{61} What do you believe?
There is science that shows a feedback loop between body language and self-confidence. Medical research is looking at why placebos work, when technically they never, ever should. Sports coaches encourage creative visualization for their athletes as it is proven to lead to enhanced performance. My therapist has been suggesting that I do positive affirmations.
To me, this all speaks to the same phenomenon: belief.
Whether a placebo or positive affirmations or creative visualization or hypnosis or (on the other side of the coin) hypochondria, it all boils down to our beliefs shaping our reality.
It’s possible to go back decades, even centuries, and find some exploration of that idea, that reality is what we make it. So, while this is not a new insight, I’ve found it challenging to dig out research on it that does not smack of pseudo-science (or in the parlance, “woo woo”). The Secret, for instance, which promoted the whole idea of the “Law of Attraction,” was hugely popular and completely without any scientific merit. The movie What the Bleep Do We Know!? was highly entertaining and…questionable, at best.
More applicable is the work done by cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman, which I only just found out about recently via an article about him at Quanta, The Evolutionary Argument Against Reality, in which he said, “Neurons, brains, space … these are just symbols we use, they’re not real. It’s not that there’s a classical brain that does some quantum magic. It’s that there’s no brain! Quantum mechanics says that classical objects — including brains — don’t exist.” (His TEDtalk is a good primer to his general perspective.)
His theory of reality and how we perceive it is not the rolly-polly version that “quantum consciousness” purveyors of woo-woo try to sell. Not everything is up for grabs, for one thing; we perceive all that we do in the way that we do because the evolution of our species used the hacks that made us most fit for our environment in order to survive and propagate.
That doesn’t discount the power of belief, though. It might explain why Jesus could walk on water, perhaps — maybe he really could just because his brain was wired to perceive reality differently. He thought he could, so he did. Or, more accurately, his brain did not view “water” the same way everyone around him did. Perhaps to him it was magical as walking across a wooden bridge.
My brain is not wired that way, because to me, deep water is a drowning hazard. I’m not going to walk on it because of how “water” has been constructed by me throughout life: it is fluid, it can drown you, don’t go trying to walk around on it. Simplistic, but also accurate, I think, and logic one can apply to other kinds of mythic miracle workers like the Buddha or Rama, etc.
I guess the intriguing thing to me is the limit to which we can affect our perception of reality. So if ability to transcend reality is dependant on the equivalent of a genetic disorder, then, what can we change?
Certainly, the “Law of Attraction” and good-luck charms don’t do much (as gamblers everywhere will attest) — no, we can’t consciously directly affect reality by thinking what we want into existence. We cannot walk on water just by believing hard enough that we can, or avoid trauma because we think happy thoughts. No one is exempt from hard times, grief, loss, and heartbreak. Some of us will just always stub our toes walking around the house before our first cup of coffee. To a very real degree, it turns out that our ability to interpret reality is both hard-wired and limited, due to evolution.
Yet, change does happen. People learn how to be optimistic and/or happy through affirmations, athletes improve their performance with creative visualization, people stop smoking after hypnosis, people are cured of cancer by inert sugar pills. A lot of this is n=1 evidence, but I don’t think we can throw out hypnosis any more than we can throw out the placebo effect. There are many phenomena that were once believed to be paranormal (such as lightning). Our inability to yet predict or explain it doesn’t mean the phenomenon isn’t real. Enough proof of “successful” placebo treatments exists to call into question any attempt to brush off uncomfortable inquiries about visualization or hypnosis.
I’ve been trying to find synergetic, legitimate research done on the nature of hypnosis and creative visualization and placebos, and unsurprisingly have not found much of value.
Disclosure: this is all about me. I want to know how much I can alter my beliefs about myself, because I have some profoundly negative beliefs that I think possibly affect me physically.
Part of the reason I think that what we believe about ourselves can affect us in real ways is that my mother was a hypochondriac. She definitely had the maladies that ruined her health, such as bipolar disorder and asthma and thyroid issues and pinched nerves and CFIDS and, in the end, colorectal cancer. I was there, I vouch for the fact she was not imagining any of that. But the flip side is that she always believed something was wrong with her, and always predicted ever more dire illnesses, and yes, maybe she just kept guessing until a new one appeared. But it’s odd to me how the previous illness always receded when the next one came along. About the only things she had “for life” were bipolar disorder and cancer (because it killed her).
I want to know if the reverse is true, and has a process. Meditation? Visualization? Hypnosis? Are humans able to convince themselves of the validity — the truth — of a fact about themselves through the act of believing it? What is the bridge here between the subconscious and consciousness? Is it something so simple as repetition? Denial? Mindfulness? Faith?
The conundrum is, if we cannot “believe” hard enough to make something real, then how is it we can believe enough to make something real?
