You Are the Placebo: Making Your Mind Matter
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| Chapter Four The Placebo Effect in the Body On a crisp September day in 1981, a group of eight men in theirs and 80s climbed into a few vans headed two hours north of Boston to a monastery in Peterborough, New Hampshire. The men were about to take part in a five-day retreat where they were asked to pretend that they were young again—or at least 22 years younger than they were at the time. The retreat was organized by a team of researchers, headed by Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer, PhD, who would take another group of eight elderly men to the same place the following week. The men in the second group, the control group, were asked to actively reminisce about being 22 years younger but not to pretend that they weren’t their current age. When the first group of men arrived at the monastery, they found themselves surrounded by all sorts of environmental cues to help them recreate an earlier age. They flipped through old issues of Life and the Saturday Evening Post, they watched movies and television shows popular in 1959, and they listened to recordings of Perry Como and Nat King Cole on the radio. They also talked about current events, such as Fidel Castro’s rise to power in Cuba, Russian premier Nikita Khrushchev’s visit to the United States, and even the feats of baseball star Mickey Mantle and boxing great Floyd Patterson. All of these elements were cleverly designed to help the men imagine that they were really 22 years younger. After each five-day retreat, the researchers took several measurements and compared them to those they’d taken before the start of the study. The bodies of the men from both groups were physiologically younger, structurally as well as functionally, although those in the first study group (who pretended they were younger) improved significantly more than the control group, who’d merely reminisced. 1 The researchers discovered improvements in height, weight, and gait. The men grew taller as their posture straightened, and their joints became more flexible and their fingers lengthened as their arthritis diminished. Their eyesight and hearing got better. Their grip strength improved. Their memory sharpened, and they scored better on tests of mental cognition (with the first group improving their score by percent compared to 44 percent for the control group. The men literally became younger in those five days, right in front of the researchers eyes. Langer reported, At the end of the study, I was playing football— 96 touch, but still football—with these men, some of whom gave up their canes.” 2 How did that happen Clearly, the men were able to turn on the circuits in their brains that reminded them of who they had been 22 years ago, and then their body chemistry somehow magically responded. They didn’t just feel younger they physically became younger, as evidenced by measurement after measurement. The change wasn’t just in their minds; it was in their bodies. But what happened in their bodies to produce such striking physical transformations What could be responsible for all of these measurable changes in physical structure and function The answer is their genes— which aren’t as immutable as you might think. So let’s take sometime to look at what exactly genes are and how they operate. Demystifying DNA Imagine a ladder or a zipper twisted into a spiral, and you’ll have a pretty good picture of what deoxyribonucleic acid (better known as DNA) looks like. Stored in the nucleus of every living cell in our bodies, DNA contains the raw information, or instructions, that makes us who and what we are (although as we’ll soon see, those instructions are not an unchangeable blueprint that our cells must follow for our entire lives). Each half of that DNA zipper contains corresponding nucleic acids that, together, are called base pairs, numbering about three billion per cell. Groups of long sequences of these nucleic acids are called genes. Genes are unique little structures. If you were to take the DNA out of the nucleus of just one cell in your body and stretch it out from end to end, it would be six feet long. If you took all the DNA out of your entire body and stretched it out from end to end, it would go to the sun and back 150 times But if you took all the DNA out of the almost seven billion people on the planet and scrunched it together, it would tin a space as small as a grain of rice. Our DNA uses the instructions imprinted within its individual sequences to produce proteins. The word protein is derived from the Greek protas, meaning of primary importance Proteins are the raw materials our bodies use to construct not only coherent three- dimensional structures (our physical anatomy, but also the intricate functions and complex interactions that makeup our physiology. Our bodies are, in fact, protein-producing machines. Muscle cells make actin and myosin; skin cells make collagen and elastin; immune cells make antibodies thyroid cells make thyroxine; certain eye cells make keratin; 97 bone-marrow cells make hemoglobin and pancreatic cells make enzymes like protease, lipase, and amylase. All of the elements that these cells manufacture are proteins. Proteins control our immune system, digest our food, heal our wounds, catalyze chemical reactions, support the structural integrity of our bodies, provide elegant molecules to communicate between cells, and much more. In short, proteins are the expression of life (and the health of our bodies). Take a look at Figure 4.1 and review a simplistic understanding of genes. This is a very simplistic representation of a cell with DNA housed within the cell nucleus. The genetic material once stretched out into individual strands looks like a twisted zipper or ladder called a DNA helix. The rungs of the ladder are the nucleic acids that are paired together, which act as codes to make proteins. A different length and sequence of the DNA strand is called a gene. A gene is expressed when it makes a protein. Various cells of the body make different proteins for both structure and function. 98 For the 60 years since James Watson, PhD, and Francis Crick, Ph.D., discovered the double helix of DNA, what Watson proclaimed in a issue of Nature 4 as the central dogma that one’s genes determine all, has held fast. As contradictory evidence popped up here and there, researchers tended to dismiss it as a mere anomaly within a complex system. 5 Some odd years later, the genetic-determinism concept still reigns in the general public’s mind. Most people believe the common misconception that our genetic destiny is predetermined and that if we have inherited the genes for certain cancers, heart disease, diabetes, or any number of other conditions, we have no more control over that than we do our eye color or the shapes of our noses (notwithstanding contact lenses and plastic surgery). The news media reinforce this by repeatedly suggesting that specific genes cause this condition or that disease. They’ve programmed us into believing that we’re victims of our biology and that our genes have the ultimate power over our health, our well-being, and our personalities— and even that our genes dictate our human affairs, determine our interpersonal relationships, and forecast our future. But are we who we are, and do we do what we do, because we’re born that way This concept implies that genetic determinism is deeply entrenched in our culture and that there are genes for schizophrenia, genes for homosexuality, genes for leadership, and so on. These are all dated beliefs built on yesterday’s news. First of all, there’s no gene for dyslexia or ADD or alcoholism, for example, so not every health condition or physical variation is associated with a gene. And fewer than 5 percent of people on the planet are born with some genetic condition—like type 1 diabetes, Down syndrome, or sickle-cell anemia. The other 95 percent of us who develop such a condition acquire it through lifestyle and behaviors The flip side is also true Not everyone born with the genes associated with a condition (say, Alzheimer’s or breast cancer) ends up getting that. It’s not as though our genes are eggs that will ultimately hatch someday. That’s just not the way it works. The real questions are whether or not any gene we might be carrying has been expressed yet and what we’re doing that might signal that gene to turn either on or off. A huge shift in the way we look at genes came when scientists finally mapped the human genome. In 1990, at the beginning of the project, the researchers expected they’d eventually discover that we have 140,000 different genes. They came up with that number because genes 99 manufacture (and supervise the production of ) proteins—and the human body manufactures 100,000 different proteins, plus 40,000 regulatory proteins needed to make other proteins. So the scientists mapping the human genome were anticipating that they’d find one gene per protein, but by the end of the project, in 2003, they were shocked to discover that, in fact, humans have only 23,688 genes. From the perspective of Watson’s central dogma, that’s not only not enough genes to create our complex bodies and keep them running, but also not even enough genes to keep the brain functioning. So if it’s not contained in the genes, where does all of the information come from that’s required to create so many proteins and sustain life? Download 5.46 Mb. Share with your friends:
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