You Are the Placebo: Making Your Mind Matter

And after years of performing in symphonies and orchestras, professional musicians expand the part of their brains associated with language and musical abilities.
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When you learn new things and begin to think in new ways, you are making your brain fire indifferent sequences, patterns, and combinations. That is, you are activating many diverse networks of neurons indifferent ways. And whenever you make your brain work differently,
you’re changing your mind. As you begin to think outside the box, new thoughts should lead to new choices, new behaviors, new experiences, and new emotions. Now your identity is also changing.
The official scientific terms for how neuroplasticity works are pruning
and sprouting, which mean exactly what they sound like getting rid of some neural connections, patterns, and circuits and creating new ones. Ina well-functioning brain, this process can happen in a matter of seconds.
Researchers at the University of California at Berkeley demonstrated this in a study on laboratory rats. They found that rats living in an enriched
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environment (sharing a cage with siblings and offspring and having access to many different toys) had larger brains with more neurons and more connections between those neurons than did the rats in less-enriched environments Again, when we learn new things and have new experiences, we’re literally changing our brains.
To break free from the chains of hardwired programming and the conditioning that keeps you the same takes considerable effort. It also requires knowledge, because when you learn vital information about yourself or your life, you stitch a whole new pattern into the three- dimensional embroidery of your own gray matter. Now you have more raw materials to make the brain work in new and different ways. You begin to think about and perceive reality differently, because you begin to see your life through the lens of anew mind.
Crossing the River of Change
At this point, you can see that in order to change, you have to become conscious of your unconscious self (which you now know is just a set of hardwired programs).
The hardest part about change is not making the same choices we made
the day before. The reason it’s so difficult is that the moment we no longer are thinking the same thoughts that lead to the same choices—which cause us to automatically act in habitual ways so that we can experience the same events in order to reaffirm the same emotions of our identity—
we immediately feel uncomfortable. This new state of being is unfamiliar;
it’s unknown. It doesn’t feel normal We don’t feel like ourselves anymore—because we’re not ourselves. And because everything feels uncertain, we no longer can predict the feeling of the familiar self and how it’s mirrored back to us in our lives.
As uncomfortable as that maybe at first, that’s the moment we know we’ve stepped into the river of change. We’ve entered the unknown. The instant that we no longer are being our old selves, we have to cross a gap between the old self and the new self, which Figure 3.8
clearly shows. In other words, we don’t all just waltz into anew personality in a matter of moments. It takes time.
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Crossing the river of change requires that you leave the same familiar predictable self—
connected to the same thoughts, same choices, same behaviors, and same feelings—and step into avoid or the unknown. The gap between the old self and the new self is the biological death of your old personality. If the old self must die, then you have to create anew self with new thoughts, new choices, new behaviors, and new emotions. Entering this river is stepping toward anew unpredictable, unfamiliar self. The unknown is the only place where you can create—you cannot create anything new from the known.
Usually when people step into the river of change, that void between the old self and the new self is so uncomfortable that they immediately slip back into being their old selves again. They unconsciously think, This

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