Over the past year I've become more interested in books dealing with the power of the mind and how our emotions and thoughts can affect our bodies and lives. Thus far I've read and enjoyed, Candice Pert’s Molecules of Emotion: The Science Behind Mind-Body Medicine and The Intention Experiment by Lynne McTaggart. Even Jill Bolte’s fascinating medical memoir My Stroke of Insight touched on the mind-body connection.
Dr. Bruce Lipton has thrown his hat into the ring with Biology of Belief where he outlines a simple, yet profound idea: “Your beliefs act like filters on a camera, changing how you see the world. And your biology adapts to those beliefs” (143).
Lipton outlines a scientific world that has blindly adopted the Darwinian belief that hereditary factors are passed from parent to child and these factors control the characteristic of the individual’s life. The genes present control the physical characteristics as well as emotional behaviors of the individual.
In the late 1980s the Human Genome Project began to create a catalogue of all genes, and scientists thought they would find a minimum of 120,000 genes. Instead they only found 25,000, not nearly enough to account for the complexity of human life.
Over time Lipton began to reject the Darwinian notion of competition. While he was on sabbatical at a medical school in the Caribbean, he began to focus on life’s harmony, not struggle, and how the world cooperates instead of competes. Lipton does not suggest that competition is not a vital and important part of the natural world, but he begins to realize that perhaps studying the more cooperative way organisms operate might be beneficial.
He points to the first scientist to establish evolution as scientific fact nearly 50 years before Darwin, French biologist Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck. His theory suggested an evolution based on instructive, cooperative interaction among organisms and their environment. Lamarck said that organisms acquire and pass on adaptations necessary for survival
After much research Lipton begins to realize that the environment a cell is in plays a huge role in the cell’s development. He points out that when the nucleus (or brain) is removed from the cell, the cell can survive for up two or more months without genes. It continues to ingest/metabolize food and to communicate. This finding leads Lipton to believe that it is the cell membrane that controls cellular life.
Through various tests Lipton finds that a cell’s operations are primarily molded by its interaction with the environment, not its genetic code. It is the job of the membrane in single cell to be aware of the environment and to set in motion an appropriate response to that environment. Smart cells are imbued with intent and purpose; actively seeking environments that support their survival while avoiding hostile, toxic ones.
Lipton takes his concept a step further when he happens to pick up the book The Cosmic Code: Quantum Physics as the Language of Nature by Heinz R. Pagels while waiting at an airport. The quantum perspective reveals the universe as an integration of interdependent energy fields and an entangled in mesh-work of interactions. Lipton begins to see that the flow of information in quantum universe is holistic and cellular constituents are in complex web of crosstalk and feedback.
Lipton uses the example of a breast cancer scan: The diseased tissue appears dark on the scan because it emits a different energy from the healthy cells surrounding it. Energy signatures pass through our bodies and travel through space as invisible waves, and all organisms communicate and read their environment by evaluating energy fields.
He goes on to state that thoughts are the mind’s energy, and they influence how the physical brain controls the body’s physiology. This energy can activate or inhibit a cell’s function-producing proteins. However, Lipton makes it clear he does not believe simply by thinking positive thoughts a person can “cure” themselves of an ailment.
He does point out that the self-conscious mind is reflexive in nature, and it can “learn” perceptions, and those perceptions then become the mind’s “truth.” But what if the learned perceptions are inaccurate?
The idea of the Placebo Effect is then discussed, and Lipton comes up with some interesting observations about medicine and beliefs. He cites a Baylor School of Medicine study published in 2002 in New England Journal of Medicine regarding surgery patients with knee pain. The surgeon conducting the study was attempting to figure out which part of the surgery gives the patient relief. Breaking up the participants into three groups, the people in the third group received no surgery at all, but were given a small incision on the knee. The results were astounding, the third group improved just as much as the other two groups that had received the surgery.
He also cites studies that show placebos (sugar pills) work extremely well for relieving the symptoms of depression.
Lipton then brings up an interesting idea: If placebos can trick people into thinking they’re getting healthier, what about negative thoughts or beliefs, which he refers to as “Nocebos.” He discusses a 2003 Discovery Health program that interviewed Nashville physician Clifton Meador. In 1974 Meador had a patient named Sam Londe who was diagnosed with cancer of the esophagus, which at the time was considered one-hundred percent fatal.
Londe was treated for the cancer, but everyone “knew that he would eventually die, and it came as no surprise when he passed away a few weeks after his diagnosis. What shocked Meador were Londe’s autopsy results. Londe had cancer, but not enough to kill him, and there was none in his esophagus. Meador expressed his guilt, wondering if his incorrect beliefs about Londe’s disease caused him to give up and die.
Lipton closes by stressing the importance of looking at our own thoughts and beliefs in order to realize we may be harming ourselves. He also feels that energy research is a field that can no longer be ignored for the “magic bullet” of pharmaceuticals. Lipton offers no directions for the reader to improve their mental health, but he gives them much food for thought.
