June nonfiction: You Are The Placebo by Joe Dispenza

Once again I don't remember who recommended this book to me. You Are The Placebo by Joe Dispenza, published in 2014. As I write this, I see that he has a newer book that just came out a few months ago, called Becoming Supernatural. That title doesn't surprise me, based on Placebo. Here are my book notes.

To summarize in one sentence, I would say that Placebo is "out there" and yet believable at the same time, when Dr. Joe describes what the human mind is capable of doing to the human body. As a skeptic, I was initially put off by the first couple of chapters, but Dr. Joe does well in describing the science behind his claims. I would say that on its own, I don't think this book would convince a skeptic. But knowledge of other studies and the daily discoveries made by quantum physicists lends support to the claims in Placebo. In general, I believe Dr. Joe does a pretty good job of describing the physical changes that happen in the body in response to various outside actions, but my opinion is that not all of those things are "placebo" in the medical sense. For example, we all know that stressful thoughts/emotions trigger the fight-or-flight reaction in the physical body. I do not feel like that reaction is placebo, though it is an example of thoughts/mind controlling the body. But that is just semantics, the advice is still good, so do not get hung up on whether or not an action is a medical placebo or something else.

Here are my book notes.

Preface: Dr. Joe describes a rather unbelievable story of being a 23yo chiropractor when he was run over by an SUV during the bicycling part of a triathlon. He then grows a new spine (I exaggerate somewhat) in 9 weeks, simply by thinking about it. I really have a hard time believing some of the details of this story. I have heard plenty of similar stories on Bulletproof Radio and the like, but not someone getting well in only 9 weeks. The preface made me immediately skeptical of Dr. Joe personally.

Introduction: He explains that a placebo is not about lying to one's self. If you are sick, you don't tell yourself that you are actually well and expect your body to believe the lie. The placebo effect is about believing in a potential transformation, from illness to wellness.

He also clarifies that just because a placebo works, does not mean that other treatments do not also work. In chapter 2 he repeats this with the more specific example of what you may already know, that placebo outperforms antidepressants. I am making up this example: suppose a drug was tested against a placebo sugar pill. And suppose that 40% in the drug group got better, and 45% in the placebo group got better. Some may argue that those who got the drug were only responding to their own placebo effect and that the drug didn't work at all. But Dr. Joe explains that this is a flawed conclusion. We don't know that the drug doesn't work at all. All we know for certain is that 45% in the placebo group got better. I did think it was interesting that Dr. Joe went out of his way to stick up for antidepressants. It was very unbiased of him to point this out, especially since he intended the story to give respect to the power of placebo.

Chapter one: a series of stories that I had mostly heard before, demonstrating the placebo effect. No new information if you haven't been living under a rock.

Chapter 2: more stories illustrating the placebo effect, dating back hundreds of years. Description of the "nocebo" effect. I thought that was a slang word but it's actually a real word. It means when someone is harmed by a harmless substance or event simply because the person believed it would harm him or her. So, the opposite of what a placebo does.

page 32: describes 2 studies from the 1970s that changed what we know about placebo. The first study proved that placebo effect was happening in the body, not the mind (or, not ONLY the mind).

The 2nd study showed that body could be conditioned to have a physiological response to an inert substance, smell, or even thought. It's complicated to explain, but it was a study on rats that ended up with some rather scary results from a nocebo.

page 35-36: an example of laughter as medicine (though Dr. Joe did also note that the patient also was taking massive doses of vitamin C), and then another example of laughter as medicine but studied with gene expression as evidence.

page 36-37: the 'placebos outperform antidepressants' discussion that I mentioned earlier

page 38: we started studying placebo effect with brain scans in 2001, proving brains were reacting to placebo.

page 40: "there isn't just one placebo response...but several." For example there is consciously thinking of wellness (or illness), and there is also proof that the body can be conditioned without you being conscious of it all, e.g. those poor rats from page 32. There are also subconscious effects like what color the placebo pills are (example on page 42).

Describes the 2010 study that you may have heard of before, in which participants were plainly told that they were getting a sugar pill and not actual medicine, and still got better. Note that the patients were told they were participating in a placebo study where they were expected to get better on placebo. It's not like they were told "this is a sugar pill that we expect to do nothing." This is important to see the difference. It ties back to Dr. Joe's initial statement in the introduction that placebo requires believing in a potential transformation.

page 41: describes another study I've heard of before in which hotel maids who were told that their jobs gave them lots of exercise, lost weight. Compared with a maids at a different hotel who were not told the same thing and did not lose weight. In my mind this is NOT evidence of placebo effect; it is evidence that awareness leads to outcome. Like how you take more steps when you are using a step counter. However, later in the next chapter Dr. Joe will include this concept as part of placebo, although he concedes that this is a conscious effort.

page 42: "When we put greater intention behind what we are doing, we naturally get better results." Dr. Joe explains that the reason he tells us these studies is so that we (readers) can get better results from the placebo effect. By putting greater intention into achieving the placebo effect.

page 43-44: illustrative examples of what I would call self-fulfilling prophecies. Believing you are going to fail a test so then you fail the test because you behaved as if you were going to fail. I am paraphrasing, he doesn't actually use these words. So then he does suggest that the self-fulfilling prophecy could be taken to a greater extreme if you believe a drug or surgery is going to work or not work...could it be the same concept as your attitude causing you to pass or fail a test? Is the brain so powerful as to make you well or unwell based only on your thoughts?

page 54: If you want change, "you must become conscious of the unconscious behaviors you've been choosing to demonstrate, that have led to the same experiences, and then you must make new choices, take new actions, and create new experiences." This should result in evolution within your brain.

page 57: discussion of how learning and remembering actually alters the physical structure of the brain.

page 63: "The hardest part about change is not making the same choices we made the day before. ...The moment we are no longer thinking the same thoughts...we immediately feel uncomfortable. This new state of being is unfamiliar; it's unknown." "That's the moment we know we've stepped into the river of change."

page 68: "...The conscious mind isn't really in charge. The body has subconsciously been programmed and conditioned to be come its own mind." This part is where Dr. Joe is explaining that our thoughts trigger emotions and our emotions trigger physical reactions in our bodies and that enough repetition of these same thoughts cause the physical reactions to become hardwired. This goes back again to the complicated rats example from page 32. Where a series of events triggers an outcome, until eventually the body memorizes the outcome such that the series of events is no longer required.

page 69: interesting comment linking repetitive thoughts and behaviors with aging. "When the same genes are repeatedly activated by the same information from the brain, then genes keep getting selected over and over again, and just like gears in a car, they start to wear out. The body makes proteins with weaker structures and lesser functions. We get sick and we age." Wow, there are A LOT of claims in these few sentences. Are any of them true??

page 69 again: describes 2 scenarios where the body reacts to repetitive thoughts and emotions. (1) The cell that is consistently receiving the same information, adapts/evolves/modifies itself to accommodate the constant barrage of same information. Comparison made to supermarket opening up additional checkout lanes when lines are too long. In this manner, the body has physically changed to adapt to the mind. (2) The cell that is consistently receiving the same information gets overwhelmed and adapts by ignoring the information. The cell only 'notices' when the lines increase even longer/brain is feeling heightened emotion.

page 70: both scenarios from page 69 mimic addiction. In (1) if the chemicals/emotions are not present, the cell craves them and then our brains notice the craving. In (2) this probably reminded you already of drug addicts who require more and more of a chemical for the same thrill, or a person who "needs" to get angrier and angrier at nothing just for a stimulant.

page 71: Dr. Joe suggests that we are only 5% conscious and 95% subconscious. (This reminds me of the 10% Human theory, which suggests that we are 90% driven by bacteria and microbes.) Therefore it will require some effort for that 5% to override the other 95% if that other 95% is going in the 'wrong' direction.

page 83: discussion of DNA in which Dr. Joe says the concept that our genes pre-determine 'everything' is an outdated concept from 1970 that is repeated constantly in news and other media, but actually is not true. Genes are not eggs that ultimately hatch. Instead, genes may be expressed, OR NOT, and our thoughts or lifestyle trigger those gene expressions, OR NOT.

page 84: Knowledge about genes and DNA changed dramatically in 2003 when the human genome was mapped and the hypotheses that had been put forth by the researchers turned out not to be true. Specifically, in 1990 when the project began, they predicted that humans have 140k genes, but in 2003 they found it is 23,688 and that's it. So this messed up their hypothesis that each gene does only one thing, because our bodies make about 140k different proteins for different things. This led to a new hypothesis that various gene combinations working together, turning on (expressing), or turning off (suppressing) that produces the 140k different proteins.

page 85: Genes are classified by the type of activity that causes them to turn on or off. Some genes are expressed when we are learning, some are expressed during exercise, etc. So they might be classified as experience-dependent, activity-dependent, or behavioral-dependent. Behavioral-dependent genes are activated during stress, emotion, our thoughts.

page 86: references further reading, The Psychobiology of Gene Expression. 

page 87: gets into deeper scientific explanation of how genes are expressed

page 92: Epigenetics refers to the control of genes from signals coming from the environment and not the DNA. The Human Epigenome Project launched in 2003 immediately after the Human Genome Project was completed. The scale of the Epigenome Project is massively larger than the Human Genome Project.

page 94: good example involving twins. Twins are born with the same DNA but they don't get the same diseases, etc. As the twins get older, researchers find their gene expression gets more and more different, proving that the expression is caused by the environment, and not a 'program' within the body. Twins are like exact copies of the same model of a computer. The 2 computers begin with the same starter software but over time they downloaded different software (epigenetic variations) along the way. The computer itself is the DNA, which does not change.

page 95: examples of medical studies in which epigenetic changes were made very quickly, over 3 to 6 months in the examples given.

page 96: if cells aren't ignited in a new way, they won't change. They don't just magically decide to change, you have to change your thoughts, environment, something.

page 98: stress is super bad, you have to relax

page 105, chapter 5: now taking it a step further by having thoughts based on a future environment that doesn't exist yet. Make your brain think the experience has already happened. Must do this repetitively in order to physically change the brain/body. Examples that you probably heard of before: athletes rehearsing in their minds, professional dancers "practicing" in their heads, musicians practicing in their heads, then when time to perform their bodies react perfectly.

page 132: following a discussion and examples of hypnosis. "Suggestibility combines 3 elements: acceptance, belief, and surrender." "Suggestibility isn't just an intellectual process. [You] can intellectualize being better, but if [you] can't emotionally embrace the result, [you]  can't enter into the autonomic nervous system...which is vital because that's the seat of the subconscious programming..."

page 134: These can't just be any emotions. Negative emotions such as anger, anxiety trigger the fight-or-flight survival reactions in the body. We do not the body to go into survival mode based on past conditioning. Positive emotions such as gratitude and peace will not trigger the fight-or-flight response and will allow genes to express that would not normally do so in fight-or-flight.  Additionally, note that you can't "try" to make something happen with your thoughts. This is a struggle against your analytical mind. You just "allow" or accept/believe/surrender. Yoda reference on this page.

page 135: Dr. Joe suggests that feeling gratitude is the best way to increase suggestibility in your mind/body. Imagine the outcome and feel grateful as if it already happened. When repeated, the body will begin to believe the future event has actually happened.

page 139: "...The placebo works only when the analytical mind is silenced so that your awareness can instead interact with the subconscious mind...eclipse your conscious mind with your autonomic nervous system."

page 141: begin discussion of implicit or procedural memories. Example, the action of reading, typing on a keyboard, or tying your shoes is subconscious, your body has memorized what to do and you don't even have to think about it. Discussion of how these implicit memories are tied to emotions and suggestibility and the difficulty of suggestibility.

page 148: begin discussion of meditation.

page 169: might want to skip this story, it is a troubling study about Cambodian women in the 1980s who were going legally blind. It was found that these women had witnessed unspeakable acts during the Cambodian genocide of the late 1970s and their brains apparently reacted by making them go blind. There is some description of the unspeakable acts and it is very disturbing.

page 172: something Dr. Joe will end up reiterating for the rest of the book. "Just changing your beliefs and perceptions once isn't enough. You have to reinforce that change over and over." Examples and discussion follow.

page 181: begin discussion of quantum physics. It's a good chapter, but I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen the Nova The Elegant Universe before.

page 199-end: the rest of the book gives examples of "personal transformation", images of brain scans I didn't really understand but he tries to explain, and text for a meditation that Dr. Joe wrote. As he continually states, he says the meditation needs to be done DAILY in order for the placebo effect to work. It is lengthy, he says there is a 45-minute version and a 1-hour version. You can record it yourself or you can purchase a copy of Dr. Joe reading it from his website.