Chapter 3 will take you through the physiology of what happens in your brain when the placebo effect is operating. You’ll read that, in one sense, the placebo works because you can embrace or entertain anew thought that you can be well, and then use it to replace the thought that you’ll always be sick. That means you can change your thinking from unconsciously predicting that your future is your same familiar past to beginning to anticipate and expect anew potential outcome. If you agree with this idea, then it means that you’ll have to examine how you think, what the mind is, and how these things affect the body. I’ll explain how as long as you’re thinking the same thoughts, they’ll lead to the same choices, which cause the same behaviors, which create the same experiences, which produce the same emotions, which in turn drive the same thoughts—so that neurochemically, you stay the same. In effect, you’re reminding yourself of who you think you are. But hold on; you’re not hardwired to be the same way for the rest of your life. I’ll then explain the concept of neuroplasticity and how we now know that the brain is capable of changing throughout our lives, creating new neural pathways and new connections. Chapter 4 moves into a discussion of the placebo effect in the body, explaining the next step of the physiology of the placebo response. It starts out telling the story of a group of elderly men who attend a weeklong retreat setup by Harvard researchers who asked the men to pretend they were 20 years younger. By the end of the week, the men had made numerous measurable physiological changes, all turning back the clock on their bodies, and you’ll learn the secret behind how they did it. To explain that, the chapter also discusses what genes are and how they are signaled in the body. You’ll learn how the relatively new and exciting science of epigenetics has basically torched the old-school idea that your genes are your destiny, by teaching us that the mind truly can instruct new genes to behave in new ways. You’ll discover how the body has elaborate mechanisms for turning some genes on and others o, which means that you’re not doomed to express whatever genes you’ve inherited. This means you can learn how to change your neural wiring to select new genes and create real physical changes. You’ll also read about how our bodies access stem cells—the physical matter that’s behind many placebo-effect miracles—to make new, healthy cells in areas that have been damaged. 28
