You Are the Placebo: Making Your Mind Matter
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| Michelle’s new self: Today, Michelle hardly ever has any of the involuntary motor symptoms associated with Parkinson’s disease. Very minor twitches do present themselves when she gets stressed or overtired at times, but for the most part, she’s high functioning and normal. When Michelle is balanced and joyful, doing her meditations daily, her brain is working well—and so is she. From both our continued scans and her own reports, Michelle isn’t merely maintaining her condition she continues to get better and better. She keeps meditating, because she understands that she has to be the placebo every day. Changing Traumatic Brain and Spinal-Cord Injury by Thought Alone John’s old self: In November 2006, John broke his neck at the seventh cervical and first thoracic vertebrae while he was a passenger in a car that spun out of control and rolled at high speed. Due to the impact, he suffered a severe head injury as well. The doctors were quick and sure about his prognosis. He would be a quadriplegic for the rest of his life. He would never walk again and would have very limited use of his arms and hands. His vertebrae were 100 percent dislocated, resulting in spinal-cord damage. It wasn’t until John had surgery that his doctors saw the exact extent of his injuries. Two days later, the neurologist told John’s wife that his spinal cord was somewhat intact but that his type of injury could have the same outcome as a complete cord severing. It would be, as with all spinal-cord injuries, awaiting game. When you’re caught up in the day-to-day reality of living in the intensive care unit, and later a rehab center, it can be extremely difficult not to get swept away by conventional thinking. When John and his family asked about his possible recovery, the doctors said that given the injury and the lack of return to any kind of normal functioning up to that point, they should begin accepting the inevitable. John would be physically handicapped for the rest of his life. His doctors hammered this message home over and over, as a necessary part of moving on But somehow, both John and his wife couldn’t accept it. I met John while he was in his wheelchair in 2009, along with his wife and family and an amazing physical therapist who understands neuroplasticity. They are some of the most energetic and optimistic people I’ve ever met, and we eagerly began our journey together. John’s scans: Take a look at John’s before meditation brain scan in Figure 10.7 . His first picture demonstrates quite a bit of hypoactivity. It’s 236 more than 3 SD below normal. John’s coherence measurement, with such significant thick blue lines, is the opposite of our study of Michelle’s Parkinson’s condition, which showed thick red lines. This scan reveals a diminished capacity for different parts of the brain working well together. His brain here is on idle and has no energy, and he has limited ability to respond to anything for any length of time. He couldn’t sustain attention, and his awareness was limited. Because of his traumatic brain injury, his brain was in a state of super-low arousal, and it showed a high degree of incoherence. Now look at his brain scan after four days of meditation. In the first image on the upper-left margin at 1 Hz delta, he has some more activity demonstrated in red. In this case, it’s a good sign, because more coherence is happening in delta in both hemispheres. Here, John is starting to show more balanced dual-brain processing. Because his traumatic brain injury is most visible in delta and theta, the hyperactivity in delta suggests that his brain is waking up. The rest of his brain in alpha and beta is showing more balanced activity and better cognitive function. This shows he has more access to control his mind and body. Now view Figure 10.8 . The blue color starting from about the middle of the second row until the end of the bottom row once again indicates that John has no alpha or beta brainwaves. This blue color distributed throughout the alpha and beta realms in the left and right hemispheres suggests that he’s vegetating and working on limited resources. The blue shows less cognitive ability and less capacity to control his body. John’s mind is just not there. After four days of meditation, 90 percent of John’s brain has returned back to normal, as shown by all the green. That’s pretty good He still has some hypoactivity in his left hemisphere, where the arrows are pointing, indicating some problems with verbal skills and expressing himself, but it’s still so much better than his first scan. John continues to do his meditations, and his brain continues to show more energy, more balance, and more coherence. John has regained access to the latent neuropathways that were there before. His brain woke up, remembered how to work again, and now has the energy to work better. Download 5.46 Mb. Share with your friends:
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