The Biology of Belief: Unleashing the Power of Consciousness, Matter & Miracles

by Bruce H. Lipton

nocebo cases suggest that physicians, parents, and teachers can remove hope by programming you to believe you are powerless. Our positive and negative beliefs not only impact our health but also every aspect of our life.

My point is that you can choose what to see. You can filter your life with rose-colored beliefs that will help your body grow or you can use a dark filter that turns everything black and makes your body/mind more susceptible to disease. You can live a life of fear or live a life of love. You have the choice! But I can tell you that if you choose to see a world full of love, your body will respond by growing in health. If you choose to believe that you live in a dark world full of fear, your body’s health will be compromised as you physiologically close yourself down in a protection response.

Before we leave this chapter, I’d just like to emphasize again that there is nothing wrong with going through life wearing the proverbial rose-colored glasses. In fact, those rose-colored glasses are necessary for your cells to thrive. Positive thoughts are a biological mandate for a happy, healthy life. In the words of Mahatma Gandhi: Your beliefs become your thoughts Your thoughts become your words Your words become your actions Your actions become your habits Your habits become your values Your values become your destiny

This research has confirmed that brain cells translate the mind’s perceptions (beliefs) of the world into complementary and unique chemical profiles that, when secreted into the blood, control the fate of the body’s 50 trillion cells. So blood, the body’s culture medium, not only nourishes cells, its neurochemical components also regulate cells’ genetic and behavioral activity. As Steve Cole, an epigeneticist at UCLA’s School of Medicine, told Pacific Standard magazine: “A cell is a machine for turning experience into biology.” (Dobbs 2013) When we change the way we perceive the world, that is, when we “change our beliefs,” we change the blood’s neurochemical composition, which then initiates a complementary change in the body’s cells. The function of the mind is to create coherence between our beliefs and the reality we experience. That explains why my health and energy soared after I jettisoned my old, “depressed, fatalistic” view of the world that I talked about in the Prologue.

The conclusion is simple: positive perceptions of the mind enhance health by engaging immune functions, while inhibition of immune activities by negative perceptions can precipitate dis-ease. Those negative perceptions can also create debilitating, chronic psychological stress that has a profound and negative impact on gene function.

Though stress plays a major role as a risk factor in disease, UCLA epigeneticist Cole, who was one of the earliest researchers to bring the study of whole genome expression into the realm of social psychology, has concluded that social isolation is an even more potent and underestimated risk factor. “If you actually measure stress, using our best available instruments, it can’t hold a candle to social isolation. Social isolation is the best-established, most robust social or psychological risk factor for disease out there. Nothing can compete,” he told Pacific Standard magazine. (Dobbs 2013)

Cole believes that isolation plays a key role, a hypothesis buttressed by a 2004 study in which Yale psychiatrist Joan Kaufman studied fifty-seven school-age children who had been removed from their homes because they had been abused. The study measured the serotonin transporter gene (SERT), which has both a long and short form, because previous studies had found that people who carry the short SERT are more likely to become depressed or anxious when stressed. The kids with the short SERT did in fact suffer twice as many mental health problems as those with the long variety. But there were unexpected results as well. When Kaufman laid both the kids’ depression scores and their SERT variants across their levels of social support (defined narrowly as contact at least once monthly with a trusted adult figure outside the house), that seemingly paltry (i.e., once a month) social connection erased about 80 percent of the combined risk of the depression-related short SERT variant. (Kaufman, et al, 2004) Science writer David Dobbs asks: “If social connection can almost completely protect us against the well-known effects of serious abuse, isn’t the isolation almost as toxic as the beatings and neglect?” (Dobbs 2013)

Shawn Achor writes in The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology That Fuel Success and Performance at Work, “The belief that we are just our genes is one of the most pernicious myths in modern culture—the insidious notion that people come into the world with a fixed set of abilities and that they, and their brains, cannot change. The scientific community is partly to blame for this because for decades scientists refused to see what potential for change was staring them right in the face.” (Achor 2010) Achor’s studies emphasize that we have been culturally programmed to believe that if we reach our goals (when we get into Harvard, lose twenty pounds, get a high-paying job, etc.), then we’ll be happy. However, this formula for happiness is actually inverted: happiness fuels success, not the other way around. Simply stated, success doesn’t bring happiness; happiness brings success. This fact is supported by a wealth of research in psychology and neuroscience that demonstrates that a positive outlook enhances brain activity and leads to a more creative, motivated, and productive work experience.

A recent study revealed that just eight hours of mindful meditation was sufficient to significantly change vital gene functions. Compared to controls, meditators exhibited a range of genetic and molecular differences that included reduced levels of pro-inflammatory genes and altered levels of gene-regulating machinery. These observed changes in genetic expression are associated with faster physical recovery from stressful situations and prove that mindfulness practice can lead to health improvement through profound epigenetic alterations of the genome. (Kaliman, et al, 2014) Research suggests that a positive mindset can even trump some of the effects of aging. A number of studies have found that people who hold more positive stereotypes about aging behave differently as they age from those who hold more negative stereotypes, even when they are similar in other ways, including how healthy they are. Recently, Yale University and University of California, Berkeley researchers decided to study whether it is possible to counteract our culture’s undeniably negative view of aging and, in so doing, improve health.

the fact that the primary source controlling our life experiences is the subconscious mind, and we need to focus on reprogramming it rather than just shifting our conscious mind’s beliefs.

Psychologist Jeffrey Rediger, a Harvard colleague of Ellen Langer, acknowledged, “health and illness are much more rooted in our minds and in our hearts and how we experience ourselves in the world than our models even begin to understand.”

The evidence that belief exerts a powerful influence over physiology, gene expression, and behavior has led epigeneticist Cole to conclude: “To an extent that immunologists and psychologists rarely appreciate, we are architects of our own experience. Your subjective experience carries more power than your objective situation.” (Dobbs 2013) In Cole’s quote, the term “subjective experience” represents perception or belief, while “objective situation” can be interpreted as reality. Replacing Cole’s words with these synonyms, his quote now reads: Your belief carries more power than your reality. Hence . . . The Biology of Belief!

In a response similar to that displayed by cells, humans unavoidably restrict their growth behaviors when they shift into a protective mode. If you’re running from a mountain lion, it’s not a good idea to expend energy on growth. In order to survive—that is, escape the lion—you summon all your energy for your fight-or-flight response. Redistributing energy reserves to fuel the protection response inevitably results in a curtailment of growth. In addition to diverting energy to support the tissues and organs needed for the protection response, there is an additional reason why growth is inhibited. Growth processes require an open exchange between an organism and its environment. For example, food is taken in and waste products are excreted. However, protection requires a closing down of the system to wall the organism off from the perceived threat.

The longer you stay in protection, the more you consume your energy reserves, which in turn, compromises your growth.

chronic inhibition of growth mechanisms severely compromises your vitality.

To fully thrive, we must not only eliminate the stressors but also actively seek joyful, loving, fulfilling lives that stimulate growth processes.

In multicellular organisms, growth/protection behaviors are controlled by the nervous system. It is the nervous system’s job to monitor environmental signals, interpret them, and organize appropriate behavioral responses. In a multicellular community, the nervous system acts like the government in organizing the activities of its cellular citizens. When the nervous system recognizes a threatening environmental stress, it alerts the community of cells to impending danger. The body is actually endowed with two separate protection systems, each vital to the maintenance of life. The first is the system that mobilizes protection against external threats. It is called the HPA axis, which stands for the Hypothalamus-Pituitary-Adrenal axis.

The body’s second protection system is the immune system, which protects us from threats originating under the skin, such as those caused by bacteria and viruses. When the immune system is mobilized, it can consume much of the body’s energy supply. To get a sense of how much energy the immune system expends, recall how physically weak you become when you are fighting infections such as a flu or a cold.

When the HPA axis mobilizes the body for fight-or-flight response, the adrenal hormones directly repress the action of the immune system to conserve energy reserves.

Activating the HPA axis also interferes with our ability to think clearly. The processing of information in the forebrain (conscious mind), the center of executive reasoning and logic, is significantly slower than the reflex activity controlled by the hindbrain (subconscious mind). In an emergency, the faster the information processing, the more likely the organism will survive. Adrenal stress hormones constrict the blood vessels in the forebrain, reducing its ability to engage in conscious volitional action. Constriction of forebrain blood vessels redirects vascular flow to the hindbrain. The increase in nutrition and energy enhances the hindbrain’s life-sustaining reflexes to more effectively control fight-or-flight behavior. While it is necessary that stress signals repress the slower processing conscious mind to augment survival, it comes at a cost . . . diminished conscious awareness and reduced intelligence. (Takamatsu, et al, 2003; Arnsten and Goldman-Rakic 1998; Goldstein, et al, 1996)

We live in a “Get set” world and an increasing body of research suggests that our hyper-vigilant lifestyle is severely impacting the health of our bodies. Our daily stressors are constantly activating the HPA axis, priming our bodies for action. Unlike competitive athletes, the stresses in our bodies are not released from the pressures generated by our chronic fears and concerns. Almost every major illness that people acquire has been linked to chronic stress. (Segerstrom and Miller 2004; Kopp and Réthelyi 2004; McEwen and Lasky 2002; McEwen and Seeman 1999) Between 75 and 90 percent of primary-care physician visits have stress as a major contributing factor. (Atkinson 2000)

I’d also like to suggest that you examine how your fears and the ensuing protection behaviors impact your life. What fears are stunting your growth? Where did these fears come from? Are they necessary? Are they real? Are they contributing to a full life? We’ll deal more with these fears and where we got them in the next chapter on conscious parenting. If we can control our fears, we can regain control over our lives.

The bad side of the coin is when our bodies become chronically stimulated by misperceptions (unfortunately, our stress managing systems cannot distinguish whether a brain-directed response is derived from a real or an imagined fear) and sadness that we can’t let go. This is dangerous to our health because we maintain the “get set” posture I mentioned earlier. In these situations, the stress response becomes chronic and results in a sustained release of the adrenal glucocorticoid hormone cortisol. Overstimulation of this glucocorticoid hormone is directly linked to significant damage and long-lasting functional changes in the brain. For example, chronic stress-related illnesses such as PTSD are associated with alterations in the volume of the brain’s gray and white matter; the region of the hippocampus associated with memory and emotions shrinks as does the amygdala, the brain’s threat center.

Chronic stress also depresses the immune system by impairing the function of glucocorticoid receptors normally used to inhibit or shut down inflammatory responses. This action conserves bodily energy to engage in a fight-or-flight response for what the mind perceives as life-threatening stress. Interfering with the behavior of these immune receptors results in a dysfunction referred to as Glucocorticoid Receptor Resistance (GCR) in which the duration and intensity of inflammatory responses increase, heightening the risk for asthma and other autoimmune diseases and encouraging the onset and progression of chronic inflammatory diseases such as cardiovascular disease, cancer, and type 2 diabetes. GCR is associated with people who experience chronic stress, such as parents of children with cancer, spouses of brain cancer patients, and persons reporting high levels of loneliness. (Cohen, et al, 2012)

Anke Karl said: “These new research findings may help to explain why, for example, successful recovery from psychological trauma is highly associated with levels of perceived social support individuals receive. We are now building on these findings to refine existing treatments for PTSD to boost feelings of being safe and supported in order to improve coping with traumatic memories.” (Norman, et al, 2014)

In a healthy relationship, holding your partner’s hand is enough to lower blood pressure, ease stress responses, improve health, and diminish physical pain! (Coan, et al, 2006)

When it comes to stress, the answer to the ever young and energetic Tina Turner’s hit song, “What’s Love Got to Do with It?” is: “Everything!” The creation of loving bonds assures the mind that when we are threatened, there will be somebody there to throw us a life preserver. That frees us, as it did me, from the need to observe our lives through filters of fear because we know we will be supported unconditionally. Individuals who are disconnected from social relationships and community, on the other hand, perceive they are alone and adrift in an ocean where no one ever comes to their aid.

Lupytha Hermin’s message (“You know why it’s hard to be happy—it’s because we refuse to LET GO of the things that make us sad”)

we can choose love over anger, gratitude over entitlement, and forgiveness and compassion over bitterness.”

“The quality of life in the womb, our temporary home before we were born, programs our susceptibility to coronary artery disease, stroke, diabetes, obesity, and a multitude of other conditions in later life,” writes Dr. Peter W. Nathanielsz in Life in the Womb: The Origin of Health and Disease. (Nathanielsz 1999) Recently, an even wider range of adult-related chronic disorders, including osteoporosis, mood disorders, and psychoses, have been intimately linked to pre- and perinatal developmental influences. (Gluckman and Hanson 2004; Shonkoff, et al, 2009)

Dr. Rima Laibow in Quantitative EEG and Neurofeedback describes the progression of these developmental stages in brain activity. (Laibow 1999 and 2002) Between birth and two years of age, the human brain predominantly operates at the lowest EEG frequency, 0.5 to 4 cycles per second (Hz), known as delta waves. Though delta is their predominant wave activity, babies can exhibit periodic short bursts of higher EEG activity. A child begins to spend more time at a higher level of EEG activity characterized as theta (4-8 Hz) between two and six years of age. Hypnotherapists drop their patients’ brain activity into theta because this low frequency brain wave puts them into a more suggestible, programmable state. This gives us an important clue as to how children, whose brains are mostly operating at this frequency through six years of age, can download the incredible volume of information they need to thrive in their environment. The ability to process this vast quantity of information is an important neurologic adaptation to facilitate this information-intense process of enculturation.

In humans as well, the fundamental behaviors, beliefs, and attitudes we observe in our parents become “hardwired” as synaptic pathways in our subconscious minds. Once programmed into the subconscious mind, they control our biology for the rest of our lives . . . or at least until we make the effort to reprogram them.

At around the age of six, we become less susceptible to outside programming with the increasing appearance of higher frequency alpha waves (8-12 Hz). Alpha activity is equated with states of calm consciousness. While most of our senses, such as eyes, ears, and nose, observe the outer world, consciousness resembles a “sense organ” that behaves like a mirror reflecting back the inner workings of the body’s own cellular community; it is an awareness of “self.”

I’ve described the power of the subconscious mind, but I want to emphasize that there is no need to consider the subconscious a scary, super-powerful, Freudian font of destructive “knowledge.” In reality, the subconscious is an emotionless database of stored programs, whose function is strictly concerned with reading environmental signals and engaging in hardwired behavioral programs, no questions asked, no judgments made.

Yet the subconscious mind, which processes some 20 million environmental stimuli per second versus forty environmental stimuli interpreted by the conscious mind in the same second,

The subconscious mind, the most powerful information processor known, specifically observes both the surrounding world and the body’s internal awareness, reads the environmental cues, and immediately engages previously acquired (learned) behaviors—all without the help, supervision, or even awareness of the conscious mind.

Subconscious programming takes over the moment your conscious mind is not paying attention. The conscious mind can also think forward and backward in time, while the subconscious mind is always operating in the present moment. When the conscious mind is busy daydreaming, creating future plans, or reviewing past life experiences, the subconscious mind is always on duty, efficiently managing the behaviors required at the moment, without the need of conscious supervision. The two minds are truly a phenomenal mechanism, but here is how it can go awry. The conscious mind is the “self,” the voice of our own thoughts. It can have great visions and plans for a future filled with love, health, happiness, and prosperity. While we focus our consciousness on happy thoughts, who is running the show? The subconscious. How is the subconscious going to manage our affairs? Precisely the way it was programmed. The behaviors managed by the subconscious mind when we are not paying attention may not be of our own creation because most of our fundamental behavioral programs were downloaded without question from observing other people. Because subconscious-generated behaviors are not generally observed by the conscious mind, many people are stunned to hear that they are just like their mom or their dad, the people who programmed their subconscious minds.

we must realize that no amount of yelling or cajoling by the conscious mind can ever change the behavioral “tapes” programmed into the subconscious mind. Once we realize the ineffectiveness of this tactic, we can quit engaging in a pitched battle with the subconscious mind and take a more clinical approach to reprogramming it. Engaging the subconscious in battle is as pointless as kicking the jukebox in the hope that it will reprogram its playlist.

Conventional methods for suppressing destructive behaviors include drugs and talk therapy. Newer approaches promise to change our programming, recognizing that there is no use “reasoning” with the subconscious tape player. These methods capitalize on the findings of quantum physics that connect energy and thought. In fact, these new modalities that reprogram previously learned behaviors can be collectively referred to as energy psychology, a burgeoning field based on the New Biology.

You may be wondering why evolution would provide such a system for fetal development that seems so fraught with peril and is so dependent on the environment of the parents. Actually, it’s an ingenious system that helps ensure the survival of your offspring. Eventually, when the child is born, it is going to find itself in the same environment as its parents. Information, in the form of regulatory hormones and emotional chemicals derived from the mother’s perception of her environment, transits the placenta and primes the prenate’s physiology, preparing it to more effectively deal with future exigencies that will be encountered after birth.

After some deliberation, this woman from the audience happily accepted the following resolution: you are personally responsible for everything in your life, once you become aware that you are personally responsible for everything in your life. One cannot be “guilty” or be “blamed” for being a poor parent unless one was already aware of the above-described information and disregarded it. Once you become aware of this information, you can begin to apply it to reprogram your behavior.

Children need parents who can playfully foster the curiosity, creativity, and wonder that accompanies their children into the world.

When babies in orphanages, for example, are kept in cribs and only provided with food but not one-on-one smiles and hugs, they develop long-lasting developmental problems. One study of Romanian orphans by Mary Carlson, a neurobiologist at Harvard Medical School, concluded that the lack of touching and attention in Romanian orphanages and poor-quality day care centers stunted the children’s growth and adversely affected their behavior. Carlson, who studied sixty Romanian children from a few months to three years of age, measured their cortisol levels by analyzing samples of saliva. The more stressed a child was, as determined by the higher than normal levels of cortisol in its blood, the poorer the outcome for the child. (Holden 1996)

Peaceful cultures feature parents who maintain extensive physical contact with their children, such as carrying their babies on their chests and backs throughout the day. In contrast, societies that deprive their infants, children, and adolescents of extensive touch are inevitably violent in nature.

We humans, it turns out, are wonderfully resilient creatures, which you should keep in mind not only if you consider yourself a less than perfect parent but also if you were, like most of us, the recipient of dysfunctional programming when you were young. Though neuroscientists once thought our brains were fixed at adolescence, it is now an established fact that the wiring of the brain is “plastic,” which means it can be rewired even into adulthood.

Statistical correlations reveal a direct connection between traumatic childhood experiences and a wide variety of health issues, including obesity, coronary artery disease, chronic pulmonary disease, cancer, alcoholism, depression, drug abuse, mental health problems, and teen pregnancies.

University of Washington neuroscientist Patricia Kuhl’s studies make it clear that infants need adults in their lives to learn language effectively. Though weary parents may sometimes wish they could buy a video that has the same effect as engaging one-on-one with their child, it turns out there is no substitute for parents interacting with their infants and young children. In one study, Kuhl exposed nine-month-old children from English-speaking families to Mandarin. Some of the children interacted with native Chinese-speaking tutors, who played with them and read to them. A second group saw and heard the same Mandarin-speaking tutors through a video presentation. The third group heard only the audio track. After twelve sessions, the children were tested on their ability to discriminate between similar phonetic sounds in Mandarin. Children exposed to the language through human interactions were able to discriminate between similar Mandarin sounds as well as native listeners. Children in the other two groups learned nothing. The result of this and other studies has led Kuhl to propose the social gating hypothesis: the idea that an interactive social experience, i.e., conversation, is a portal to linguistic, cognitive, and emotional development. (Kuhl 2011)

La importancia de la interacción

The technology that has resulted from pursuing this philosophy has brought human civilization to the brink of spontaneous combustion by disrupting the web of nature.

On that early morning in the Caribbean, I realized that even the “winners” in our Darwinian world are losers because we are one with a bigger Universe/God. On a personal note, I do not perceive of God as a bearded old man on a throne in Heaven. To me, God represents “All That Is,” the whole environment comprising the Universe. The cell engages in behavior when its brain, the membrane, responds to environmental signals. In fact, every functional protein in our body is made as a complementary “image” of an environmental signal. If a protein did not have a complementary signal to couple with, it would not function. This means, as I concluded in that “aha!” moment, that every protein in our bodies is a physical/electromagnetic complement to something in the environment. Because we are machines made out of protein, by definition we are made in the image of the environment, that environment being the Universe, or to many, God.

I learned from cells that we are part of a whole and that we forget this at our peril. But I also recognized that each one of us has a unique, biological identity. Why? What makes each person’s cellular community unique? On the surface of our cells is a family of identity receptors, which distinguish one individual from another. A well-studied subset of these receptors, called self-receptors, or human leukocytic antigens (HLA), are related to the functions of the immune system. If your self-receptors were to be removed, your cells would no longer reflect your identity. These self-receptor-less cells would still be human cells, but without an identity they would simply be generic human cells. Put your personal set of self-receptors back on the cells and they again reflect your identity. When you donate an organ, the closer your set of self-receptors matches the receptors of the person who is to receive the organ, the less aggressive the rejection reaction launched by the recipient’s immune system.