Changing Your Brain

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAXzPIjvhUA

I hear from people every day who say the tenth dimension animation has "blown their mind", or words to that effect. I also hear from people who say they've watched the video many times, and that it has changed the way they think about the world. Could my unique approach to visualizing the dimensions really be capable of re-wiring people's neurons?

This is not as far-fetched as you might think. In entries like Changing Your Genes and Changing Your Genes - part 2, we've looked at the startling research showing that changes in lifestyle and attitude can affect not just the way your own genes are expressed, but even what genes you pass on to your offspring. This news flies in the face of the standard twentieth century approach which taught us that the genetic hand of cards we'd been dealt was locked in at conception, putting us on a specific train track defined by whatever genes we had inherited from our parents.

In Placebos Becoming More Effective?, we looked at the difficulties the pharmaceutical industry is encountering, as the placebo effect appears to be becoming stronger over the last twenty years, to the point where even successful drugs such as Prozac (approved by the FDA in 1987), would have difficulty getting approval today. As it said in the Wired Magazine article about Placebos:

Some products that have been on the market for decades, like Prozac, are faltering in more recent follow-up tests. In many cases, these are the compounds that, in the late '90s, made Big Pharma more profitable than Big Oil. But if these same drugs were vetted now, the FDA might not approve some of them. Two comprehensive analyses of antidepressant trials have uncovered a dramatic increase in placebo response since the 1980s. One estimated that the so-called effect size (a measure of statistical significance) in placebo groups had nearly doubled over that time.

I've been suggesting that there could be something about these modern times that is re-wiring people's brains in ways to give them a feeling of greater control over their observed reality (see last entry, The Quantum Observer), and hence the enhanced placebo effect. What do you think is causing this shift?

With Changing Your Brain, part of what we're talking about here is the concept of neuroplasticity: the brain is very adaptable, constantly making new connections. There was a BBC article published last year about how singing rewires damaged brains that relates nicely to this discussion. And Science Daily recently published an article about a new study with far-reaching implications. The title of the article really says it all: Mindfulness Meditation Training Changes Brain Structure in Eight Weeks.

With all that in mind, let's return to my new diagram we've been looking at lately and do a little creative meditation on it. As I've said before, if you click on this image it takes you to a higher-resolution version. If you'd like, print the image out and follow along, or just do the following exercise in your mind.

1. In Einstein's view of the universe, gravity is pictured as a bending of the "rubber sheet" of our spacetime. If our "sheet" was a 2D plane, similar to the piece of paper you've printed your image out on, we'd see this bending as being through the 3rd dimension. But since the "rubber sheet" of our spacetime is four-dimensional, my assertion is that this shows us gravity comes from the 5th dimension.

2. In Light Has No Speed, we looked at physicist Peter Russell's persuasive argument for why, from a photon's point of view, it takes no time or distance for light from a distant star to reach our eye. We can help to visualize this by folding our piece of paper horizontally, so that the upper half and lower half of the image are now touching. Now, the vertical line representing "light" in this diagram has converged, so that any point on the line is in direct contact with any other point. From light's point of view, past, present and future are one and the same.

3. Stephen Hawking has said "there's another kind of time, at right angles to real time, in which the universe has no beginning or end". If our paper image represents 4D spacetime, then when we folded it we were folding it through a space which is at "right angles to spacetime": the fifth dimension, which would be where Hawking's "another kind of time" resides. Since, as Peter Russell says, a photon experiences itself traveling no distance in no time, and its birth and death are the same moment, this also leads me to say that "light is at right angles to spacetime".

4. Spread your paper out flat again. Now, fold the paper the other way, vertically, so that all points on the horizontal line are touching. This is the quantum point of view, where any particle can have an instantaneous effect on another, no matter how far apart they are from each other in the universe. But again, because these effects defy the logic of our observed reality, they are usually portrayed as being unimaginably strange. I would say that imagining how these effects come from the additional degree of freedom afforded by the fifth dimension shows how these "spooky" quantum effects occur.

5. So which is it? Which fold represents the fifth dimension? Well, they both do. And if there was a way to fold our paper so that both folds are happening simultaneously, in the same way that Schrödinger's Cat is both alive and dead, then we would be visualizing the fifth dimension: where Kaluza proved to Einstein that the field effects for gravity and light are resolved.

WHEN Max Planck came up with the notion of the quantum at the turn of the 20th century, he couldn't justify it. Nevertheless, the idea that energy couldn't be split infinitely many times - that there was an indivisible quantum of energy - was the only way he could fit the observed spectrum of radiation from a hot body to a mathematical law. This ruse was, he later said, "an act of despair".

- editorial from January 24 2011 edition of New Scientist Magazine

The predictions of quantum theory have not been contradicted by a single experimental observation, making it the most successful model of the universe ever to have been created. With it, we move from Planck's "act of despair" to a revolutionary understanding of the granular, non-continuous nature of our observed reality. This leads me to conclude that our "Now", despite the apparently smooth and seamless reality we see around us, is really a constantly evolving series of points in the fifth dimension, one planck frame after another.

Does that understanding change our brains? It certainly has changed mine. Next time, we're going to look at how language changes our brains: the entry will be called Language and the Mind.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Is Reality an Illusion?

Is reality an illusion? This is not just a philosophical question. Here's a link to an article about a new scientific experiment, and the title says it all: "Fermilab is Building a Holometer to Determine Once and for All Whether Reality is Just an Illusion".


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCJLRrFTX3Q

The above video is for Changing Reality, recently put up on youtube but accompanying a blog entry from six months ago. The Big Question is, how much are we each creating the reality we see around us, and by extension how inevitable is it? Can we change our reality by changing our attitude? Epigenetics and the increasingly effective Placebo Effect are some of the signposts I've been using to say that leading edge science supports this idea, but a century of training to the contrary still makes a number of educated people reject such ideas immediately. "The only thing that matters is matter", they say, and "people can't change reality with their thoughts".

In Just Geometry we looked at an idea from The Grand Design: Model Dependent Realism. Some are lamenting that this represents Stephen Hawking giving up on the possibility of there ever being one TOE, one Theory of Everything, because each unique frame of reference changes the rules, so to speak. Model Dependent Realism proposes that the fabric of reality contains many possibilities, and no one theory or formula is going to be able to encompass them all.

So if reality is an illusion and different frames of reference allow the possibility of different rules, are you willing to accept the implications of the following video my facebook friend Frank Samaritano recently sent to me? Or are you going to say the man in this video is a charlatan? Is it really possible for a person to set paper on fire using only the energy from their body? A century of training to the contrary will lead some people to assume that this couldn't possibly be real, but see what you think.


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3F3ovb2kZ9Q

Next time we'll return to the Three Becomes One concept, with an entry called Threes. Till then, enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Placebos and Biocentrism

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vuv2eWJpG9o

The above video was posted last week on youtube, it connects to a text blog entry I published early this year called "Placebos Becoming More Effective?".

Thinking about what it's like to be an observer within a system where you and the system are both changing in the same way is the central idea to this entry. Here's a question for you: if I were growing one inch taller every month but everything in my world was also getting bigger by the same amount, how on earth would I ever be able to tell what's going on? I would need to find some way of viewing my reality from "outside the system", a very tricky thing to manage.

Biocentrism presents similar conundrums. If life creates space, time and the cosmos retroactively, how could life exist in the first place? For me, it comes down to imagining how life must be a process which ultimately exists "outside the system", outside of spacetime, in that timeless realm where "the distinction between past, present and future is meaningless", as Einstein liked to say.

Dr. Robert Lanza has a fascinating article he published at Huffington Post a few weeks ago which presents these ideas quite eloquently: it's called "Does the Past Exist Yet? Evidence Suggests Your Past Isn't Set in Stone". Here's the opening two paragraphs:

Recent discoveries require us to rethink our understanding of history. "The histories of the universe," said renowned physicist Stephen Hawking "depend on what is being measured, contrary to the usual idea that the universe has an objective observer-independent history."

Is it possible we live and die in a world of illusions? Physics tells us that objects exist in a suspended state until observed, when they collapse in to just one outcome. Paradoxically, whether events happened in the past may not be determined until sometime in your future -- and may even depend on actions that you haven't taken yet.

I'll invite you to read the whole article. Biocentrism as a concept takes some getting used to, but it does hold some fascinating implications once you wrap your head around the idea. Other blogs where I've talked about related ideas include:
Love and Gravity
Time and Schizophrenia
Alien Mathematics
The Long Undulating Snake
The Biocentric Universe Part 2
The Big Bang is an Illusion
Happy Birthday Paul
Placebos and Nocebos
The Biocentric Universe

That's all for this time around. Next time, our topic will be Dark Flow, Gravity, and Love.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Polls Archive 59 - Placebos and our Interface with Reality

Poll 59 -"Pharma companies are wrestling with the fact that placebos have grown twice as effective in drug trials over the last few decades. This is evidence that something is changing about our interface with reality." Poll ended March 2 2010. 61.5% agreed, while 38.5% did not.

This poll began not long after an entry called "Placebos Becoming More Effective?"was published here. If you would like to know more about the evidence surrounding this poll question, please go back and read that entry, I'm not going to repeat myself here because I want to talk about some other interesting connections to this idea.

In Poll 54 - Is Time Moving Faster? we returned to a question that relates to Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems: how can we know everything about the system we're within, when we can't get outside the system to "see it from the outside", so to speak?

This was one of the central ideas within Song 11 of 26 - The Anthropic Viewpoint, which has this verse:

If there’s other worlds then we’ve just missed ‘em
No way to know what’s outside our system
We’re like goldfish livin in a bowl
What’s beyond it we can never know
All we can do is theorize
Cause we can never… get outside, outside

Here's a video for that song, which has proved to be one of my more popular music videos on my youtube channel:

A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=du86lNCvOdA

Would the evidence that placebos are becoming noticeably more effective qualify as evidence that we are collectively shifting our reality in some subtle way? That's the crazy idea that I'm proposing here. But since 61% of the visitors to this blog were willing to go along with this as a possibility, maybe it's not all that crazy after all.

Here's some of the other entries where we've talked about Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem over the past few years:
The Anthropic Viewpoint
Everything
Just Ten Things
The Universe as a Song
What's Around the Corner

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: We'll look at one more poll question: Polls Archive 60 - Quantum and Macro a Continuum?

Placebos Becoming More Effective?

Since Imagining the Tenth Dimension began, I've talked a lot about the idea that there are patterns and shapes, fractal structures and waveforms, outside of our spacetime that contribute to the reality we are currently observing. Here's how I described it in Logic vs. Intuition:

"...our world is now starting to move away from scientific materialism (the idea that what we observe around us is all there is to reality, and that everything about our reality is logical and predictable if only we collect enough data). Instead, we're starting to move towards a more holistic paradigm. That's true as we see the growing acceptance that our universe is only one of many, that roughly 96% of our own universe is completely invisible and undetectable, that the way our genes are expressed and even which genes are passed on to our offspring is strongly connected to our attitude and lifestyle, and that our holographic universe comes from the fifth dimension, connected together outside of fourth-dimensional space-time in ways that boggle the mind".

I've also been marveling in the almost four years since this project started at the shifting sands of public opinion, as more and more people find ways to connect my way of visualizing reality to their own schools of thought. In recent blogs like You are the Point and An Expanding 4D Sphere, we arrived back at the conclusion that we are each at the center of a universe which is now continually accelerating its expansion, and in entries like Jumping Jesus and The Stream we've talked about how an acceleration is happening in our meme space just as much as it is in our physical space. There was a great editorial about this acceleration in The New York Times a few days ago, which includes this quote from Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project:

“People two, three or four years apart are having completely different experiences with technology. College students scratch their heads at what their high school siblings are doing, and they scratch their heads at their younger siblings. It has sped up generational differences.”

When you're within a system where everything is changing and accelerating, it can be hard to tell what's really happening. The child who is immersed in today's rapid-fire world of instant communication and multi-touch screen displays will grow up seeing that as the expected norm. On the other hand, a person who gradually loses their perception of color or some part of their hearing could go for a long time before they realize that their perception has changed, because the slowly modified version of their senses becomes their expected norm. Here's the tricky part: if the way we are perceiving the world is changing, and the world is changing in the same way, would there be any way for us to tell? We might each go for a long time believing that nothing has changed at all! What we need, then, is some way to gain an objective viewpoint that is outside of our own perception.

My old friend John recently sent me a link to the following article from a few months back in Wired Magazine (thank John, I can't believe I missed this!). The name of the article is "Placebos and Getting More Effective. Drugmakers are Desperate to Know Why". This article, written by Steve Silberman, really is worth reading in its entirety, and I invite you to do so. It begins with a story about pharmaceutical giant Merck, which in 2002 was falling behind its rivals in sales, and planned to regain their status with a new antidepressant codenamed MK-869:

The drug tested brilliantly early on, with minimal side effects, and Merck touted its game-changing potential at a meeting of 300 securities analysts.

Behind the scenes, however, MK-869 was starting to unravel. True, many test subjects treated with the medication felt their hopelessness and anxiety lift. But so did nearly the same number who took a placebo, a look-alike pill made of milk sugar or another inert substance given to groups of volunteers in clinical trials to gauge how much more effective the real drug is by comparison. The fact that taking a faux drug can powerfully improve some people's health—the so-called placebo effect—has long been considered an embarrassment to the serious practice of pharmacology.

MK-869 wasn't the only highly anticipated medical breakthrough to be undone in recent years by the placebo effect. From 2001 to 2006, the percentage of new products cut from development after Phase II clinical trials, when drugs are first tested against placebo, rose by 20 percent. The failure rate in more extensive Phase III trials increased by 11 percent, mainly due to surprisingly poor showings against placebo. Despite historic levels of industry investment in R&D, the US Food and Drug Administration approved only 19 first-of-their-kind remedies in 2007—the fewest since 1983—and just 24 in 2008. Half of all drugs that fail in late-stage trials drop out of the pipeline due to their inability to beat sugar pills.

Okay, you might be thinking, maybe the reason these new drugs aren't working so well in tests is because we've hit some kind of limit in what can be done with pharmaceuticals? Here's where things get really interesting: some older drugs that were previously proven effective and used for successful treatment are also now faring less well when compared to placebos! The article continues:

Some products that have been on the market for decades, like Prozac, are faltering in more recent follow-up tests. In many cases, these are the compounds that, in the late '90s, made Big Pharma more profitable than Big Oil. But if these same drugs were vetted now, the FDA might not approve some of them. Two comprehensive analyses of antidepressant trials have uncovered a dramatic increase in placebo response since the 1980s. One estimated that the so-called effect size (a measure of statistical significance) in placebo groups had nearly doubled over that time.

It's not that the old meds are getting weaker, drug developers say. It's as if the placebo effect is somehow getting stronger.

What do you think? Does the information that the placebo effect is now twice as strong as it was roughly twenty-five years ago not sound like a strong indication that something fundamental about our world (or our interface with the world!) is changing? I would say that as people have become more connected to each other, we are now seeing a new force come into play: more and more of us are gradually waking up to the possibilities. The hard determinists who say we each have no control over our future are being overtaken, and a child born today will assume that people have always had a substantial amount of control over their health and their future: certainly, much more than people raised in the twentieth century were taught to believe was possible. The Wired article has many more fascinating tangents, then concludes with this powerful paragraph:

Ironically, Big Pharma's attempt to dominate the central nervous system has ended up revealing how powerful the brain really is. The placebo response doesn't care if the catalyst for healing is a triumph of pharmacology, a compassionate therapist, or a syringe of salt water. All it requires is a reasonable expectation of getting better. That's potent medicine.

Indeed! In Do Animals Have Souls, I described the old way of thinking this way: "the only thing that matters is matter, and consciousness has no part in the universe we are observing". Why was that viewpoint promoted so aggressively for so many years?

Do you remember the article I published in the North American version of Urban Garden Magazine last year, called "Why the Fifth Dimension is a Dangerous Idea"?. In it, I suggested that it seemed very strange that scientists like Einstein embraced the idea that our reality is defined at the fifth dimension almost a century ago, and yet most of the general public are not familiar with this concept. Could there have been reasons why certain factions would rather we not know just how much power we all really have, and could this be connected to the knowledge that we are navigating within a fifth-dimensional probability space rather than a linear fourth-dimensional "line of time"?

Coming Soon
I'm pleased to tell you that the next issue of Urban Garden magazine will have another article I've written, this one also connects the fifth dimension to the some of the ideas we're talking about in this entry, and in other past entries such as Placebos and Nocebos and Now vs. the Future. The article will be called "Placebos and Nocebos".

Ever hear of the Global Consciousness Experiment? It was a study run by Princeton University which looked for correlations on people's ability to predict what random number would be generated, and discovered that these abilities rose slightly on days when events captured the attention of larger parts of the world population, such as September 11 2001. It also showed that this ability to predict a random number was slowly rising over the course of the study, from 1998 to 2002. More evidence that our awareness and our interface with reality is changing?

In entries like The Long Undulating Snake, What's Around the Corner and Consciousness in Frames Per Second we've looked at other ways of fitting these ideas into my approach to visualizing the dimensions that our reality springs from. There is a beautiful and complex interaction between the observer and the observed happening here, and we can see evidence of that interplay in many surprising ways. We're going to continue this discussion with an upcoming entry called Monkeys Love Metallica.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

P.S. - I should also mention that New Scientist magazine published an article a few months ago called "Placebo Effect Caught in the Act" in which it described how scientists were actually able to track how the brain responded differently to pain when a patient was told a painkiller had been administered but it was really a placebo: more evidence of the amount of power our minds have over the reality we're observing.

Next: Dark Flow

The Long Undulating Snake

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKNJmrdA0Fg

(an amusing shot from the parody of Imagining the Tenth Dimension created by
CollegeHumor.com that we looked at last time, in "Ice Age in 4D")

One of the more well-known phrases from my original Imagining the Tenth Dimension animation is that when each of us thinks of ourselves as a shape in the fourth spatial dimension, we're more like a long undulating snake, a shape with a beginning, a middle and an end. I've talked before about futurist and science fiction writer Bruce Sterling who refers to this kind of fourth-dimensional information-set as a spime, and that's really the same concept.

In Suffering in the Multiverse, we took an extreme look at all of the universes that could be out there - not just in the parallel universes that result from chance and choice as per the proof published in 2007 by a team of scientists at Oxford under the direction of physicist David Deutsch, equating the quantum wave function with the different versions of our universe that result from chance and choice... but also in the multiverse landscape of all the 10 to the power of 500 potential universes that scientists like Brian Greene (who we just quoted in Does the Multiverse Really Exist?) are now beginning to say are just as real as the universe we find ourselves to be living within.

Then, in The Biocentric Universe Part 2, we looked at an amazing theory that shows how life creates time and the universe, and not the other way around. Does that sound crazy? Not when we think of ourselves from within the fifth dimension rather than the fourth.

Let's look at that "long undulating snake" visualization of ourselves within the fourth dimension. When you die, there will be one version of that shape which will represent the life you experienced from conception to death. But right now you are some place within that 4D shape, and there are many branches that lie before you. Those branches come from the fifth dimension, the dimension that Kaluza proved to Einstein is where our universe is defined, the dimension which the Holographic Universe theory says our universe is just a shadow of, the dimension where my project insists the "spooky" non-local nature of quantum mechanics makes sense when we realize that our 4D "line of time" is not continuous, because it's actually being created one planck frame at a time as our universe twists, turns and folds within our fifth dimensional probability space.

So, here you are at this very instant, someplace within that 4D shape. You can imagine that you have one long "tail" stretching from "now" back to conception, and then a "ray" of possible futures in the fifth dimension, making your shape more like a dandelion gone to seed than a "snake".

But it turns out that that's only half the story. As we've explored in blogs like The Past is an Illusion and Time in Either Direction, there are also an equally complex number of ways that you could have gotten to the "now" you're in at this instant, so in the fifth dimension you are really more like the very centre of the head of that dandelion gone to seed, forgetting about the stalk - there are branching, probabilistic versions of you that extend out into the past just as much as into the future.

Some people call this idea mind-blowing, I prefer to call it liberating. By understanding just how much freedom we each have at any particular "now" to navigate out of traps and negative loops, and visualizing the best-possible-versions of ourselves that already exist within the fifth dimension, we can head towards those goals. Think of the scientific evidence concerning the effectiveness of placebos and nocebos, and the burgeoning science of epigenetics (which shows that changes in attitude and lifestyle can change which genes are switched on or off): when you add those ideas in you can see just how intimately we are each involved in choosing one set of branches over another as we travel through our lives. This is not just about entering one parallel universe or another depending on whether I slept in an extra ten minutes this morning or not: this is about being fully engaged with the beautiful possibilities we have before us.

By understanding that the past is just as complex a structure as the future, we can start to visualize how such amazing theories as Lanza and Berman's Biocentric Universe make more sense - but all of this doesn't really start to gel until we start to imagine this "dandelion gone to seed" imagery from an even higher extra dimension, where all of those possible branches exist as a single point.

Then, finally, we've reached the purest expression of the concept that Einstein was thinking about when he said there is ultimately no distinction, no separation, between past, present and future.

But what about the law of the conservation of energy? How can there be all of these different versions of our universe without running out of energy? That law still stands: there is a certain total amount of energy within a particular version of each dimension, and that's one of the things that physicists use to calculate the amount of dark matter and dark energy that is affecting our particular universe. But each additional dimension multiplies the possibilities for the way that energy can be expressed. There are not nearly as many possible expressions of energy for our imaginary 2D flatlander as there are for us in the third dimension, for instance. And I really love the concept of digital physics because it tells us that ultimately, our reality is not based upon energy, but information. As MIT professor and quantum computing expert Seth Lloyd says in his mind-expanding book "Programming the Universe":

"The conventional history of the universe pays great attention to energy: How much is there? Where is it? What is it doing? By contrast, in the story of the universe told in this book, the primary actor in the physical history of the universe is information. Ultimately, information and energy play complimentary roles in the universe: Energy makes physical systems do things. Information tells them what to do."

Information equals reality. And that long undulating snake imagery is really just another way of trying to get people to think about reality as information, because that is a liberating approach with far-reaching implications.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: The Flexi-Laws of Physics

Edit: The above blog entry was published in 2009. Here's a great entry published by physicist Sean Carroll in 2010 that gives a good explanation of how the laws of conservation of energy only apply locally. As our spacetime expands, so does the amount of available energy: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2010/02/22/energy-is-not-conserved/

Placebos and Nocebos

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pg2Fxp7DgX0

Last weekend I had a great time watching a new movie from Sam Raimi: "Drag Me to Hell". Like some of Mr. Raimi's early work (Evil Dead II being the classic example), this is a film that successfully walks the line between horror and very black comedy. We've talked before about empathy, audiences, and comedy and in entries like The Comedian and The Musician, we're connecting to that idea somewhat here as well.

Coincidentally, Raimi's film can be related to a word I just learned a few days ago: the word is "nocebo", which is the opposite of "placebo". In entries like The Placebo Effect, Crossing Your Arms to Change Your Trajectory, and Evolution's Fast Lane, we've talked about the surprising scientific evidence that a person's attitude can affect their own health right down to the expression of their genes, and in The Biocentric Universe we talked about the even more remarkable information that this can affect what genes they pass on to their offspring! A placebo, then, can actually confuse the results of a study testing a new drug, because some of the people receiving the placebo (which should have no effect at all) will experience an improvement in their condition because they believe they are being given a drug that will help them. As it turns out, it's their own attitude which is effecting the positive change they experience.

How does a nocebo work, then? Let's say a doctor gives a patient a harmless placebo as part of a test for a new drug, but warns the patient of possible side effects. What does it mean if the patient then develops those side effects? They didn't take the drug, all they got was the sugar pill, and now their hair is falling out because the doctor warned that this was a possible side effect? In the same way that the placebo effect tells us that people can improve their health simply by changing their attitude, the nocebo effect shows us that a person can make themselves ill by the same process.

In Drag Me to Hell, the main character is cursed by a gypsy woman, and told that she has three days to live. How different would that story be if we replaced the gypsy woman with a cancer specialist, who then told the main character they had three months to live? If we are to believe an article published recently in New Scientist magazine, the answer is that both scenarios may be more similar than we realize. Here's a quote from that article, written by Helen Pilcher:

Take Sam Shoeman, who was diagnosed with end-stage liver cancer in the 1970s and given just months to live. Shoeman duly died in the allotted time frame - yet the autopsy revealed that his doctors had got it wrong. The tumour was tiny and had not spread. "He didn't die from cancer, but from believing he was dying of cancer," says Meador. "If everyone treats you as if you are dying, you buy into it. Everything in your whole being becomes about dying."

Cases such as Shoeman's may be extreme examples of a far more widespread phenomenon. Many patients who suffer harmful side effects, for instance, may do so only because they have been told to expect them. What's more, people who believe they have a high risk of certain diseases are more likely to get them than people with the same risk factors who believe they have a low risk. It seems modern witch doctors wear white coats and carry stethoscopes.

The idea that believing you are ill can make you ill may seem far-fetched, yet rigorous trials have established beyond doubt that the converse is true - that the power of suggestion can improve health. This is the well-known placebo effect. Placebos cannot produce miracles, but they do produce measurable physical effects.

Ideas telling us that we live in troubled times, where there is little hope for the future, that environmental toxins are slowly killing us, or secret government agencies are deliberately poisoning us, then, take on a whole new significance. Could modern society be creating a dangerously poisonous environment with a constant influx of fear-based input? Could it really be so simple as avoiding entertainment and news that are designed to scare us, and we'll become a healthier society? Here's another few paragraphs from that New Scientist article:

Alarmingly, the nocebo effect can even be catching. Cases where symptoms without an identifiable cause spread through groups of people have been around for centuries, a phenomenon known as mass psychogenic illness. One outbreak (see "It's catching") inspired a recent study by psychologists Irving Kirsch and Giuliana Mazzoni of the University of Hull in the UK.

They asked some of a group of students to inhale a sample of normal air, which all participants were told contained "a suspected environmental toxin" linked to headache, nausea, itchy skin and drowsiness. Half of the participants also watched a woman inhale the sample and apparently develop these symptoms. Students who inhaled were more likely to report these symptoms than those who did not. Symptoms were also more pronounced in women, particularly those who had seen another apparently become ill - a bias also seen in mass psychogenic illness.

The study shows that if you hear of or observe a possible side effect, you are more likely to develop it yourself. That puts doctors in a tricky situation. "On the one hand people have the right to be informed about what to expect, but this makes it more likely they will experience these effects," says Mazzoni.

How many people thought they might have caught the H1N1 virus in the last month or two but were actually fine? How can we protect ourselves from the nocebo effect when we are bombarded with information about how sick we are about to get? If we really are all connected together in ways unseen, then we have to get better together. Certainly, laughing at to the boogeyman can help (another reason I bring up black comedies like Drag Me to Hell), but clearly there really are things that make us sick, and recognizing which is the nocebo effect and which is a real danger to our health and our future requires us to not bury our heads in the sand.

As another coincidence, I just started listening to an audiobook called Spontaneous Evolution, by Bruce Lipton and Steve Bhaerman, and not far into the very first CD it too mentions the nocebo effect. Here's what they have to say about it: ultimately, knowing about nocebos should be no different than knowing about placebos - in both cases, we are shown that we have more control over our own lives than we've been led to believe, and all we have to do is recognize the patterns that make us the way we are now, and find ways to change the patterns that we don't like. Lipton and Bhaerman caution us, though, that some of these patterns are so deeply ingrained from a very early age that it can be hard for us to even recognize which patterns are limiting us: as with most of what we've been talking about here, it's our need to move beyond the "now" of our limited position within spacetime, and embrace the much larger "everything" that is timelessness, that will help us to find the way to a better version of ourselves and our universe.

To finish, here's a video for my song about using the power of the mind, imagination, or meditation to get to a safe and healing place: "Turquoise and White".

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89oKPEmMT_k

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: Surveillance

Polls Archive 40 - Now vs. the Future

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khTlSGfZWiU

Poll 40: "People who focus on the "now" rather than their possible future paths are more likely to be moody, indecisive, and envious." Poll ended May 26 2009. 45% agreed while the majority disagreed.

A number of visitors to the blog had some trouble accepting this supposition, which relates to a specific entry I published last month called "The Time Paradox". In it, I talked about a book of the same name by Philip Zimbardo, professor emeritus of psychology at Stanford University. In a promotional video for his book he tells us that tests given to children showed a clear link years later to which of them were more successful and well-adjusted as they entered adulthood: four-year-olds were offered the choice of a marshmallow right now, or two marshmallows if they were willing to wait for twenty minutes. Those children who jumped at the single marshmallow rather than thinking about the greater future reward coming if they would wait, to use Dr. Zimbardo's words, grew into young adults who were more likely to be "moody, indecisive, and envious". Those who did wait went on as adolescents to score an average of 210 points higher on the Scholastic Aptitude Test and to be much more likely to be rated by independent examiners as "competent" or "attentive", while those who were not able to delay gratification were more likely to be described as "sulky" or "irritable".

As I mentioned in my previous blog about the Time Paradox, the difficulty some people have in accepting these results may be connected to the current popularity of Ekhart Tolle's writing: The Power of Now, he tells us, is better than the ego-based striving for tomorrow and fretting about the past. Sometimes, though, living in the Now is living in a trap of endlessly repeating negative patterns, and that is not the way to make your life better. Who would disagree that "attitude affects outcome"? What psychiatrist would disagree that healing can't really start until it comes from within? What entrepeneur would disagree that "the eye of the tiger" is how you get to the future version of yourself that you hold as your heart's desire? What athlete would disagree with the power of positive visualization techniques? What health care provider has not seen people who lose their interest in tomorrow, their will to carry on, and death follows?

All of these are related to the processes of engaging not just in the "now", but in the branching future paths that exist as potential for each of us. In The Placebo Effect I talked about the surprising results of medical studies showing how difficult it can be to test new drugs when patients given placebos will also do better because of their assumption that they are being given some new treatment. In Changing Your Genes Part 2 I talked about the amazing new science of epigenetics, which proves that people can actually change their own gene expression through changes in lifestyle and attitude. And in Creativity and the Quantum Universe, I talked about how this "engaging in the future paths" concept has been proved to be basic to our universe and to the basic structures of all living things.

And where are all these future paths that hold this amazing promise, these powerful tools that people around the world are using to moving beyond a "now" that is not to their liking and to a possible "then" that exists within their set of all possible future states? According to my way of visualizing, this is all within the fifth dimension, within a probability space that connects to Everett's Many Worlds and the hidden patterns of the universe, and which each of us are navigating within one planck after another right at this very "now".

Welcome to a better future you. And enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: A compilation of Polls 31 to 40

Tenth Dimension Polls Archive 25

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ddj360e4sZk

Poll 25 - "The placebo effect is real - people who think they are getting medicine are more likely to get better. This demonstrates that we have more control over our health than we realize." Poll ended October 18, 2008

This has been one of the central ideas behind the Imagining the Tenth Dimension project. If I were more interested in marketing this project and less interested in being true to these ideas, I would be telling everyone that my book shows people a secret way of understanding reality, and all they have to do is visualize the Ten Dimensions and all of their deepest wishes will be realized.

This project is not about easy answers, though, because what we're talking about is a complicated interaction between choice, chance and circumstance. Nonetheless, with blog entries like Crossing You Arms to Change Your Trajectory, Changing Your Genes, Changing Your Genes 2, Magnets and Souls, Everyone Has a Story, and The Placebo Effect we've talked about the surprising scientific evidence that we each have much more control over our own well-being than we have traditionally been led to believe.

Is there a certain power in understanding why things are the way they are, and understanding that change from our current trajectory is easier than we might realize within a many-worlds universe of branching options? Unquestionably. And since the vast majority of visitors to this blog were willing to agree with the idea that we have more control over our individual health than we've traditionally been led to believe, it sounds like this idea is not that big a stretch for people to wrap their minds around.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Next: a compendium of Polls 21 to 25

Click here for the archive of polls 1 to 10.
Click here for the archive of polls 11 to 15.
Click here for the archive of polls 16 to 20.

The Placebo Effect

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ve3xtIKiyRs

placebo :

1 a: a usually pharmacologically inert preparation prescribed more for the mental relief of the patient than for its actual effect on a disorder b: an inert or innocuous substance used especially in controlled experiments testing the efficacy of another substance (as a drug)
2: something tending to soothe

- from the Mirriam-Webster Online Dictionary

In entries like Changing Your Genes and Changing Your Genes Part 2, we've talked about the surprising new scientific research that indicates people can change which genes are expressed purely through changes in lifestyle. The idea that each of us are dealt a certain genetic hand of cards at conception, then, which destines us to a particular future of good or poor health depending upon our genetic luck of the draw, is an old idea with much less weight than it used to have. In Crossing Your Arms to Change Your Trajectory, we talked about a different scientific study showing that something as simple as changing your physical stance will have an effect on the decisions you make and the paths you choose.

In my book, the chapter "How Much Control Do We Have" wrestled with a related set of ideas, and as we just discussed in my blog entry We're Already Dead (But That's Okay), even if we do have a surprising amount of control there are still a combination of factors that cause us to have one life or another from out of the bush-like branching structure of possible futures that extends out for each of us from our current "now". It's a balancing act, as we live out a life where each of us have free will, but are also affected by a certain amount of randomness and the actions that have come before.

There was an interesting article by Michael Brooks in the August 23rd issue of New Scientist Magazine about "The Power of the Placebo Effect", which discusses research being conducted by doctors Luana Colloca and Fabrizio Benedetti of the University of Turin in Italy. Here are some excerpts from that article:

...Benedetti and others are now claiming that the true nature of placebo is far more complex. The placebo effect, it turns out, can lead us on a merry dance. Drug trials, Benedetti says, are particularly problematic. "An ineffective drug can be better than a placebo in a standard trial," says Benedetti.

The opposite can also be true, as Ted Kaptchuk of Harvard Medical School in Boston points out. "Often, an active drug is not better than placebo in a standard trial, even when we can be confident that the active drug does work," he says.

Some researchers are so taken aback by the results of their studies that they are calling for the very term "placebo" to be scrapped. Others suggest the latest findings undermine the very foundations of evidence-based medicine. "Placebo is ruining the credibility of medicine," Benedetti says."The findings threaten the very credibility of modern medicine"

How did it come to this? After all, the foundation of evidence-based medicine, the clinical trial, is meant to rule out the placebo effect.

If you're testing a drug such as a new painkiller, it's supposed to work like this. First, you recruit the test subjects. Then you randomly assign each person to one of two groups to ensure both groups are alike. One group gets the painkiller, the other gets a dummy treatment. Then, you might think, all you have to do is compare the two groups.

It's not that simple, though, because this is where the placebo problem kicks in. If people getting an experimental painkiller expect it to work, it will work to some extent... If the control group know they're getting a dummy pill whereas the other group know they're getting the "real" drug, the experimental painkiller might appear to work better than the dummy when in fact the difference between the groups is entirely due to the placebo effect.

So it's crucial not to tell the subjects what they are getting. Those running the trial should not know either, so they cannot give anything away, creating the gold standard of clinical trials, the double-blind randomised controlled trial. This does not eliminate the placebo effect, but should make it equal in both groups. According to conventional wisdom, in a double-blind trial any "extra" effect in the group given the real drug must be entirely down to the drug's physical effect.

Later on in the article, it talks about a study involving a specific painkiller called a CCK-antagonist" that was known to be effective. The article continues:

...Now comes the mind-boggling part. When Benedetti gave the same drug to volunteers without telling them what he was doing, it had no effect. "If it were a real painkiller, we should expect no difference compared to the routine overt administration," he says. "What we found is that the covert CCK-antagonist was completely ineffective in relieving pain."

If you don't know you have been given the painkiller, it has no effect."

Please click on this link to read this whole article, there are many more surprises revealed. One of the most important things, the article tells us, in determining the effectiveness of a treatment is whether the patient has confidence in their treatment. Homeopathic remedies and other oft-ridiculed alternative medicines, then, take on a different light in the face of this evidence, as do the suppressed information that psychedelics or meditation may actually be helping people to live happier, healthier lives: and all of this points to the idea that we, as observers of a quantum wave function representing our possible future selves, may have much more control over our own well-being than we've been led to believe.

This is the current poll question, then, here at the tenth dimension blog, and it is based upon the New Scientist article we've been looking at today:

The placebo effect is real - people who think they are getting medicine are more likely to get better. This demonstrates that we have more control over our health than we realize.

Do you agree or disagree?

Clearly, the power of the placebo effect does not say modern medicine is bunk. What it does say, though, is that a doctor or caregiver who has the confidence and trust of their patients is going to be more successful in helping those people find their way to good health, and that's an inspiring scientifically proven fact.

Finally... for fun, here's one of the 26 songs attached to this project, and it's about the conundrum of how much control we have as we move one planck frame after another through the bush-like branching structure of possible futures. It's called "Making It Up As I Go". A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpkehQ97ltA


Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Related Entries
Song 15 of 26 - What Was Done Today
David Jay Brown and Psychedelics
Crossed Wires in the Brain
Your Fifth-Dimensional Self
The Fifth Dimension Isn't Magic

Next: Why Do We Need More Than 3 Dimensions?

Crossing Your Arms to Change Your Trajectory

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lr5BKZPnHbc

There's a news story circulating in the last couple of days about a new study that indicates that people who fold their arms will, without even being aware of it, increase their perseverance and activate their unconscious desires to succeed. The researchers gave random selections of university students a set of problems, some of which were unsolvable. Before the study began, some of the students were instructed to sit with their arms folded, and researchers were surprised to see a strong correlation between this body stance and the number of people who kept trying to solve the unsolvable puzzles. The results of this study were published in the most recent issue of the European Journal of Social Psychology.

It's so simple: attitude affects outcome. As physical creatures, our physicality affects our interface with reality, our attitude. This is why simple techniques such as breathing exercises, meditations, guided visualization, regular physical activity, and even changes to physical stance like folding your arms can so easily affect a person's trajectory as they twist and turn in the fifth dimension. Here's a quote from chapter nine of my book:

Have you ever met someone who claimed they had been too busy to get a cold, so they continued working and stayed healthy? Perhaps that person also mentioned that after a month or two they took a break and suddenly the cold sent them to bed. What is the mechanism that could allow a body to avoid or at least stave off a virus for so long, while others nearby are immediately struck down with the same virus? Could this be an example of people finding a way to collapse a different quantum reality simply through their desire to do so?

Back in my blog entry Information Equals Reality, I worked through a simple visualization technique that involved nothing more complicated than sitting up straighter in your chair:

We can ... move ourselves to different trajectories within our probability space. Try this one: imagine a warm ball of energy starting at the base of your spine, gradually working its way up your back, making you sit up straighter, creating a radiant glow out through your shoulders and the top of your head that opens your eyes wider and makes you feel more alert. Do you feel it? It really is that simple to change your energy, because it's all just information. Think about this: just standing up straighter, you might say, improves your body mass index (my son the med student will say "not really", but he's the one who said this to me as a joke, and I still think it's a useful idea)!

My song Turquoise and White is also about using attitude and physicality to change our trajectory. In a blog entry about that song, I say this:

Why should meditation cause things to change about our physical reality? Why should ritualized physical activities like Tai Chi cause people to think more clearly, become more "centered"? Why should changing our physical stance, or breathing more deeply, or even just making a conscious effort to smile more be able to change so much about the mind? These ideas are all part of the larger concepts we've been exploring here: what does it mean to be a quantum observer, occupying a physical body, navigating through the information that is our reality?

In my last blog, I talked about the idea of us as flatlanders in the fifth dimension, unable to see the whole picture because there is no way for us to be lifted above our fifth dimensional plane to see the whole picture of state space for our universe. But just because we can't see the extra dimensions doesn't mean that we can't use simple tricks that affect our physicality and our mental attitude to harvest the potentials that exist within the information that becomes our reality: and that's a powerful idea. But it's also a double-edged sword, because depression, disease, and other negative loops can affect our fifth-dimensional trajectory just as easily. Next blog: Everyone Has a Story.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Some related followup entries:
Changing Your Genes
Changing Your Genes Part 2
The Placebo Effect
Magnets and Souls
Crossed Wires in the Brain
David Jay Brown and Psychedelics

Other entries about how attitude affects outcome:
Song 3 of 26 - Burn the Candle Brightly
Boredom and Consciousness Part Two
Everything Fits Together in the Zero at the End
Waveforms in the Ten Dimensions
Remembering the Future

Other entries about how physicality affects our fifth dimensional trajectory:
Music and the Dance of Creativity
Connections
Constructive Interference
Living In the Fifth Dimension
Seeing Eye to Eye