your brain has organized itself into a very finite signature of automatic programs—and that fixed pattern is called your identity.
Think of it as a box inside your brain. There’s no literal box inside your head, of course. But it’s safe to say that thinking inside the box means you’ve physically hardwired your brain into a limited pattern, as illustrated in Figure 3.6
. By reproducing the same level of mind over and over again, the most commonly red, neurologically wired set of circuits has predetermined who you areas a result of your own volition.
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If your thoughts, choices, behaviors, experiences, and emotional states remain the same for years on end—and the same thoughts are always equal to the same feelings, reinforcing the same endless cycle—then your brain becomes hardwired into a finite signature. That’s because you are recreating the same mind everyday by making your brain fire in the same patterns. Overtime, this biologically reinforces a specific limited set of neural networks,
making your brain physically more prone to creating the same level of mind—you’re now thinking in the box. The totality of those hardwired circuits is called your identity.

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