You Are the Placebo: Making Your Mind Matter
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| like to live without this pain and limitation?—your frontal lobe snaps to attention. Ina matter of seconds, it creates both an intention to be healthy (so you can get clear on what you want to create and what you no longer wish to experience) and a mental picture of being healthy so that you can imagine what it will be like. As the CEO, the frontal lobe has connections to all the other parts of the brain. So it starts selecting networks of neurons to create anew state of mind as an answer to that question. You might say it becomes a symphony conductor, silencing your old hardwiring (the pruning function of neuroplasticity) and selecting different networks of neurons from different parts of the brain and wiring them together to create anew level of mind tore ect what you were imagining. It’s your frontal lobe that changes your mind—that is, it makes the brain work in different sequences, patterns, and combinations. Once the frontal lobe can select different networks of neurons and seamlessly turn them on in tandem to create anew level of mind, a picture or internal representation appears in your mind’s eye, or frontal lobe. Now let’s bring in some more neurochemistry. If your frontal lobe is orchestrating enough of these neural nets tore in unison as you focus on a clear intention, there will come a moment when the thought will become the experience in your mind—that’s when your inner reality is more real than your outer reality. Once the thought becomes the experience, you begin to feel the emotion of how the event would feel in reality (remember, emotions are the chemical signatures of experiences). 121 Your brain makes a different type of chemical messenger—a neuropeptide—and it sends it out to the cells in your body. The neuropeptide looks for the appropriate receptor sites, or docking stations, on various cells so that it can deliver its message to the body’s hormonal centers and, ultimately, the cells DNA—and the cells get anew message that the event has occurred. When the DNA in a cell gets this new information from the neuropeptide, it responds by turning on (or upregulating) some genes and turning off (or downregulating) others, all to support your new state of being. Think of the upregulating and downregulating as lights either heating up and getting brighter or cooling off and getting dimmer. When a gene lights up, it’s activated to make a protein. When a gene turns o, it becomes deactivated and gets dimmer or weaker—and it doesn’t produce as many proteins. And we seethe effects with measurable changes in our physical bodies. Take a look at Figure 5.1A and Figure B. They will help you follow the entire sequence of how to change your body by thought alone. 122 123 In Figure A, the flowchart demonstrates how thoughts progress through a cascade of simple mechanisms and chemical reactions in a downward causation to change the body. By deduction, if new thoughts can create anew mind by activating new neural networks, creating healthier neuropeptides and hormones (which signal the cells in new ways and epigenetically activate new genes to make new proteins, and if the expression of proteins is the expression of life and is equal to the health of the body, then Figure B illustrates how thoughts can heal the body. Stem Cells Our Potent Pool of Potentials Stem cells are the next layer we need to understand in the puzzle. They’re at least partially responsible for how the seemingly impossible becomes possible. Officially, these are undifferentiated biological cells that become specialized. They’re raw potential. When these blank slates are activated, they morph into whatever kind of cell the body needs— including muscle cells, bone cells, skin cells, immune cells, and even nerve cells in the brain—in order to replace injured or damaged cells in the body’s tissues, organs, and systems. Think of stem cells as scoops of shaved snow-cone ice before the flavored syrup is pumped on top lumps of clay waiting on the potter’s wheel for their turn to be fashioned into plates, bowls, vases, or mugs or maybe even a roll of silver duct tape that can fix a leaking pipe one day and be cleverly fashioned into a prom dress the next. Here’s an example of how stem cells work. When you cut your finger, the body needs to repair the break in the skin. The local physical trauma sends a signal to your genes from outside the cell. The gene turns on and makes the appropriate proteins, which then instruct stem cells to turn into healthily functioning skin cells. The traumatic signal is the information the stem cell needs to differentiate into a skin cell. Millions of processes like this occur allover our bodies all the time. Healing 124 attributable to this type of gene expression has been documented in the liver, muscles, skin, intestines, bone marrow, and even the brain and the heart. 10 In wound-healing studies where the subject is in a highly emotional, negative state like anger, the stem cells don’t get the message clearly. When there’s interference in the signal, as with static on the radio, the potential cell doesn’t get the right stimulation in a coherent fashion to turn itself into a useful cell. As you know from reading the section about the stress response and living in survival mode, the healing will take longer because most of the body’s energy is busy dealing with the angry emotion and its chemical effects. It’s just not the time for creation, growth, and nurturing—it’s the time for an emergency. So when the placebo effect is at work, and you create the right level of mind with a clear intention and combine it with a nurturing, elevated emotion, the right type of signal can reach the cell’s DNA. The message will not only influence the production of healthy proteins for better structure and function of the body, but also make brand-new, healthy cells from latent stem cells that are just waiting to be activated by the right message. You could even think of these stem cells as get out of jail free cards, as in the game Monopoly, because once they’re picked up or activated, they replace cells in damaged areas of the body, allowing fora fresh, clean start. In fact, stem cells help explain how healing occurs in at least half the placebo cases involving sham surgery, whether it’s for an arthritic knee or a coronary bypass (as described in Chapter 1 ). Download 5.46 Mb. Share with your friends:
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