This book will either reach you or it won't. Some readers will view this book analytically and think the central idea ludicrous; others will instantly grasp the immense value of autosuggestion--as well as grasp the paradox that belief in it is both self-fulfilling and circular.
Once you know how a placebo actually works--how the placebo effect is actually you creating a response to a perceived external stimulus--you can take the idea of a placebo to its ultimate, self-empowering conclusion: you can produce your own placebo effect using your own stimuli, volition and beliefs. In other words, you don't have to wait around for somebody to give you a pill or therapy, you can produce results yourself.
You Are the Placebo fits well with David Hawkins' striking book Power versus Force, as well as C. Harry Brooks' short and useful book about the Coué Method, The Practice of Autosuggestion. If you're familiar with either of these works (I recommend both, if only for the open-mindedness they'll instill), you'll find it a short leap to Dispenza's ideas on applying meditation and visualization toward healing and self-directed neuroplasticity. You'll also learn a fair amount of neuropsychology too, as Dispenza offers his various hypotheses on what specific mechanisms drive these internally-driven methods of healing and change.
The book isn't perfect. Chapters 8 and 10 could and should be cut. And there's a lot of "studies show science" (my favorite thing!) used in here to support the author's points. Remember: with enough grant money you can produce a study "showing" anything you like! It's rather the aggregate weight, methodological validity and replicability of all studies, both pro and con, that matter when trying to identify the robustness (or lack thereof) of a finding. I really wish authors would give honest meta-commentary about the rigor (or lack thereof) of any studies show science they cite, rather than merely playing cite-a-study to support an argument.
One final and highly useful tool from this book is the notion of "increasing your suggestibility" in the sense of creating conditions (both in yourself and in your personal and psychological environment) such that autosuggestion techniques work better. Analytical thinkers will understandably recoil at this idea (why would I want to make myself more suggestible? Suggestible people are easy to manipulate!), whereas non-analytical thinkers will get this idea instantly, and recognize how valuable it can be to think of your suggestibility in terms of a dial that you can turn up or down based on your needs. And when those needs involve changing for the better, you'll obviously want to turn your suggestibility dial up to 11.
Pair with:
The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle (for increasing meta awareness and stepping outside of the chatter of our mind)
See also the athletic training books reviewed here on this site:
Notes:
Preface:
1) The author has a catastrophic accident, then literally checks himself out of the hospital and engages in a long term practice of visualizing his body healing itself: "I decided that I would begin every day reconstructing my spine, vertebra by vertebra, and I would show this consciousness, if it was paying attention to my efforts, what I want." Dispenza does two hours twice a day (!) of meditation and visualization of his intended result, which was a totally healed spine.
2) But then he also learns how out of control and distractible his mind is [heh, this is something everyone learns--to their mortification--once they begin a meditation practice...!]. "So every time I lost my attention and my mind wandered to any extraneous thoughts, I would start from the beginning and do the whole scheme of imagery over again. It was tedious, frustrating, and, quite frankly, one of the most difficult things I'd ever done."
3) This guy then started a whole freaking business from his injury experience, hiring and training coaches, moving towards coaching elite upper management and businesses.
4) [It's interesting to think about the challenge of writing a book like this for a general audience: the author would lose half the readers if he speaks in the language of religion or culture, it's way to woo-woo; so he has to speak in the language of science to convey the ideas. Thus the language of quantum physics, use of EEGs, various studies-show science, etc.]
Introduction:
5) All of this comes out of the idea of the placebo: how people can get better based on a belief in something outside themselves. But what if the placebo came from inside themselves rather than outside, and yet did the same thing as the placebo?
6) Note here how the author anticipates a reactive pushback from the reader: that adopting Dispenza's view means therefore to reject all things that they're doing currently: "I encourage you to continue using any and all healing modalities that work for you, be they prescription drugs, surgery, acupuncture, chiropractic, biofeedback, therapeutic massage, nutritional supplements, yoga, reflexology, energy medicine, sound therapy, and so on." Did you leave anything out?
7) The book is divided into two parts: Part 1 "gives you all the detailed knowledge and background information you need to understand what the placebo effect is and how it operates in your brain and body, as well as how to create the same kind of miraculous changes in your own brain and body all by yourself, by thought alone."
8) Quick book chapter-by-chapter summary:
Chapter 1: stories demonstrating the power of the human mind, including stories of how people's thoughts have healed them and how people's thoughts have made them sick.
Chapter 2: a brief history of the placebo.
Chapter 3: takes you through the physiology of what happens in your brain when the placebo effect is operating.
Chapter 4: a discussion of the placebo effect in the body, the next step of the physiology of the placebo response.
Chapter 5: ties the previous two chapters together, explaining how thoughts change your brain and your body, includes an explanation of how to use the technique called "mental rehearsal."
Chapter 6: concentrates on the concept of suggestibility
Chapter 7: how attitudes, beliefs and perceptions change your state of being and create your personal reality.
Chapter 8: discusses the quantum universe and how we impact it via our thoughts and observations.
Chapter 9: introduces you to people from his workshops who reported truly remarkable results.
Chapter 10: more remarkable stories from workshop participants.
9) Part II of the book is all about meditation:
Chapter 11: outlines simple preparation steps for meditation and goes over specific techniques.
Chapter 12; gives you step-by-step instructions for using the meditation techniques I teach in my workshops.
Part 1: Information
Chapter 1: Is It Possible?
10) The man who died because his doctors and everyone around him "thought" he was dying of a cancer that he never even had. [This is quite a striking story and very good rhetoric to start the book with; it illustrates the power of the mind for ill, and sets the reader up for using it the opposite way...]
11) "Overdosing on a placebo": on the man who is in the placebo arm of a drug trial and downed all of his pills--and had physiological effects from them even though they were all placebos; actually it was a nocebo effect, a placebo that because of expectations causes harm. Again another rhetorically effective step here.
12) Another patient: a woman who was in the placebo arm of a psych/depression drug trial (Effexor) yet was still cured of depression; in fact her study indicated that 38% of the placebo group felt better compared to 52% of the people who received the med. [After seeing enough stats like this from enough drug trials over the years, you can't help but wonder if the effect of most psych meds is largely spurious or largely suggestion-based.]
13) And on the story of Mr. Wright, who is wrong-footed by a placebo not once but twice, and whose tumors magically vanished then reappeared then vanished then reappeared... This anecdote beggars belief.
14) Placebo/sham knee surgeries improving people's condition significantly, also sham/placebo/lavage surgical results were as good as actual surgery.
15) Likewise experiments using sham heart surgery where the placebo surgery worked better.
16) Other examples across various domains of placebo-like effects: anticipatory nausea; higher dopamine production in the placebo group of Parkinson's patients; snake handlers and snake bites; examples of hysterical strength, etc.
Chapter 2: A Brief History of the Placebo
17) World War II doctor Henry Beecher, who ran out of morphine and injected his wounded soldiers with saline, calming down the soldiers and reducing their pain, this led to model of using placebo trials to test meds.
18) See Sai Baba, an avatar of the deity who could heal believers.
19) French and English kings reigning between the 4th and 9th centuries used the laying on of hands to cure their subjects; King Charles II of England was known to have performed the practice 100,000 times.
20) On Viennese physician Franz Anton Mesmer--note that apparently the modern meaning of his name is a psyop because he was capable of miraculous healing efforts using magnets and fluid balancing.
21) Marquis de Puységur, an early therapeutic attempt to explore the mind-body relationship using a sleepwalking state where the subject was suggestible and would follow instruction but without memory of it happening.
22) Scottish surgeon James Braid discovering hypnotism when he came to his office late and saw a patient staring in intense fascination at a flickering flame of an oil lamp; other doctors like Hippolyte Bernheim explored the idea of implanting ideas or using the power of suggestion as a therapeutic tool.
23) World War I and II army psychiatrist Benjamin Simon using hypnotic suggestibility to help soldiers deal with shellshock.
24) Back to Henry Beecher and his discovery is of the placebo effect; on realizing that you had to have a placebo as part of a study control group in order to tease out a medical effect above and beyond any placebo effect.
25) The nocebo effect, how physiological response systems enable emotions, fear in particular, to create illness. Your belief in the power of a hex or another phenomenon to kill you produces the effects in your body. The word nocebo means "I shall harm" in Latin, it refers to an inert substance that causes a harmful effect only because someone believes it is harmful. It pops up in trials when people expect there will be side effects to the drug being used.
26) See a shocking study in Japan on poison ivy, where children didn't get a rash when exposed to it and did when they were given a fake poison ivy exposure, giving rise to the idea that a thought in the form of an expectation could have a greater effect in the body than the real physical environment. This gives rise to the domain of psychoneuroimmunology, the effect of thoughts and emotions on the immune system.
27) See also nocebo studies from the 60s with asthmatics and asthma inhalers with just inert water vapor, but where subjects were told that it was an allergen or an irritant: 48% experienced asthmatic symptoms; then they were given inhalers that had still more inert water vapor, but they were told it was medicine and then the asthmatics' symptoms went away. In both cases the symptoms were brought on by suggestion alone.
28) On the nature of self-fulfilling prophecies we are creating in our minds without being aware of them, and what "truths" can we reverse simply by "thinking new thoughts and choosing new beliefs"
29) In the late '70s a breakthrough that a placebo could trigger endorphin release, on the idea that this experience of the study subjects wasn't just in their minds it was also in their bodies; that the human body can act as its own pharmacy producing what it needs.
30) On also adding the placebo effect to conditioning, to drive a conditioned response.
31) On the arrival of transcendental meditation to the West, borrowed by Harvard cardiologist Herbert Benson, who developed a technique called the relaxation response, lowering blood pressure, stress response, etc.
32) The positive thinking movement: Norman Vincent Peale followed by Norman Cousins and his work using laughter in therapeutic applications.
33) Norman Cousins on the placebo effect: "The process works not because of any magic in the tablet, but because the human body is its own best apothecary and because the most successful prescriptions are filled by the body itself."
34) Yale surgeon Bernie Siegel looking at why some of his cancer patients survived while others died; concluding those who had "a feisty fighting spirit" were more likely to live; and "there were no incurable diseases, only incurable patients."
35) Placebos outperform antidepressants (!!!): see the work of psychologist Irving Kirsch showing most of the improvement from randomized trials is due to the placebo; essentially the belief that you can get better from depression actually heals depression just as well as taking a drug. Note also that the performance of placebos in depression trials has gotten greater over time; this might be from people having higher expectations for the antidepressant drugs themselves which in turn makes the placebos more effective because of belief. [This is some striking stuff here]
36) The neurobiology of the placebo; see a Parkinson's placebo study that showed the placebo's effect on individual neurons; exploring the neurobiology of expectation; see also how a placebo kind of conditions the person to to the same sort of things when taking the drug, thus a placebo which replaces a drug can cause the same hormonal or chemical changes in the body, signaling the body to make the chemicals found in the drug. Further, there are several types of placebo responses: some based on conditioning, some based on conscious responses, some based on suggestion or expectation, some baesd on priming.
37) See also a 2010 study from Harvard showing that placebos worked even when people knew they were taking a placebo.
38) On the importance of our intentions, our awareness; how we assign meaning to explanations that are offered to us; also on priming and our ability to use priming on ourselves; "...and when we put greater intention behind what we're doing, we naturally get better results."
39) Money quote right here: "What we're conditioned to believe will happen when we take a pill, and what we think that everyone around us (including our doctors) expects will happen when we do, affects how our bodies respond to the pill. Could it be that many drugs or even surgeries actually work better because we're repeatedly primed, educated, and conditioned to believe in their effects--when if it weren't for the placebo effect, those drugs might not work as well or at all?" [Obviously this takes us to the next logical question which is: Wouldn't it be great if we could be our own placebo?]
40) Note also that efficacy estimates for the placebo effect range from anywhere to 10-100% of healing due to placebo effects. Note also that we should ask: "What percentage of diseases and illnesses are due to to the effects of negative thoughts in the nocebo?"
41) The next chapter goes into how our mind "dispenses" the chemicals and the healing processes that our body needs; how does it work on a biological level?
Chapter 3: The Placebo Effect in the Brain
42) [This chapter is a review of material from Dispenza's previous book Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself]
43) "...the privilege of being a human being is that we can make thought more real than anything else - and that's how the placebo works."
44) On the key elements of conditioning, expectation, and meaning:
* Conditioning: an example: the stimulus of a headache causes us to look for something in our outer world (like an aspirin) which we take, but which also comes with various cues of "the experience of taking an aspirin" based on associative memory; this process has been repeated in our lives so often that we can actually replace the aspirin with a sugar pill that looks like an aspirin and it will produce the automatic inner response of reducing the headache.
* Expectation: an example would be if we have chronic pain from arthritis but then get a new med from the doctor and we expect it to have efficacy. The expectation itself leads to the result. Note also the doctor has increased our level of suggestibility in this case.
* On assigning "meaning" to a placebo: our assigning it meaning endows it with power or intention or a capacity.
45) If the placebo effect is a function of how a thought can change physiology, then we should examine our thoughts and how they interact with our brains and bodies. How we tend to have the same thoughts, and therefore behave in the same way every day. "Your yesterday becomes your tomorrow." If you want to change or iterate this you have to think about the thoughts you are thinking and change them, thus new thoughts lead to new choices, then new behaviors, experiences, feelings/emotions, etc.
46) On the development of personality and identity as a function of your self-organized thoughts of your mind and the behaviors that follow.
47) Neuroplasticity; "pruning and sprouting"
48) On becoming "conscious of your unconscious self"; fighting automaticity/homeostasis: here the author talks about changing your behavior, and it gives us a heuristic to seek discomfort, because you know that in discomfort you're not replicating your old patterns. Another heuristic is to recognize discomfort as the feeling of dismantling old attitudes beliefs and perceptions, thus that discomfort should be seen and sought out as a good thing. Interesting reference here to The Dark Night of the Soul: "The old self has to die for a new one to be reborn. Of course that feels uncomfortable!"
49) "If you told me that you didn't like being in that void because it's so disorienting and that you can't see what lies ahead because you can't predict your future, I'd say that's actually great, because the best way to predict the future is to create it--not from the known, but from the unknown." Again, on seeking discomfort and avoiding comfort-seeking behavior.
50) Discussion here of neuropeptides and brain messaging and receptors signaling the creation of protein or the activation of a protein; other epigenetic phenomena; a neurological process where the body actually is being trained by the mind, at least on some level; this is all a function of whether you maintain your old thoughts or ignite new thoughts which will produce different results.
51) On the role emotions play in this process: The author uses the phrase "the body memorizes the emotion." Also when feelings become the means of thinking then we are in the program rather than dictating the program: "we can't think greater than how we feel."
52) Also on habits: when the body becomes the mind (or the body is the mind more accurately), this is a habit conditioning process that produces unconscious behavior: memorized behavior, skills, emotional reactions, beliefs, perceptions and attitudes, all functioning "like a subconscious automatic computer program." See also the homeostatic aspect of this: even though the author doesn't use this word, he argues at 95% of who you are is subconscious or unconscious, and that means the 5% you're actually using is working against that 95%, so it really feels like you're swimming upstream when your mind and body are working in opposition. "...the greatest habit we have to break [is] thinking, feeling, and behaving in the same way that reinforces the unconscious programs that reflect our personalities and our personal realities."
53) An example given here about the anticipatory feeling of fear of public speaking: you have associated feelings of nervousness, trepidation, and then actual physical responses, like an increased pulse and heart rate, nervous feelings and nausea in your stomach, etc. Even when we have a future thought of public speaking the mind will condition the body to respond automatically to these feelings. "This is how we continuously move into familiar states of being--our thoughts and feelings become one with the past because we can't think greater than we feel."
54) Note this is also how we remember past events because we remind ourselves of how they "felt", and furthermore each time we run the experience through our mind we again produce the same chemical changes in our brain and body, which reaffirms and continues this conditioning process further. Remember: the brain doesn't know the difference between the actual event and the remembrance of the event, the emotional states are the same as far as the brain is concerned. (What the author is doing here is walking through how you can "fire and wire" any experience, not just one you've had.)
55) Likewise you'll associate phrases like "I am not a public speaker" or "I get nervous in front of groups" as self-fulfilling reinforcements of the state of being. [Obviously a huge takeaway here is to mind carefully the statements you make, especially if they are belief-type statements about yourself that you wish to change!]
56) All of these responses and experiences are like a placebo, they involve conditioning, expectation and meaning;
1) we condition ourselves by thought alone to respond to cues
2) your expectation is that the future experience will be like your past experience, the familiar reality which you have known before, and then
3) you assign meaning to these things. You've become susceptible to your own autosuggestions.
57) "You've always been your own placebo."
Chapter 4: The Placebo Effect in the Body
58) A group of men in their 70s and 80s asked to believe they were 22 years younger... and they literally became younger; this study is a stretch, N = 8, etc.
59) Standard criticisms of genetic determinism here; on environmental activation of genes, including the environment inside the body; unnecessary side tangent here explaining the biology of gene expression.
60) "Scientists used to believe all the body needed was the information itself (the blueprint) to start construction, that's what most of them focused on. They paid little attention to the fact that the whole cascade of events starts with the signal outside of the cell, which is, in fact, responsible for what genes within its library the cell chooses to read. That signal, as we now know, includes thoughts, choices, behaviors, experiences, and feelings. So it makes sense that if you can change these elements, you can also determine your genetic expression."
61) Epigenetics, playing God with your genes; upregulation or downregulation, the turning on/turning off of a gene, and those factors both in the environment and in our body's internal environment that produce signals to do these things; on twin studies showing these impacts, etc.
62) [Isn't it wild that when you think about epigenetics, especially the fact that epigenetic variations may even be inherited, in a way this is as if Lamarckian genetics was still right in many cases!]
63) Interesting point here that if you continue to perceive your life the way you used to, and react to all your environmental conditions in the same way as you have all along, you actually are headed toward a predetermined genetic destiny, you're at the mercy of your genes. In other words your beliefs, your volition and your agency are what will help you escape. Otherwise you are imprisoned by your genes.
64) Stress as a key cause of epigenetic change: physical stress, chemical stress and emotional stress affecting hormones and neurotransmitters, etc.
65) On "highly addictive" negative emotions: if we turn on our stress response and can't turn it off it produces illness, disease, other problems; likewise, if you imagine and then anticipate a future state, you start to set an emotion with your mind and thoughts, this creates the corresponding stress chemicals automatically. "This is how the mind body connection can work against us."
66) You have much more control over epigenetic function than you think and it can happen more quickly than you think; see for example changes in wound healing depending on stress chemicals produced by the body.
67) [This is an interesting discussion here of Quadrant 2 type thinking although the author doesn't frame it this way] "When we're living in survival mode, with our stress response turned on all the time, we can really focus on only three things: our physical bodies (Am I okay?), the environment (Where is it safe?), and time (How long will this threat be hanging over me?). Constantly focusing on these three things makes us less spiritual, less aware, and less mindful, because it trains us to become more self-absorbed and more focused on our bodies, as well as on other material things (such as what we own, where we live, how much money we have, and so on), in addition to all the problems we experience in our external world. This focus also trains us to obsess about time--to constantly brace ourselves for the worst-case future scenarios based on our traumatic past experiences--because there's never enough time and everything always takes too much time."
Chapter 5: How Thoughts Change the Brain and the Body
68) We can see now that you can act as your own "epigenetic engineer" with your thoughts and emotions, can you program the gene ahead of the actual environment? Feelings and emotions are the end products of experience. Note also your body can't tell the difference between a mental rehearsal of an event and the actual event. The brain will install new neurological circuitry, training the body for this new future, and it will "turn down" neurological circuitry for the old self.
69) On mental rehearsal; basically this is visualization. Note the added idea of pairing it with a heightened state of emotion like joy or gratitude.
70) Again, neurochemically, your body does not know the difference between having an experience and thinking about an experience.
71) Visualization examples from Natan Sharansky, Aaron Rodgers, Jack Nicklaus, Jim Carrey (who wrote a check for himself for $10 million "for acting services rendered" and later the event literally happened), etc. "What all of these individuals have in common is that they eliminated the external environment, got beyond their bodies, and transcended time so that they could make significant neurological changes within. When they presented themselves to the world, they were able to get their minds and bodies to work together, and they created in the material world what they’d first conceived in the mental realm.
72) Studies on piano players, other subjects, where mental rehearsal is effective, where the subject's bodies "responded to a new mind."
73) Discussion of why mental rehearsal works: the frontal lobe dials back input from your sensory centers as well as your perception of time and space; it is the brain's CEO, it can create mental pictures and an intention.
74) See also the physiological mechanisms at work here, starting with stem cells (see the example of wound repair that causes cell differentiation, see also studies on the emotional state of a wound healer).
75) Turbocharging our mental rehearsals with heightened emotional response: cultivating sincere positive emotions, gratitude, joy, excitement, fascination, enthusiasm, inspiration, wonder, trust, appreciation, kindness, compassion and empowerment.
76) Note also that positive, expansive emotions (e.g., kindness and compassion) shut down the amygdala and receptors there, the part of the brain that generates fear and anxiety.
77) "Now we can understand exactly why it is that if we hold a clear intention of a new future; marry it to a state of expansive, elevated emotion; and repeat that over and over until we've created a new state of mind and a new state of being, these thoughts will seem more real to us than our previous, limited view of reality."
78) The author now returns to the study of men told act younger, and explain how it worked; this is good rhetoric to help drive home the value of mental rehearsal. That specific study seems like less of a stretch to the reader now!
Chapter 6: Suggestibility
79) The story of Ivan Santiago who was successfully hypnotized to shoot a stranger; long tangent here on how the most suggestible subjects were chosen from a pool of 185 volunteers.
80) Analogizing Ivan Santiago's suggestion process with other examples earlier in the book of asthmatics or Parkinson's sufferers, or sham knee surgery patients; all responding to imagined scenarios with actual physiological responses. All of these are examples of response to suggestion.
81) Suggestibility combines three elements: acceptance, belief, and surrender, and in some cases a reminder or reinforcement (e.g.: if you're taking a placebo pill); also note that the real work occurred in the subconscious mind in the case of these patients.
82) On suggestibility and how there's a sort of spectrum of it in people; some people simply can't accept the idea that a drug or procedure will help them get better. Thus the idea of employing acceptance and belief to surrender to the idea without worrying and analyzing; "Suggestibility combines three elements: acceptance, belief, and surrender." The notion here is that you have volition over your suggestibility and you want to do what you can increase that suggestibility at those times you wish to perform autosuggestion for the things you want.
83) On emotionally embracing the result not just being intellectual; on the limbic brain; on activating your selfconscious system with elevated emotion and amplifying your emotional response; keep in mind they have to be the right kinds of emotions: gratitude is best, but also love, joy, inspiration, peace, trust, all positive emotions, not negative ones like fear, futility or hostility; also you can't "try"! The idea of struggle or forcing an outcome won't be effective "There is no try; there's only allow."
84) Distinguishing creative/elevated emotions versus limited/survival emotions, see photo:
85) Note here an interesting nuance on gratitude: it is a very powerful emotion for increasing your suggestibility because it "teaches your body emotionally that the event you're grateful for has already happened, because we usually give thanks after a desirable event has occurred... Gratitude, therefore, is the ultimate state of receivership."
86) Pairing the emotion of appreciation or thankfulness combined with a clear intention, this is "beginning to embody the event emotionally."
87) On the analytical/egoic mind, which analyzes, perceives what something looks like, asks what other people might think, etc. This interferes with suggestibility (of course it's also a useful part of the brain as well); also the analytical/egoic mind puts ourselves first and tries to have power over outcomes, "it clings to the familiar and won't let go--so it holds grudges, feels pain and suffers, or can't get beyond its victimhood. It will always avoid the unknown condition and view it as potentially dangerous, because to the ego, the unknown is not to be trusted." [This author has quite a good understanding of the egoic mind; note also this is typically why very intelligent, very well-educated people tend to fail at autosuggestion: it doesn't fit with the analytical mind's needs and worldview. Note that Emile Coué used to note that less educated people tended to respond far better to autosuggestion.]
88) "Think of the analytical mind as a separate part of the conscious mind that divides it from the subconscious mind." "...the placebo only works when the analytical mind is silenced."
89) Note also the subconscious mind is where skills, habits, reactions, hardware, behaviors, conditioned responses, associative memories, routine thoughts and feelings, attitudes, beliefs and perceptions all live.
90) The conscious mind is where explicit or declarative memories and knowledge exist; also semantic knowledge, episodic memories. This is contrasted with implicit or nondeclarative memories (or procedural memories), these are sort of like habits: running a program to do something that you're not even really aware of, like driving a stickshift, or riding a bike. Developing this type of automaticity is a conditioned process.
91) Implicit memories are installed either from 1) a highly charged one-time emotional event, or 2) the redundancy of emotions derived from consistent experience.
92) "You've just entered the operating system." this is sort of a Godel, Escher, Bach idea, that you can jump into the system of habits and adjust it, tweak things, "write your own program" (to borrow the idea from Stephen Covey), etc.
93) Note that your "regular feelings" are autosuggestions too, of a sort you may or may not want: "These are thoughts that you accept, believe, and surrender to as if they were true." This can be true for any collection of thoughts, although note that your brain will be less suggestible thoughts or feelings that are atypical, that are different from what you normally would thing. [It also goes without saying your analytical mind will fight this tooth and nail!], Also, note your self-talk, which is typically habitual, also slips by your conscious awareness, this is also a type of autosuggestion of a type you may or may not want.
94) On the idea of changing how you feel and becoming suggestible to a new stream of thoughts. "By feeling an elevated emotion and allowing a whole new set of thoughts to be driven by their new feeling, you'd increase your level of suggestibility to what you were feeling and then thinking. You'd be in a new state of being, and your new thoughts would then be the autosuggestions equal to that feeling." [I guess the idea here is be to add strong, salient feelings like joy or gratitude to add efficacy to your new thoughts and associations, again basically we're doing here what the placebo people in earlier chapters did, but we're doing it with volition and meta-awareness, and we are adding tweaks to it to increase our receptiveness to the effects.]
95) On the "thickness" of the analytical mind: thinking of it like a barrier between the conscious and subconscious minds, and the thickness corresponds to the difficulty you have getting into and adjusting your operating system; you're open (or not open) to suggestion based on this analytical mind thickness. The author frames it as two kinds of people: analytical and critical thinkers versus people who don't overthink, which is a helpful way to think of it. [Obviously what one would want to do here is make it an act of volition to "thin down" one's analytical mind as necessary.]
96) Elements and techniques to silence the analytical mind: physical or mental fatigue, sensory deprivation, hunger, also shock and trauma, meditation.
97) Demystifying meditation: note the stigmas attached to meditation [which ironically are products of the analytical/egoic mind resisting change, mocking things, etc.]; instead, consider the idea of meditation as moving to different levels of the subconscious mind, opening a door to it; moving from being egoic-based to egoless; or from being a being in time and place to no-time and no-place, etc. [I can't help but chuckle at the idea of being "reasoned into meditating" but the author is sculpting an argument here with various vectors to apply to wide range of readers.]
98) Quieting your mind and having a "cease-fire" of all the automatic neural networks in your thinking brain that habitually fire.
99) Later in the book the author will talk about methods to meditate; at this point he's just trying to increase the reader's "level of intention" to improve results and reap greater rewards.
100) [Quite a bit of overlap here (unexpectedly!) with Metaphors We Live By and the idea of an "experientialist" perception of reality versus an "objectivist" or purely "subjectivist" perception of reality; meditation will take you into changing yourself which changes your world, even though really only your perception of the world has changed (and the world itself hasn't changed); Also here we get to the idea of using this as a tool depending on your needs.]
101) On brainwave states: in order of deepest to highest (or slowest to fastest):
* Delta: deep restorative sleep, totally unconscious
* Theta: twilight state between deep sleep and wakefulness (this can be called "mind awake, body asleep" the state we are shooting for in meditation--it's also where we are the most suggestible)
* Alpha: the creative imaginative state (also a light stage of meditation, even daydreaming: we're paying attention to our inner world and it's more real than our outer world)
* Beta: conscious thought in our everyday waking state (note also the low-range beta: relaxed, interested attention like reading a book; mid-range beta: learning and then remembering; high-range beta: highly focused, crisis-mode attention when stress chemicals are produced)
* Gamma: elevated states of consciousness
102) "Think of theta as the key to your own subconscious kingdom."
103) [Regarding the hypnosis subject Ivan Santiago's suggestibility that enabled him to be hypnotized into "assassinating" someone]: "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... [and] use that state to program your subconscious mind... to triumph over whatever health issues, emotional traumas, or other personal matters you may be dealing with."
Chapter 7: Attitudes, Beliefs, and Perceptions
104) Examples of rock-solid belief and no doubt or second guessing in Indonesian glass chewers, Appalachian snake handlers, Fijian firewalkers, etc. The placebo effect requires strong beliefs: how can we cultivate whatever is happening to create such profound alterations in the body?
105) Where our beliefs come from: good example here of a person going to a doctor and experiencing a diagnosis/prognosis/treatment to which they were susceptible and suggestible, then basically appropriating the beliefs required by the situation. "Once the patient sees the doctor and hears a professional opinion, the patient automatically accepts the condition, then believes what the confident doctor has said, and finally surrenders to the treatment and possible outcomes—and this is done without any real analysis. The patient is suggestible (and susceptible) to what the doctor says... The patient is pretty much at the mercy of his or her beliefs (and the beliefs of the doctor) about the diagnosis."
106) "So when people like the folks you’ll read about in the next few chapters healed themselves using the placebo effect, what did they do differently?" Three things:
* They did not accept the finality of the diagnosis prognosis treatment,
* They did not believe in the most probable outcome declared by the doctor,
* They didn't surrender to the diagnosis/prognosis or suggested treatment.
107) Contrast this with the person who receives the diagnosis and says "I'm going to beat this": they have not changed their underlying beliefs about being sick. They are still sitting at the [reactance-based!] intellectual level, using only the conscious mind. Note here also the "doctor's diagnosis becomes the modern-day equivalent of a voodoo curse."
108) [Very helpful section upcoming here on attitudes, how attitudes are strung together to form beliefs, which are strung together to form perceptions of reality, and how the entire paradigm shows how reality is far more subjective than any of use really realize.]
109) On the concept of an "attitude" and how attitudes become beliefs: a shortened state of being, that alters how you think and feel: "I have a good attitude today"; "If you revisit the same attitude enough times, then it becomes automatic." Maintained attitudes (or attitudes repeated successfully and strung together) become beliefs. "A belief is just an extended state of being--essentially, beliefs are thoughts and feelings (attitudes) that you keep thinking and feeling over and over again until you hardwire them in your brain and emotionally condition them into your body. You could say that you become addicted to them, which is why it’s so hard to change them and why it doesn’t feel good on a gut level when they’re challenged."
110) Also: "...beliefs are subconscious and also unconscious states of being derived from the past." Beliefs are more permanent than attitudes, they can last for months or years and they become more programmed within you.
111) If you string a group of related beliefs together they form your perception; your perception of reality is a sustained state of being based on long-standing beliefs, attitudes, thoughts and feelings, and since many of these beliefs and attitudes are subconscious, or unconscious, or programmed, then you're not really conscious of your beliefs until they're tested. Your perceptions (how you subjectively see things) thus become your subconscious and unconscious view of your reality from the past. [Basically your brain sculpts a highly subjective, even suspect, version of reality such that it's consistent with your past (read: existing/already formed) beliefs and perceptions.] [Lots of insights here, not least of which: test all your beliefs and aggresssively falsify any limiting belief that doesn't serve your purposes!]
112) Various examples here of how our perceptions are strongly subjective as well as implicit and non-declarative, so they are therefore automatic and/or subconscious; the implications here are that we "automatically edit reality subjectively." In order "to change an implicit or subconscious perception, you must become more conscious and less unconscious.". Also you would have to "become conscious of what you were unconscious about" [which is a type of "jumping out of the system" as well; also note the various homeostatic forces that would keep you with your old perceptions and your old related beliefs: the power of your ego, a wish to avoid discomfort, analytical disbelief, etc.]
113) Good chart here with a continuum of states of being, attitudes, beliefs and perceptions, how they are formed, time horizons, etc., see photo:
114) "When your perception becomes so second nature and so automatic that you really don't pay attention to the way reality truly is (because you automatically expect everything to be the same), you're now unconsciously accepting and agreeing to that reality--the way most people unconsciously accept and agree to what the medical model tells them about a diagnosis. So the only way to change your beliefs and perceptions in order to create a placebo response is to change your state of being. You have to finally see your old, limited beliefs for what they are--records of the past--and be willing to let go of them so that you can embrace new beliefs about yourself that will help you create a new future."
115) [Beliefs are "records of the past"; also on the idea that we're not even aware of most of the beliefs we believe (!)]
116) "What beliefs and perceptions about you and your life have you been unconsciously agreeing to that you'd have to change in order to create this new state of being? This is a question that requires some thought, because as I said, with many of these beliefs, we aren't even aware that we believe them."
117) On "limiting beliefs": many we harbor without being fully aware that we're doing so; the author lists a paragraph of examples, ranging from "I'm not good at math" and "I'm shy" to "I'm not a lucky person" and "I'm a bad person." [It is an excellent metaexercise to believe the opposite of any of these things as a matter of standard personal policy]
118) "[W]e're addicted to our beliefs; we're addicted to the emotions of our past. We see our beliefs as truths, not ideas that we can change." [This notion of beliefs as addictive is extremely helpful, a good paradigm]
119) On actively choosing useful beliefs like "There is an abundance of time" or "The universe is friendly and works in my favor." "What a great belief! How would you think, how would you live, and how would you walk down the street if you believe the universe works in your favor?"
120) Striking example of how traumatic experiences can literally change you, neurochemically and physically, citing a study of Cambodian refugees experiencing a type of hysterical blindness.
121) More placebo effect examples: See also the Parkinson's patients who received placebo saline, but whose brains actually then produced dopamine (!) but then the patients went back to their old environments--and, per the author, re-identified with those environments and their prior behaviors--and then reverted back to non-dopamine producing. The idea here is your environment (both physical and psychological environment) is strong source of gravity back to your baseline, to your past self. We see the same thing with drug addicts who go back to their old environment. See also the related behavior of New Zealand students who were told they would get vodka and tonic, then actually believed and felt as if they had been experiencing intoxication, but their bodies and minds produced these cues and behaviors, not the alcohol. "In other words, their beliefs alone were sufficient to fire up a biochemical change in their bodies that was equal to being drunk."
122) On the idea of building a habit of changing your internal state every day before you get up and face your regular environment. [This is interesting: I've already found myself slipping out of the habit of say for example my tennis-related mantras/recently installed habits: my homeostasis pulled me back out of the habit of using it!] See for example the patient who took a daily placebo thinking it was an antidepressant and who made physical changes to her brain, she had a daily reminder: the act of taking the pill. [Thus you'd want to create some sort of daily habit or set of habits as a device for breaking out of homeostasis.]
123) Changing your energy: "...we have to create a new internal experience in our minds and bodies that's greater than the past external experience." It has to outweigh the hardwired programs and emotional conditioning that we already have. [Maybe one could think of this like an intention that is so powerful it's like shock and awe, overwhelming force.]
Chapter 8: The Quantum Mind
124) [Now the author is assuming he's "converted" the reader, now he's directly talking about "using your mind to affect matter"... This is a well-built book rhetorically speaking, and I guess it has to be at this particular point in the book because this chapter really stretches credulity, especially if you happen to know anything about physics...]
125) On Newtonian and Cartesian reality, the duality of matter and mind, how they start to show significant limitations at the atomic and quantum level; how at the quantum level things have tendencies and probabilities, they don't exist per se; also more significantly, that the process of observing particles changes or affects their behavior, the so-called observer effect.
126) For our purposes what this means is "the subjective mind has an effect on objective reality." Or taking it even farther, "if you can imagine a particular future event that you want to experience in your life, that reality already exists as a possibility somewhere in the quantum field--beyond this space and time--just waiting for you to observe it." "So the quantum model, which states that all possibilities exist in this moment, gives us permission to choose a new future and observe it into reality."
127) Here's more good rhetoric as the author argues the applications of believing the opposite of what he just said: "However, this also means that you create by default as well. If you, as the quantum observer, look at your life from the same level of mind every day, then according to the quantum model of reality, you're causing infinite possibilities to collapse into the same patterns of information day in and day out. Those patterns, which you call your life, never change, so they never allow you to effect change."
128) [Here we're kind of really bending physics until It breaks but...] the author talks about different frequencies of different types of matter and the type of frequency or energy vibrations you and I have based on our states of being (see photo below). "You're turning up the speed on the atomic fans that make up your body. As you embrace a heightened, emotional creative state like inspiration, empowerment, gratitude, or invincibility, you're causing your atoms to spin faster, and to broadcast a stronger energy field around your body... which affects your physical matter... You're becoming more energy and less matter. You're now more wave and less particle." [I'm not sure you need to twist physics so aggressively in order to keep this metaphor alive...]
129) "So according to the quantum model of reality, we could say that all disease is a lowering of frequency." Stress hormones or being in fight or flight mode makes you become a materialist stuck in the here and now, unable to imagine or conceive of a future that's different etc; also on the idea of coherence of intention versus incoherence of intention [maybe we could call the notion of congruence here too; tough to make changes in yourself if you lack congruency in your intentions, actions, environment].
130) [This chapter unfortunately will be anti-persuasive for anyone who understands even a minimum of physics, but for liberal-artsy people who have zero science background, it will likely be persuasive, if only because quantum physics gives this book's ideas the patina of "science"... Ultimately, I feel like this chapter really should be taken out of the book.]
Chapter 9: Three Stories of Personal Transformation
131) Laurie, with polyostotic fibrous dysplasia: her life changes after diagnosis, with her surgeon warning her that she was fragile and vulnerable, the disease allowed her to submit her identity as a vulnerable and weak person, it also made her safe from her father's temper. Also her disease began to work for her in other ways: attention, help, assistance, it was a way of manipulating her reality to get what she wanted. After coming into contact with the author's ideas at conferences and etc she had no intention of healing her body because she didn't believe it was possible, but she began working on something she did think was possible which was to change her inner self.
132) [Interesting quote from her here] "I was powerful enough to manifest weakness perfectly in my body."
133) Interesting how she went really literal with some of her environmental changes like putting deodorant on the right side instead of the left first, or folding her arms left over right, or sitting in a different chair in her apartment and sleeping on the other side of the bed, all of these things just to give her body new and different signals; also interesting to read about the notes she puts all over her apartment and car dashboard, like "Your thoughts are incredibly powerful. Choose yours wisely."
134) Candace, addicted to volatile emotions in a volatile relationship.
135) Joanne, with MS, even after symptom onset was able to use visualization and priming exercises to do some standing yoga poses, walking, ultimately she realizes that she created her own disease, even teaches herself to walk again.
Chapter 10: Information to Transformation: Proof That You Are the Placebo
136) Once you know how a placebo really works, you recognize that you are the placebo, meaning the pill (or injection, or procedure) can be taken away but the same outcome will unfold because you put into place the change in events or behavior through your beliefs.
137) Also, instead of giving our power away to the material world (to some placebo that somebody gives to us that has an effect on us) what if we took our own power and ourselves and created that reality ourselves? Do we have to wait around for "permission" from the outside material world, from some doctor or some effect induced in us from someone else, when we can induce this effect through our own volition and our own change in beliefs and behavior?
138) You don't need any fake pills or sham surgery to heal you.
139) Dispenza measures EEGs of clients changing themselves, "information to transformation" so there's more evidence to show people what they can do. Found improved brain function. Measuring gratitude and thankfulness as brain states.
140) On "trying" or worse "trying hard" to rewrite your program. One of the key aspects of this is you need to loose your attachment to the outcome, or welcome whatever outcome comes, although the author doesn't quite frame it this way.
141) The author now gives example cases with brain scan information, EEG, etc.
142) [I would really like to see follow-ups on both the patient with MS as well as the patient with Parkinson's, and also the traumatic brain and spinal cord injury patient. How are they doing years later since the EEGs were taken in 2013? Both patients were able to ameliorate their symptoms and show improvement, not just a slowing of the progression of their diseases, and that's tremendous, but what's the long term result here?]
143) John, the patient with the traumatic brain injury and spinal cord injury is an interesting example because when you have a traumatic brain injury you're likely not going to have the executive function to change your way of thinking, it would be very very difficult, you need to have the right people around you to impose this executive function on you by proxy.
144) The CEO, Kathy: always on the go and realizes she was never in the present moment. Constant brain chatter, self-talk, anxiety, hyperactivity.
145) Bonnie: fibroid tumors, severe menstrual leading. She has a mystical, ecstatic experience during one of the meditation sessions, which spontaneously led to the end of her irregular bleeding and menstrual pain.
Part II: Transformation
Chapter 11: Meditation Preparation
146) [This chapter is on getting ready to meditate, the next one will be walking the reader through actual meditations.]
147) "All of the participants in this book who changed something about themselves had to first go inward and change their state of being. So think of your meditation practice as a way for you to take the placebo every day. But instead of taking a pill, you'll be going inward. In time, your meditation will become like your belief in taking medication."
148) Times of day to meditate: right before you go to bed at night and right after you get up in the morning; it's easier to slip into alpha or theta brain waves and you're more primed for being in an altered state, the door to the subconscious mind is more open during these times.
149) Where to meditate: a place where you won't be distracted where you can unplug, and a place that you can return to every day; the author doesn't don't recommend meditating in bed or laying down or using a recliner; pick a chair to sit in or sit on the floor. A blindfold or ear plugs can help to enhance the effect of sensory deprivation and reduce external stimuli.
150) Sessions will last between 45 minutes to an hour.
151) On mastering your will: dealing with the negative voices in your head, procrastination urges, on training yourself to notice, become aware of and observe your mind's reactions. Likewise your body will do things (make an itch, create pain, etc.) to try and distract you and bring you out of the present moment. Just observe and be aware.
152) Open focus meditation, Buddhism-style, versus our day-to-day attention which is object-focused; object-focused attention is not conducive to meditating, it's more of a fight-or-flight, compartmentalized attention state where regions of the brain are working separately rather than together, and often even in opposition to each other. Also mixed or non-integrated signals sent to the body as well. In a true meditative state the brain can send more coherent signals throughout the entire nervous system.
153) On how the past is the future: we have redundant thoughts and actions, this is when the body becomes the mind, we will be in the same program to be in the same predictable future, based on our state of being from the past; in some sense our bodies are literally living in the past.
154) The extensive degree of conditioning or habitual thinking and action keeps us out of the present, and leaves no room for something new or unknown or miraculous to show up in life. "...our brains and bodies are already living in a known future reality based on the past."
155) On the dangers of just inserting meditation as another event on your timeline, as another item on your to-do list; you still won't be able to find the present moment. Likewise if you obsess about time you will also block yourself from the present moment.
156) In the present moment you have no future and no past, they literally do not exist; you become your consciousness or thought in that moment. "That is the moment that you can change your body, change something in your environment, and create a new timeline."
157) Note the instance where a meditation participant was "seeing without eyes."
Chapter 12: Changing Beliefs and Perceptions Meditation
158) Guided meditation to help you change beliefs of perceptions about yourself or your life [the text is in the appendix in two versions: a 1 hour version and a 45 minute version].
159) Remember: the thoughts and feelings you think and feel over and over become habituated, at which point they form an attitude, attitudes strung together become beliefs, beliefs tied together become perceptions; over time this creates a view of the world and of yourself that's largely subconscious and affects everything in your life. So if you want to change a belief or perception you have to change your state of being, and do it with enough energy it will overwhelm your current emotional signature; this is how you change your own biology.
160) Choose to believe that you want to change: get a piece of paper and draw a vertical line down the middle and on the left side write down the two beliefs you want to change, one on top of the other. Then write down on the right side what you do want to believe and perceive about yourself and how it would make you feel perception-wise.
161) The meditation is in three parts: first, an induction to enter the open focus technique; second, finding the present moment; and third, changing your beliefs and perceptions. You can practice the first part for a week every day and then add the second part in the second week and so on; if you're more experienced meditating, do the whole meditation all the way through the first time.
162) Induction (part 1 of the meditation) is about becoming aware of different spaces in your body: between your eyes, between your temples, your nostrils, the space between your tongue and the back of your throat, etc.
163) Becoming possibility (part 2) is the part of the meditation where you are finding the present moment.
164) Changing beliefs and perceptions about yourself and your life (part 3) will ask you to decide what do you want to believe and perceive about yourself, and how would that feel: "you'll have to change your energy by marrying a clear intention with an elevated emotion" as you overwrite the old experience.
Afterword: Becoming Supernatural
165) "Some critics may categorize this body of work as faith healing. I'm actually fine with that accusation at this point in my life."
166) On getting up from our meditations as if our prayers have already been answered.
167) On being uncomfortable (and being okay with that being uncomfortable) when embracing new paradigms.
168) Also when we achieve changes we wish, we also give others permission to achieve these things; note as other people see us performing an action, this fires mirror neurons in their brains.
169) If you "over-intend" you get in your own way, in other words you're trying too hard. If you "over-surrender" you become lazy and apathetic, so there's a fine balance between these paradoxical states of intention and surrender.
170) On the biological concept of "emergence"; a level of unity taking place at a bottoms-up level where a group has no leader, everyone is leading, and they're part of a collective group consciousness (like a school of fish or of hundreds of birds in flight); by extension this is how we change the world by changing ourselves, by overcoming selfish states of mind.
Appendix:
171) There are scripts here of the various "changing beliefs and perceptions" meditations; two versions: one for changing two beliefs and perceptions (1 hour), the other is for changing one belief/perception (45 minutes).
To Read:
Dr. Joe Dispenza: Evolve Your Brain
Dr. Joe Dispenza: Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself
Herbert Benson: The Relaxation Response
Norman Cousins: Anatomy of an Illness
Bernie Siegel: Love, Medicine, and Miracles: Lessons Learned About Self-Healing from a Surgeon's Experience with Exceptional Patients
Larry R. Squire and Eric R. Kandel: Memory: From Mind to Molecules
Dawson Church: The Genie in Your Genes: Epigenetic Medicine and the New Biology of Intention
Donald O. Hebb: The Organization of Behavior: A Neuropsychological Theory
Ian H. Robertson: Mind Sculpture: Unlocking Your Brain's Untapped Potential
Ivo Kohler: The Formation and Transformation of the Perceptual World
Aaron T. Beck: Cognitive Therapy and the Emotional Disorders
***Les Fehmi and Jim Robbins: The Open-Focus Brain: Harnessing the Power of Attention to Heal Mind and Body