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The key is making your inner thoughts more real than the outer environment, because then the brain won’t know the difference between the two and will change to look as if the event has taken place.
Attitude had more of an influence on longevity than blood pressure, cholesterol levels, smoking, body weight, or level of exercise.
certainly not confined to the Christian tradition. The late Indian guru Sathya Sai Baba, widely considered by his followers to be an avatar—a manifestation of a deity—was known to manifest holy ash called vibhuti from the palms of his hands. This fine gray ash has been said to have the power to heal many physical, mental, and spiritual ills when either eaten or applied to the skin as a paste. Tibetan lamas are also said to have healing powers, using their breath to heal by blowing on the sick.
psychoneuroimmunology—the effect of thoughts and emotions on the immune system
the relief the study subjects experienced wasn’t all in their minds; it was in their minds and their bodies—in their state of being.
Their autonomic nervous system—the body’s subconscious system that operates below conscious awareness—took over. So conditioning creates subconscious internal changes in the body by associating past memories with the expectation of internal effects (what we call associative memory) until those expected or anticipated end results automatically occur. The stronger the conditioning, the less conscious control we have over these processes and the more automatic the subconscious programming becomes.
Researchers surmised that laughter influences many genes involved with immune response, which in turn contributed to the improved glucose control. The elevated emotion, triggered by the patients’ brains, turned on the genetic variations, which activated the natural killer cells and also somehow improved their glucose response—probably in addition to many other beneficial effects.
Siegel’s work defined cancer survivors largely as those who had a feisty, fighting spirit, and he concluded that there were no incurable diseases, only incurable patients. Siegel also began writing about hope as a powerful force for healing and about unconditional love, with the natural pharmacy of elixirs it provides, as the most powerful stimulant of the immune system.14
To use placebos to effect unconscious physiological responses by associative memory (such as to secrete hormones or alter the functioning of the immune system), conditioning gets results, whereas to use placebos to change more conscious responses (such as to relieve pain or lessen depression), a simple suggestion or an expectation works.
Priming is, basically, when someone, someplace, or something in our environment (for example, taking a test) triggers all sorts of associations that are hardwired into our brains (that people grading this test think black students score lower than whites), causing us to act in certain ways (not scoring as highly) without being conscious of what we’re doing.
What we’re conditioned to believe about ourselves, and what we’re programmed to think other people think about us, affects our performance, including how successful we are.
So the optimists were more likely to respond positively to a suggestion that something would make them feel better, because they were primed to hope for the best future scenario. And the pessimists were more likely to respond negatively to a suggestion that something would make them feel worse, because they consciously or unconsciously expected the worst potential outcome.
In other words, in exactly the same environment, those with a positive mind-set tend to create positive situations, while those with a negative mind-set tend to create negative situations. This is the miracle of our own free-willed, individual, biological engineering.
The members of the control group didn’t assign the same meaning to their tasks, because they didn’t know that what they were doing was beneficial to their health, so they also didn’t receive the same benefits—even though they were performing exactly the same actions.
We think somewhere between 60,000 to 70,000 thoughts in one day,1 and 90 percent of those thoughts are exactly the same ones we had the day before.
if we repeat what we learn enough times, we strengthen communities of neurons to support us in remembering it the next time. If we don’t, then the synaptic connections soon disappear and the memory is erased. This is why it’s important for us to continually update, review, and remember our new thoughts, choices, behaviors, habits, beliefs, and experiences if we want them to solidify in our brains.2 Figure 3.5 will help you become familiar with neurons and neural networks.
That’s how the programs are installed in the brain. The hardware creates the software, and the software system is embedded into the hardware—and every time the software is used, it reinforces the hardware.
By the time you reach your mid-30s, your brain has organized itself into a very finite signature of automatic programs—and that fixed pattern is called your identity.
Once we understand that crossing the river of change and feeling that discomfort is actually the biological, neurological, chemical, and even genetic death of the old self, we have power over change and we can set our sights on the other side of the river. If we embrace the fact that change is the denaturing of the hardwired circuitry from years of unconsciously thinking the same way, we can cope. If we understand that the discomfort we feel is the dismantling of old attitudes, beliefs, and perceptions that have been repeatedly etched into our cerebral architecture, we can endure. If we can
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