You Are the Placebo: Making Your Mind Matter

Now let’s return to the story of Ivan Santiago and the other hypnosis subjects from the start of this chapter. Obviously, these folks have an easier time getting past their analytical minds than most of us. They seem to have both a neuroplasticity and an emotional plasticity that allow them to make their inner worlds more real than their outer worlds. In their normal waking states, they probably spend more time in alpha than in beta, so they have fewer stress hormones circulating that can pull them out of homeostasis. Their highly suggestible states better enable their conscious minds to control the autonomic functions of their subconscious minds.
Yet they’re not all the same several different degrees of suggestibility were demonstrated in this study. The 16 people who passed the initial evaluation were certainly suggestible, although they weren’t all as suggestible as those who passed the next test by taking their clothes off in public after being given a posthypnotic suggestion to do so, going against deeply rooted social norms. The four who passed that test were certainly highly suggestible, able to be greater than their social environment. But when it came to immersing themselves in the ice water, three of those four couldn’t go that far they weren’t able to be greater than their physical environment.
Only Santiago, who remained greater than his physical environment in extreme conditions for an extended period of time while having dominion over his body, demonstrated the highest level of suggestibility.
He was able not only to withstand the frigid ice bath, but also to be greater than his moral environment, by following the posthypnotic suggestion to shoot the foreign dignitary despite the fact that his conscious personality was hardly one of a coldblooded killer.
In terms of the placebo effect, it takes a similar high degree of suggestibility to be greater than the body and greater than the environment for an extended period of time—that is, to accept, believe,
and surrender to the idea of your inner world being more real than your outer world. But in just a few chapters, you’ll learn how you cannot only change your beliefs and become more suggestible, but also use that state to program your subconscious mind—not to shoot a stuntman with a prop gun, fortunately, but to triumph over whatever health issues,
emotional traumas, or other personal matters you maybe dealing with.
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Chapter Seven
Attitudes, Beliefs, and Perceptions
A 12-year-old Indonesian boy with a vacant stare opens his mouth to willingly accept shards of broken glass from people in a crowd gathered in a Jakarta park to watch traditional Javanese trance dancing called “kuda lumping The boy chews on the glass and swallows it, as if it were nothing more than a handful of popcorn or pretzels, and he shows no ill effects. As a third-generation kuda lumper, this youth has been ingesting glass in similar mystical performances since he was nine. The boy and the other 19 members of his traditional dance troupe recite a Javanese spell before every performance, summoning the spirits of the dead to reside in one of them for the duration of that day’s dance, protecting that dancer from pain.
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The boy and his fellow dancers are no different, in certain respects,
from the Appalachian snake-handling preachers described in Chapter who become anointed with the spirit and enthusiastically dance around the pulpit with venomous snakes coiled around their arms and shoulders.
Bringing them dangerously close to their faces, they are seemingly immune to the venom if bitten. The dancers are also similar to the Fijian
firewalkers from the Sawau tribe on the island of Beqa, who unflinchingly walk across white-hot stones that have been covered in flaming logs and glowing red coals for hours, an ability said to have been given to one of the tribe’s ancestors by a god and then passed down within the tribe.
The glass-eating boy, the snake-handling preacher, and the Fijian
firewalker never pause even fora moment to think, I wonder if it will work

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