- One of the most powerful things we can do
is actually, using your language there,
is to take a mental representation of illness
and turn that into a mental representation of wellness.
So when I was growing up as a teenager,
my mom and I would often talk about the power of the mind,
and all the different things like
your visualization, meditation, affirmations.
So when I found myself, several years later,
as an R&D scientist in the pharmaceutical industry,
and mostly working in cardiovascular,
a little bit in cancer,
but mostly cardiovascular,
and my friends and colleagues there say,
"Look how many people improved on the drug. Brilliant."
And I'm saying,
"Look how many people improved on the placebo.
"Isn't that amazing?"
And I was just captivated by the numbers
but also the fact that there must be something going on
that causes,
there must be some explanation for why believing something
can have a real, physical effect.
So I spent a lot of my spare time,
when I worked as a scientist,
some of my spare time,
I spent researching the mind-body connection,
and understanding, you know,
"How does believing that this little tablet here
"that's a placebo,
"how does that actually fiddle around
"with my brain chemistry, my physiology?"
And I learned so much that I decided,
"You know what? This is my passion.
"I don't want to work at a lab bench anymore.
"There's enough people,
"enough skilled researchers doing that.
"I don't need to be there.
"There's far more that I could do with my passion,
"which is education."
So that's pretty much how I left,
why I left the industry.
- And I know a lot of us know about the placebo effect,
but can I ask you to tell people about the nocebo effect,
because I find people don't really understand what that is.
We know placebo.
Well, if you could just do it,
because you're so much smarter than me.
Tell us. - I'm not sure about that.
- Well, it's your background,
so, placebo versus nocebo, tell us the difference.
- Yeah, well, you know, placebo comes from the Latin
that means "I shall please,"
"There'll be a pleasing result from this."
Whereas nocebo derives from the Latin, "I shall harm."
In other words, there will be a harmful result from that.
So some people call it the "evil twin."
And what it really means is, if the placebo effect that,
"I take this and I expect to get better,"
then something positive will happen.
And the nocebo is, "When I expect something bad to go wrong,
"and I expect to have more pain."
And the way it kind of works is like,
if you use the pain example,
let's say I was taking a wee, white tablet
that I thought was a painkiller,
but it was really a placebo,
then the pain would go away, more than likely.
But the reason it goes away
is because my belief has caused the brain
to produce its own painkillers,
and it's the real, actual painkillers that I produce,
my own version,
they're called endogenous opiates,
they're the brain's natural versions of morphine and heroin.
But if I then take something
that I think's going to make me worse,
or if I have an idea that I think,
"This isn't going to help me," for example,
then the pain might intensify.
And the reason why
is because I've now produced something else
that's blocked the production
of the natural morphine and heroin.
So in a sense,
because they're always providing some pain relief,
I'm actually neutralizing them and intensifying the pain.
So what you get is an opposite effect, placebo
go up the way, nocebo goes down the way,
in terms of, that would be an improvement
and that would be a getting worse kind of thing.
- Yeah.
And I love the fact
that so many people on placebos get better.
It's that thing about every thought we think
has a physical reaction
and, indeed, an emotional response,
but I'd love to know from you,
how can our audience do more to help themselves,
to help themselves move from illness to wellness?
What are some very simple but powerful things
that they can do?
- Well, do you know, Marisa,
one of the most powerful things we can do
is actually using your language there,
is to take a mental representation of illness
and turn that into a mental representation of wellness.
And what I mean by a "mental representation"
is just the way that I might represent something mentally.
So, for example, if I had, say, some arthritis in my knee,
then I might represent that in whichever way I want.
Maybe I would have a picture of it,
because I know what that looks like,
or maybe I would just represent that
as sand between two things,
like sand between two sandwiches, for example.
And you wouldn't want to eat a sandwich of sand.
And so I would turn that
into a mental representation of wellness.
So, for me, it would either be, if you knew medicine,
you might want to clean it out
and imagine putting some oil or fatty substance
so that the joint now easily moves around with no pain.
Or I might take that sandwich and get rid of all the sand
and put, like, butter or olive oil
or something fatty in there,
so that the sandwiches,
the two little bits of bread,
slide over.
And the reason I'm using a medical and a nonmedical example
is because it doesn't actually matter.
All that matters is that you take a mental representation
of illness
and you turn that into a mental representation of wellness.
And the basis of that is because, in many ways,
the brain doesn't really make that much of a distinction
between whether something's actually happening,
or whether it's actually happening
or whether you're imagining it happening,
and so imagination itself can, in some cases,
tilt the movement of stuff in the body towards
that which you're imagining happening.
- Yeah.
I think that's so profoundly true,
that, you know, when people say, "Oh, but how does that work?"
We all know
that if we think an embarrassing thought, we blush.
If we think an emotional thought,
our eyes fill up with tears.
If we think about food, our stomach starts to rumble.
So every day, we see very practical examples of,
"Wow, I'm thinking a thought,
"and my body's making that thought real."
And I do believe that if we could all be taught,
"Every thought you think is your blueprint
"that your mind and body have to make real.
"It's not like it has a choice.
"The mind has to work on the thoughts you think,
"which you are free to change."
So can you tell me more about the types of visualization
that you recommend to people
if they want to heal from something,
or just improve in a certain area?
People get very confused,
"But I can't visualize."
I go, "Listen, if you can't visualize,
"you would never worry a day in your life."
When you worry about your kids not coming home on time
or something bad happening,
that's visualization.
But can you tell us more about how we can use visualization
to heal from something
or, indeed, to just improve an area of our life?
- Yeah. Yeah.
So to get around the fact
that some people say they can't visualize,
I sometimes swap the word for "imagine,"
because, just like you said,
people can imagine something bad happening,
so you are visualizing, but,
so, maybe we can swap "visualization" for "imagine."
I do that sometimes. - Great idea.
- And so, the key strategy is
take a mental representation of illness
and turn it into wellness, but to do it repetitively.
And I say "repetitively" because research into the idea
that the brain can't distinguish real from imaginary
began with a breakthrough study at Harvard University,
led by a professor called Alvaro Pascual-Leone,
where he asked volunteers to play five notes on a piano
for two hours on five consecutive days.
And he measured the changes in the brain,
and it was a significant amount of change.
But he got another group of people,
instead of playing the notes with their fingers,
to close their eyes,
put their hands flat,
and imagine moving their fingers,
imagine playing the notes.
So they had no movement of the fingers.
It's called "kinesthetic imagery."
You just imagine what it would feel like
if you really were playing the notes.
So they did the imagine bit
for the same two hours over five days,
and they also had their brains scanned every day,
and, amazingly, it was exactly the same
as those who did the physical movements.
It had substantially changed a key region of the brain.
And if you put the brain scans side by side,
you couldn't tell the difference in the scans
between those who'd actually played the notes
and those who had imagined playing the notes.
So visualization, or imagination, in this way
works through the repetition, begins to sculpt,
if you will, brain circuitry,
and brain circuitry,
the more you imagine illness turning into wellness,
the more you see that wellness,
the more brain circuitry begins to sculpt around
that kind of idea.
So you can apply it to just about anything,
even, I've given an example of arthritis.
You could even apply it to mental illness.
So the idea is to take a mental representation again.
So I met a gentleman years ago
who suffered terrible depression,
and he had what the industry called "treatment-resistant depression."
And that's when the treatment is no longer working.
And he had actually, also, at one point,
he had made a suicide attempt it had been so bad,
and one of his friends had suggested visualization to him,
and he thought,
"Well, I've only heard of visualization for physical things.
"So how do I do this for depression?"
And he came up with a novel idea.
He'd actually read one of my books,
'How Your Mind Can Heal Your Body,'
and it was because I'd mentioned
making a mental representation, he thought,
"Well, I can do that for depression."
So he said, "I felt broken."
And that was how he described how he felt at the time,
and it turned out that his marriage had broken up,
and he took it really badly,
and he started drinking too much alcohol,
such that he was going into work the next day,
now, he was a university lecturer,
and he was going into work the next day
smelling of alcohol.
After a few warnings, he was eventually made redundant.
He was eventually given the sack
and told he can't work anymore.
And he lost his house.
He ended up homeless,
in a little town north of Manchester in the UK.
And so he said, "I felt broken."
So he said,
"Could I make a mental representation of brokenness?"
So he remembered a mirror that him and his former wife
had in their hall, and he really loved it,
and he thought,
"I'm going to imagine my brokenness
"as if that mirror is broken."
So he imagined the mirror broken,
it was lying on the ground
in hundreds and hundreds of shards.
And he said, "So I have to turn illness into wellness,
"in other words, brokenness into wholeness."
So, in his imagination, he took a brush and pan,
and he swept up all the shards,
and he put them in a cauldron, in his imagination.
Then he imagined lighting a fire under the cauldron,
and all the shards of broken mirror
began to melt into liquid silver.
And then he just imagined the empty mold,
and he poured all the liquid mirror back into it again,
and blew on it to cool it down.
Then he held it up,
and he imagined seeing himself whole again.
So, in other words, he took his brokenness,
and turned it into wholeness.
And he did it every single day,
because he said it only took a minute in his mind,
to visualize it every day.
But within a couple of months,
he said that he was a brand new,
he said, "I was a brand new person."
He'd literally made himself whole again.