Experience—Mind and Matter

By Ervin Laszlo and Jude Currivan

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The energetic imprints of our experiences encode not only their physical attributes but how we think and feel about them

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Our Sense of Time

     The human brain is the most amazing data-processing system yet discovered. In comparison, the most powerful computers yet built are simpler than the simplest single-celled biological organism.

     Digital computers encode signal inputs and outputs as bits (strings of 0s and 1s) and process information by electronic on/off switches that manipulate the bits. In addition, computers have a built-in clock that synchronizes their data-processing operations. While this approach is a working basis of many of our technologies, it is utterly inadequate for carrying out the sort of complex mental tasks that our brains process and that we take for granted. For example, our visual recognition of a face in a crowd is a task we can accomplish without a moment’s hesitation, but computers find it incredibly difficult. The reason is that our brains comprise a dynamic matrix of some one hundred billion neurons—nerve cells that, like computers, operate electrically. But instead of just acting digitally on or off, they behave in a so-called analog way and are able to respond to inputs and produce output voltages across a range of signal strengths.

     Also, we have seen that, unlike computers, there is no inner clock in our brains. Our perceptions of events are accumulated from an ongoing variety of sense-based inputs from our environment. These arrive in a time frame of a few milliseconds; and it is only when they cumulatively pass an energy threshold that a given neuron sends an output signal, whose firing correlates with our becoming aware of the event. Again unlike computers, which are constructed with fixed hardware and programmed software, our neurons are highly plastic. Neural channels—the connections between neurons—are constantly changing and adapting through interactions with what is perceived as reality. And although for many years neuroscientists believed that when neurons die through aging, disease, or trauma they’re not replaced, as we have noted, this has been shown not to be the case. Through a process called neurogenesis, new neurons are created throughout our lifetime and especially as a result of intensely felt experiences.

     The energetic imprints of our experiences encode not only their physical attributes but how we think and feel about them. In fact, it’s our thoughts and emotions about the events of our lives that are their most vivid and long-lasting aspects. Even when we no longer consciously remember a specific event, its related emotions may continue to reside in our subconscious memory. Contributing to our patterns of habitual response, the hopes, fears, anger, regret, and myriad other feelings are aspects of the shadowy terrain from which our “sunlit” waking awareness emerges.

     Our brains are continually processing a vast amount of environmental impressions that we initially respond to unconsciously. An enormous majority of these remain unconscious, for only when they are energetically strong enough do they cross the threshold of our conscious awareness. The apparent continuity of our conscious impressions is illusory, because without an inner “clock” our perceptions lag behind the multitude of stimuli, which we are continually bathed in and interact with. The neural processes that respond to such impressions take around a quarter of a second to accumulate and form into a conscious experience—this is due to different attributes of stimuli, such as their color, shape, and texture. Although they occur simultaneously, they are registered by our brains at different times.

     In our everyday awareness, this overlapping of impressions becomes a coherent whole, and we experience our waking consciousness as a unified flow. This is how our sense of the flow of time is formed. The emotional and mental contents that enrich our experiences manipulate our sense of time, ratcheting it up to “fast-forward” or reducing it to slow motion. Traumatic events appear to slow down or even stop time, whereas when we are enjoying ourselves, “time flies.”

Mind over Matter

     Such different perceptions of the same reality are an everyday occurrence. But we are rarely aware of just how much our believing or disbelieving affects what we actually “see.” Generally, our ego-selves are culturally conditioned. As a consequence, we not only act in accordance with our prevailing worldview and beliefs, but our identification is so powerful that we are literally unable to see what we cannot imagine. When we’re able to imagine something, we create an image of it that we can relate to. Without such relationship, there is no resonance, and so we have no energetic and informational means of attuning ourselves to a new phenomenon. When we can imagine a phenomenon and believe in its reality, we can actually experience that reality.

     For millennia, the meditative techniques of spiritual traditions have taught their initiates how to embody greater well-being by attuning their minds and emotions more harmoniously. Additionally, they have shown how the attuned power of our mind can overcome physical pain. Tibetan monks, for example, have long been tutored in visualization exercises that enable them to slow or increase their heart rates and alter their body temperatures at will. Such exercises, over many years, allow them to focus their mind so coherently that there are well-documented cases of overnight snowbound vigils held by monks who melted the snow around them through their body heat alone. Although we may not have their fortitude or training, our beliefs, too, are not only capable of altering our biology but do so all the time.

     What is the process that enables our thoughts and feelings to have such power over our bodies? In the last chapter, we introduced biologist Bruce Lipton’s model of cellular membranes as organic information processors that are dynamically linked to the environment. The receptor molecules that are embedded within the membranes resonate and interrelate with specific environmental stimuli, both physical and informational. Their responses are the triggers that organize the behavior and the internal condition of the cell.

     But, as Lipton points out, the stimuli that trigger cell activity may be distorted; thus, they rather represent our beliefs about reality. And so environmental signals such as our feelings and thoughts—even, and often especially, when they are subconscious—affect the behavior and thus the health of the cell whether or not they reflect a “real” view of the world. As biochemist David Hamilton shows in his book It’s the Thought That Counts, the attunement of our conscious and subliminal thoughts and emotions—both of which express our beliefs about ourselves and the wider world—powerfully affect the health of our bodies and our overall well-being at the level of every cell of our body.

The Placebo Effect

     One significant way our beliefs and expectations affect our biology is in the so-called placebo effect.

     This was first discovered during pharmaceutical drug trials in the 1950s in which the effect of a new drug was tested by comparing its performance against a dummy medication, or placebo, administered to patients suffering from a given condition. Over many studies, it has been found that on average about a third of patients who are given the placebo feel better. In fact, a number of studies have shown that individuals suffering from mild depression respond to placebos as well as they do to antidepressant drugs—and without any adverse side effects.

     For a long time, doctors tended to assume that the mechanism of placebo response is psychological. Researchers at the University of Michigan tested this assumption by scanning the brain activity of healthy volunteers whose jaws had been injected with salt water, causing painful pressure. The volunteers were then told they would receive a new pain-relieving drug when in fact they were given a placebo. The scans showed that their brains responded to their belief in the placebo by releasing endorphins—natural painkilling chemicals that block the pain signals between nerve cells—and as these coursed through their bodies, the volunteers felt better.

     The scale of the placebo effect may in fact be increasing. In 1999, in an article for Science magazine, Martin Enserink reported that tests for drugs to alleviate obsessive-compulsive disorder disclosed that for over 15 years, the proportion of placebo responses had grown from virtually nil to where some trials failed—in all likelihood, due to the high level of placebo response. The year before, in a meta-analysis of 19 antidepressant drug trials, psychologists Irving Kirsch and Guy Sapirstein showed that the proposed drugs relied on the placebo effect for three-quarters of their effectiveness.

     The power and potential for intentional healing of the placebo effect is finally being recognized—although unsurprisingly, not by drug companies. What it appears to depend on is a person wanting to be healed and his or her expectancy that the treatment will be effective.

     One of the pioneering researchers of the intimate connections between our minds, emotions, and bodies is psychopharmacologist Candace Pert, author of Molecules of Emotion. In the early 1970s, biologists were trying to understand how mind- and mood-altering opiates such as morphine worked. Theorizing that such drugs interact with the brain’s cellular receptors, Pert, with her colleague Sol Snyder, discovered the existence of such a receptor. The discovery opened the door to the realization that if our bodies have such receptors, then we must also have a natural feel-good opiate within us. Subsequently identified by neuroscientists John Hughes and Hans Kosterlitz in 1975, this turned out to be a molecule called endorphin that was found to be released in large quantities through physical exercise, among other things—and also by eating chocolate!

     Endorphins are one type of so-called neuropeptides that are produced by emotions and in turn produce them through our continuous flow of experience. Involved in an enormous range of bodily functions from the management of pain to the release of hormones, neuropeptides and the cellular receptors they interact with form a psychosomatic and dynamic matrix operating through our thoughts, emotions, and bodies.

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Excerpted from Chapter Eight of CosMos: A Co-creator’s Guide to the Whole-World by Ervin Laszlo and Jude Currivan. Published by Hay House, it is available at retail and online bookstores.

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