The Science of How What We Believe Becomes Our Reality

by Georgianna Donadio, MSc, DC, PhD

Over 20 years ago, Newsweek ran an article by Howard Brody, MD, PhD, author of “The Placebo Response: How You Can Release Your Body’s Inner Pharmacy for Better Health.”

He begins the article by telling a story of a patient who experiences “a medical miracle”. She was undergoing experimental brain surgery for her Parkinson’s disease. She was so stiff before she had the surgery that she could barely take a step. Several months later, when a TV news magazine filmed the woman, she was striding easily across the room.

Now, here is the exciting part of the story – the surgery she had was fake. She was part of a fetal-cell transplant research study. The procedure consisted of drilling holes into the skull and placing fetal cells into specific targeted areas of the brain.

The woman was placed under anesthesia, and holes were drilled into her head. But she did not have any fetal cells implanted into her brain. This meant that her miraculous recovery was entirely what is called the “nuisance factor” by researchers, or better known as the placebo effect.

In the conclusion of the study, it was stated that the patients who received the sham operation realized almost the same effects as the ones who received the fetal cell implants. This is a powerfully important piece of information concerning understanding that we can “tell ourselves” or implant messages into our conscious and unconscious mind about what we want to realize about our health or our lives, and can manifest those very messages into reality.

Beliefs are powerful things, and what we tell ourselves and others tells us can make us better or worse. We all have “our story,” and we tell it over and over again both to ourselves and to others. We believe it, we expect it, and we project it.

When we change our beliefs and our story, we change the outcomes.

One of the better-known studies that demonstrates how changing our stories can change our outcomes (and our lives) is the 1980s breast cancer support group study that was written up in the journal Advances. All of the women had breast cancer that had metastasized before the study began. Their prognosis was poor, but they became a group who listened to each other’s stories, supported each other, cared about one another,r and helped each other manage their symptoms and disease. They also helped each other change their story. It is not surprising that the women in this support group lived on average 18 months longer than breast cancer patients with the same degree of metastasis.

Given the way the health sciences have been taught in nursing and medical schools, it is perfectly understandable for physicians and nurses trained more than 25 years ago to think the placebo effect didn’t make sense and was instead a popular explanation for a sudden healing…a “spontaneous remission.”

It is a leap for many to accept that a person could think or believe something, and that simple act of belief could heal them.

Up until the last twenty or so years, research scientists did not have a grasp on how the brain and our emotions worked to create our reality. The subject of emotions has been and still is very much uncharted waters in behavioral science. However, what is well documented today is how the various brain waves function and what part of the brain each of the various brain waves controls and stimulates, and most importantly, what emotions actually are.

The “beta waves,” which are the brain waves that allow us to focus on the words on this blog and comprehend, in the moment, what is intellectually being communicated. These waves are produced in the frontal lobe, which is the seat of intellectual functioning. Thinking, analyzing, reasoning, and so forth occur in this part of the brain.

The “alpha waves,” which are the slower brain waves that originate in the midbrain, are the brain waves that allow us access to our unconscious thinking or what some refer to as the soul. All thought processes, be it from the beta wave or alpha wave region of the brain, are actually chemical reactions that produce specific proteins which communicate with our immune cell membranes and other cell membranes of our body.

The specific thoughts we think and the region of the brain they originate in have an identifiable chemistry shown to create dramatic changes in our physical bodies. In Dr. Paul Pearsall’s groundbreaking book, “The Heart’s Code,” he tell many amazing mind/body stories but one in particular, that is a striking example of how powerful thoughts and images are, is the story he tells about a schizophrenic patient who demonstrated completely different disease states depending on the personality she was exhibiting. Ultrasounds, CT scans, and lab tests all confirmed that one of her personalities had a massive cancerous tumor, and yet when she went into a different personality state all of her previous pathology disappeared as well.

Our brains are the ultimate manifestors of matter. The chair you are sitting on was a thought before it became that chair. Thought ARE “things” – that thoughts in action are what manifest reality.

For the woman in the study in Part I of this blog topic, who was cured of her stiffness after the sham surgery, her mind manifested a different set of thoughts through her hope and expectations for the outcome of the surgery. Her brain waves and proteins created positive chemistry, which communicated with her immune system through its cell membranes. The results – she became healthier and could “stride across the room.”

The idea of mind over matter is a powerful one. This science, and our understanding of its amazing chemistry, is in its infancy. In the future, we will take the possibility of healing ourselves with thought and imagery for granted just as we now do about people having an organ transplant, which was thought to be unheard of not that long ago.

In the meantime, we can all improve our health, success, and happiness but learning to improve our “self-speak” and reinforce our bodies and minds with positive words, thoughts, and images.

— G