Seven weeks before Muhammad Ali met World Heavyweight Champion George Foreman for their “rumble in the jungle” at Kinshasa in 1974, he practiced his punches as if he couldn’t care less, taking a few desultory swipes at his sparring partner as if distractedly popping a speed bag. Mostly he would lie against the ropes and allow his opponent to pound away at him from every angle.
In the latter years of his fighting career, Ali spent much of his training time learning how to take punches. He studied how to shift his head by just a hair a microsecond before the connection was made, or where in his body he could mentally deflect the punch, so that it would no longer hurt. He was not training his body to win. He was training his mind not to lose, at the point when deep fatigue sets in around the twelfth round and most boxers cave in.1 The most important work was being done, not in the ring, but in his armchair. He was fighting the fight in his head.
Ali was a master of intention. He developed a set of mental skills that eventually altered his performance in the ring. Before a fight, Ali used every self-motivational technique out there: affirmation; visualization; mental rehearsal; self-confirmation; and perhaps the most powerful epigram of personal worth ever uttered, “I am the greatest.” Ali also made public statements of his intentions. His constant barrage of rhyming couplets and quatrains, seemingly so innocuous, were highly specific intentions in disguise:
Archie Moore
Is sure
To hug the floor
By the end of four
Now Clay swings with a right
What a beautiful swing
And the punch knocks the Bear
Clear out of the ring.
Before a fight, Ali repeated these little rhymes like a mantra—to the press, to his opponent, and even in the ring—until he himself accepted them as fact.
When they met in Kinshasa, Foreman was seven years younger than Ali and among the most savage fighters in the ring. Just two months earlier, he had left Ken Norton for dead with five blows to the head after only two rounds.
Nevertheless, in the weeks before the fight, when reporters pressed Ali about the two-to-one odds against him, Ali had rewritten the history of the Norton–Foreman fight, which he repeated, virtually verbatim, to every journalist who interviewed him.
“He’s got a hard-push punch but he can’t hit,” he would say, punching the air in front of the reporter’s nose. “Foreman just pushes people down. He just got slow punches, take a year to get there. You think that’s going to bother me? This is going to be the greatest upset in the history of boxing.”2
Ali’s intention came to pass in the jungle. He also made masterful use of intention to beat Joe Frazier in the Philippines later that year, in perhaps the most brutal and stunning display of boxing of all time.
This time, he created a voodoo doll. Ali turned his ferocious opponent into a tiny rubber gorilla, which he carried around with him in his top pocket, taking a swipe at it with his right from time to time for the television cameras: “It’s gonna be a thrilla and a chilla and a killa when I get the gorilla in Manila.” By the time Frazier entered the ring, he had been reduced in his own mind to something less than human.
Besides these verbalized intentions, Ali carried out mental intentions by rehearsing every moment of the fight in his head: the fatigue in his legs, the sweat pouring off his body, the pain to his kidneys, the bruises on his face, the flash of the photographers, the exultant screams of the crowd, even the moment when the referee lifts his arm in victory against Frazier. He sent an intention to his body to win and his body responded by following orders.
To take intention out of the laboratory, I began to sift through the data from people or groups who were using intention successfully in real life. I wanted to study their techniques, the particular thought processes they underwent when sending intention, and would try to extrapolate from their experiences some tools that all the rest of us could use when sending intentions. I was also curious about the extent of their mental reach—just how far people had been able to push their intentions.
The most instructive examples came from sports, not only from the greatest athletes of all time, but also from other elite sportsmen and sportswomen. Athletes of all varieties now routinely practice what is variously termed “mental rehearsal,” “implicit practice,”3 or even “covert rehearsal.” Focused intention is now deemed essential to alter and improve performance. Swimmers, skaters, weight lifters, and football players employ intention to enhance their level of performance and consistency. It is even being used in leisure sports, such as golf or rock climbing.
Any modern coach of a competitive sport routinely offers training in some form of mental rehearsal, which is touted as the decisive element separating the elite sportsperson from the second-division player. National-level soccer players, for instance, are more likely to use imagery than those who remain at the provincial or local levels.4 Virtually all Canadian Olympic athletes use mental imagery.
Psychologist Allan Paivio, professor emeritus of the University of Western Ontario, first proposed that the brain uses “dual coding” to process verbal and nonverbal information simultaneously.5 Mental practice has been shown to work just as well as physical practice for patterns and timing.6 Paivio’s model has been largely adapted to help athletes with motivation or in learning or improving a certain skill set.7 The techniques involved in mental rehearsal have been exhaustively studied and written about in scientific literature and popular publications,8 and their credibility was given a further boost in 1990, when the National Academy of Sciences examined all the scientific studies to date on these methods and declared them effective.9
Athletic mental rehearsal has been incorrectly considered synonymous with visualization. “Visualization” implies that you observe yourself in the situation, as if watching a mental video featuring yourself or seeing yourself through another pair of eyes. Although this may be useful in other areas of life, visualizing oneself from an external perspective in a sports event can hamper athletic performance. Mental rehearsal also differs from positive thinking; happy thoughts on their own do not work in competitive sports.10
The most successful internal rehearsal involves imagining the sports event from the athlete’s perspective as though he or she is actually competing. It amounts to a mental trial run—Ali imagining his right fist at the moment of impact on Frazier’s left eye. The athlete envisages the future in minute detail as it is unfolding. Champion athletes forecast and rehearse every aspect of the situation, and the steps they should take to overcome any possible setbacks.
Tracy Caulkin used intention to land a third gold medal in the 1984 Olympics. Caulkin had already broken five world records and sixty-three American records, and at the age of twenty-three was considered the best American swimmer who had ever lived. All she needed to complete her trophy wall was a few Olympic golds.
At the time, electronic touch pads had just replaced stopwatches. Whereas the watch could distinguish only differences of hundredths of a second, the new electronic technology distinguish could the lead within a thousandth of a second—four hundred times faster than the blink of an eye. In the Olympics relay swimmers are given two-hundredths of a second of grace to leave their block before their previous teammate hits the touch pad. This kind of fine timing is critical; even a single coat of paint on one side of the pool can make a swimmer’s lane one-thousandth of a second longer to swim and give another swimmer the leading edge.
During the four-woman 400-meter relay race, Tracy took the lead by diving in one-hundredth of a second before her returning teammate hit the touch pad.
Although all her competitors had a similar level of fitness, Caulkin had one enormous advantage. She already knew every moment of her swim, from the dive and the cool rush of water past her head to the very moment when she would lunge out in front. Tracy had practiced that hair’s-width lead, the precise moment when she would leave the block a hundredth of a second earlier than her opponents, every night inside her head. The conclusion of the Olympic relay had entirely depended upon the specificity of her intention.
The most successful athletes break down their performances into tiny component parts and work on improving specific aspects. For general mastery of their sport, they imagine a flawless performance.11 They concentrate on the most difficult moments and work out good coping strategies—how to stay in control in the face of adversity, such as a pulled muscle or an umpire’s adverse call. Different intention is employed, depending on whether they are first learning a skill or simply wishing to reinforce and improve their technique. Like Muhammad Ali, elite athletes learn how to block out images representing doubt. If an image of difficulty pops into their heads, they become extremely adept at changing the internal movie, quickly editing the scene to imagine success.12
Winning depends on how specifically you can mentally rehearse. Seasoned athletes use vivid, highly detailed internal images and run-throughs of the entire performance.13 The most important aspect of the intention is to rehearse the victory; rehearsal appears to help secure victory. Successful competitors rehearse their own feelings, particularly their elation and emotional response to winning: the reactions of their parents, the prizes or medals, the postmatch celebration, and the residual awards like sponsorships.14 They imagine that the crowd is cheering for their performance alone.
Experienced athletes engage all their senses in their mental rehearsal. They not only have a visual internal image of the future event but also hear it, feel it, smell it, and taste it—the ambience, the competitors, the sweat of their bodies, the applause. Of all the sensations, the most vital for athletics appears to be mentally rehearsing the “feel,” or kinesthetic sensations.15 The more experienced athletes are, the better they are at imagining the feel of their bodies when engaged in sport.16 Champion rowers are most successful when they can forecast the “feel” of every part of the race, from the drag on the oar to the strain on their muscles.17
Some athletes find that it helps to study the actual setting where the sporting event is to take place first and then to imagine themselves there. Those who can combine the knowledge of the sports venue with mental rehearsal tend to be more successful than those who simply use mental rehearsal on its own.18
Rocky Bleier, former running back for the Pittsburgh Steelers, used intention to help the Steelers win the Super Bowl. His technique was to saturate his mind with the details of specific plays. He carried out mental rehearsals in the morning, before the team meal and last thing before drifting off to sleep every day of the two weeks before a game. He also found it reassuring to run through the entire catalog of moves one final time just before play. While sitting on the bench, he again rehearsed some thirty runs and thirty passes. No matter what the field threw up to him that day, he was determined to be ready.19
Techniques differ among the various sports. Those mental rehearsals that work best for sports requiring aerobic ability and fast, coordinated movement tended to fail with strength training. Weight lifters are most successful after carrying out a mental intention that galvanizes them to lift an impossibly heavy object.20
Conventional wisdom has it that the best state for performance is a state of relaxation, but as I found with masters of intention, a relaxed state is not necessarily optimum. In a study of karate, using relaxation techniques before carrying out the intentions did not improve performance.21 It was useful only if the participant was nervous and needed to be calmed down in order to perform better.22, 23 Relaxation and hypnosis used with intention have worked to improve aim—say, for basketball shots or accuracy in chipping in golf. But as with Davidson’s Buddhists, the most successful athletes manage to work themselves into peak intensity—a state of calm hyper-awareness.
But how can simply thinking about a future performance actually affect performance on the day of the event? Some clues come from intriguing brain research with electromyography (EMG). EMG offers a real-time snapshot of the brain’s instructions to the body—when and where the brain tells the body to move—by recording every electrical impulse sent from motor neurons to specific muscles to cause a contraction. Ordinarily, EMG offers doctors a useful tool to diagnose neuromuscular disease and to test whether muscles respond appropriately to stimulation.
But EMG has also been employed to solve an interesting scientific conundrum: whether the brain differentiates between a thought and an action. Does the thought of an action create the same pattern in neurotransmission as the action itself? This very question was tested by wiring a group of skiers to EMG equipment while they were carrying out mental rehearsals. As the skiers mentally rehearsed the downhill runs, the electrical impulses heading to their muscles were just the same as those they used to make turns and jumps while actually skiing the run.24 The brain sent the same instructions to the body, whether the skiers were simply thinking of a particular movement or actually carrying it out. Thought produced the same mental instructions as action.
Research with EEGs has shown that the electrical activity produced by the brain is identical whether we are thinking about doing something or actually doing it. In weight lifters, for instance, EEG patterns in the brain that would be activated to produce the actual motor skills are activated while the skill is simply being simulated mentally.25 Just the thought is enough to produce the neural instructions to carry out the physical act.
On the basis of this research, scientists have posited some interesting theories of how mental rehearsal works. One school of thought proposes that mental rehearsal creates the neural patterns necessary for the real thing. As though the brain were simply another muscle, these rehearsals train the brain to facilitate the moves more easily during the actual performance.26
When an athlete performs, the nerves that signal to the muscles along a particular pathway are stimulated and the chemicals that have been produced remain there for a short period. Any future stimulation along the same pathways is made easier by the residual effects of the earlier connections. We get better at physical tasks because our signaling from intention to action has already been forged. It is not unlike a train track laid down through wild, inhospitable country. Future performances improve because your brain already knows the route and follows the track already laid down. Because the brain does not distinguish between doing something specific and just thinking about doing it, mental rehearsal lays down the tracks just as well as physical practice does. The nerves and muscles create a pathway just as sound as one produced through repeated practice.
Nevertheless, there are a few important differences between mental and physical practice. With physical practice, when you practice too much, you become fatigued, and fatigue causes electrical interference and blockage along the tracks. With mental intention, no roadblocks ever appear, no matter how much you practice in your head.
The other difference concerns the size of the effect; the neuromuscular pattern laid down with mental practice may be slightly smaller than that of physical practice. Although both types of practice create the same muscle patterns, the imagined performances have smaller magnitude.27
To produce any benefit, mental rehearsal must replicate the real thing—at normal speed. Although it might seem logical that a rehearsal would work best in slow motion, with particular attention to specific moves, that is not borne out by research. When skiers monitored by EMGs imagined their performance in slow motion, they produced a different muscle response pattern from that produced in carrying out the skill at an ordinary pace. In fact, the brain–muscle activity of rehearsing at slow motion is identical to the brain–muscle pattern when the skiing itself is carried out in slow motion. This accords with what scientists understand about the neural patterns involved in slow motion, compared with those of normal speed. The same task carried out in slow motion produces completely different neuromuscular patterning from when it is done at normal speed.28
There is no such thing as cross-training in mental rehearsal; intention facilitates just the type of athletic event that is being mentally rehearsed and is not transferable to other sports, even those involving similar muscle groups. This was apparent in a fascinating study involving sprinters. The researchers had divided a group of runners into four groups and asked them to do one of four types of preparation: to imagine themselves in a 40-meter sprint; to engage in power training on a stationary bicycle; to combine imagery and power training; or, as the controls, to do no training in any form. After six weeks of training the athletes were asked to perform two tests—to cycle their hardest while their effort was recorded on a cycle ergometer, which tests for cycling power, and to run a 40-meter sprint. The two activities require much the same motor ability and leg muscles.
In the cycling test, those groups who had used power training alone showed improvement. However, when it came to the sprint, only the groups who had mentally practiced sprinting had significantly improved. Specific imagery enhanced only the specific task that had been imagined. It did not simply build muscles generally. The motor neuron training was highly specific, and affected only the actual performance visualized in the mind.29
Besides improving performance, mental intention can produce actual physiological changes, and not only in athletes’ bodies. Guang Yue, an exercise psychologist at Cleveland Clinic Foundation in Ohio, carried out research comparing participants who went to a gym with those who carried out a virtual workout in their heads. Those who regularly visited the gym were able to increase their muscle strength by 30 percent. But even those who remained in their armchairs and ran through a mental rehearsal of the weight training in their minds increased muscle power by almost half as much.
Volunteers between 20 and 35 years old imagined flexing one of their biceps as hard as they could during daily training sessions carried out five times a week. After ensuring that the participants were not doing any actual exercise, including tensing their muscles, the researchers discovered an astonishing 13.5 percent increase in muscle size and strength after just a few weeks, an advantage that remained for three months after the mental training stopped.30
In 1997, Dr. David Smith at Chester College came up with similar results: participants who worked out could achieve 30 percent increases in strength, while those who just imagined themselves doing the training achieved a 16 percent increase.31 Pure directed thought can give you the burn almost as well as any workout.
Thinking of changing an aspect of the body in other ways can also work—and might prove comforting to anyone who is not happy with his or her body shape. One study demonstrated that under hypnosis, women increased the dimensions of their breasts simply by visualizing themselves on the beach with the sun’s rays warming their chests.32
The kinds of vivid visualization techniques used by athletes are also highly effective in treating illness. Patients have boosted treatment of an array of acute and chronic conditions, from coronary artery disease33 and high blood pressure to low-back pain and musculoskeletal diseases,34 including fibromyalgia,35 by using mental pictures or metaphoric representations of their bodies fighting the illness. Visualization has also improved postsurgical outcomes,36 helped with pain management,37 and minimized the side effects of chemotherapy.38
Indeed, the outcome of a patient’s illness has been predicted by examining the types of visualizations used to combat it. Psychologist Jeanne Achterberg, who healed herself of a rare cancer of the eye through imagery, went on to study a group of cancer patients who were using visualization to fight their own disease. She predicted with 93 percent accuracy which patients would completely recover and which would get worse or die, simply by examining their visualizations and rating them. Those who were successful had a greater ability to visualize vividly, with powerful imagery and symbols, and could hold a clear visual intention imagining themselves overpowering the cancer and the medical treatment being effective. The successful patients also practiced their visualizations regularly.39
If the brain cannot distinguish between a thought and an action, would the body follow mental instructions of any sort? If I send my body a mental intention to calm down or speed up, will it necessarily listen to me? Literature about biofeedback and mind–body medicine indicates that it will. In 1961, Neal Miller, a behavioral neuroscientist at Yale University, first proposed that people can be taught to mentally influence their autonomic nervous system and control mechanisms such as blood pressure and bowel movements, much as a child learns to ride a bicycle. He conducted a series of remarkable conditioning-and-reward experiments on rats. Miller discovered that if he stimulated the pleasure center in the brain, his rats could be trained to decrease their heart rate at will, control the rate at which urine filled their kidneys, even create different dilations in the blood vessels of each ear.40 If relatively simple animals like rats could achieve this remarkable level of internal control, Miller figured, couldn’t human beings, with their greater intelligence, regulate more bodily processes?
After these early revelations, many scientists found that information about the autonomic nervous system could be fed back to a person as “biofeedback” to pinpoint where a person should send intention to his body. In the 1960s, John Basmajian, a professor of medicine at McMaster University in Ontario and a specialist in rehabilitative science, began training people with spinal-cord injuries to use EMG feedback to regain control over single cells in their spinal cords.41 At roughly the same time, psychologist Elmer Green at the Menninger Institute pioneered a method of biofeedback to treat migraine, after discovering that a migraine patient of his could make her headaches go away whenever she practiced a structured form of relaxation. Green went on to use biofeedback to help patients cure their own migraines, and it is now an accepted form of therapy.42 Biofeedback is particularly useful to treat Raynaud’s disease, a vascular condition in which blood vessels are constricted when exposed to cold, causing extremities to grow cold, pale, and even blue.43
During a biofeedback treatment, a patient is hooked up to a computer. Transducers applied to different parts of his or her body send information to a visual display, which registers activities of the autonomic nervous system, such as brain waves, blood pressure and heart rate, or muscle contractions. The audio or visual information fed back to the patient depends on the condition; in the case of Raynaud’s, as soon as the arteries to the hands constrict, the machines record a drop in skin temperature and a lightbulb flashes or a beeper sounds. The feedback prompts the patient to send an intention to his body to adjust the process in question—in the case of Raynaud’s, the patient sends an intention to warm up his hands.
Since those early days, biofeedback has become well established as a therapy for virtually every chronic condition, from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) to menopausal hot flashes. Stroke patients and victims of spinal-cord injuries now use biofeedback to rehabilitate or regain the use of paralyzed muscles. It has proved invaluable in eliminating the pain felt in a phantom limb.44 Astronauts have even used biofeedback to cure motion sickness while journeying to outer space.45
The more conventional view of biofeedback maintains that it has something to do with relaxation—learning to calm down the fight-or-flight responses of our autonomic nervous system. However, the sheer breadth of control would argue that the mechanism has more to do with the power of intention. Virtually every bodily process measurable on a machine—even a single nerve cell controlling a muscle fiber—appears to be within an individual’s control. Volunteers in studies have achieved total mental mastery over the temperature in their bodies,46 or even the direction of blood flow to the brain.47
Like biofeedback, Autogenic Training, the technique developed by a German psychiatrist named Johannes Schultz to relax the body and slow the breathing and heart rate, also demonstrates that a wide variety of the body’s functions are under our conscious control. Those who practice the technique are able to lower blood pressure, raise temperature in extremities, and slow heartbeat and breathing. Autogenic Training has also been used to treat many chronic conditions besides stress, such as asthma, gastritis and ulcers, high blood pressure, and thyroid problems.48 There is even evidence that Autogenic Training can work effectively in groups.49
For a cat, nirvana is the food bowl just around the corner. Dr. Jaak Panksepp, professor emeritus of psychology at Bowling Green University, theorizes that this anticipatory joy has to do with the “seeking” mode of the brain—one of the five primitive emotions that humans share with members of the animal kingdom.50 The seeking system helps animals investigate and work out the meaning of their environment. The seeking circuits are fully engaged when an animal is involved in high anticipation, intense interest, or insatiable curiosity. As Panksepp was astonished to discover, the most emotionally arresting part for any animal is the hunt, not the catch.51
When animals are curious, the hypothalamus lights up and the “feel-good” neurotransmitter dopamine is produced. Scientists used to believe that the chemical itself caused the pleasure, until it was discovered that the chemical’s true purpose is to arouse a certain neural pathway. What actually feels good is the activation of the seeking portion of the brain.
Forty years ago, Barry Sterman, professor emeritus of the departments of Neurobiology and Biobehavioral Psychiatry at UCLA, accidentally discovered that this anticipatory emotion sent cats into a meditative state; their brains slowed to an EEG rhythm of 8–13 hertz, corresponding to human alpha brain frequencies, moments before they got their reward.52 Eventually, he was able to get the cats to re-create this state at will, not simply when they were awaiting food. It was tantamount to the animals’ being able to control their own brain waves.
But could a human being do the same? To test this, Sterman needed to test someone whose brain waves were so out of the ordinary that any change would be apparent immediately. He located a woman troubled by periodic epileptic seizures, which are caused by the brain’s firing theta brain waves at inappropriate moments. Sterman constructed a biofeedback EEG machine that would flash a red light in the presence of a theta wave and a green light during an alpha state. After a while, his patient was able to change her state at will and reduce the amount and intensity of her epileptic fits. Sterman spent the next 10 years of his life studying epileptics and training them to reduce their own fits.53
In the 1980s, two American psychologists, Eugene Peniston and Paul Kulkosky, made use of Sterman’s findings to reform alcoholics. With their brain-wave biofeedback, alcoholic patients concentrated on damping down high beta brain waves, which tend to be predominant during moments of craving and dependency, and increasing the alpha and theta wave frequencies, which help one to relax and establish greater brain-wave coherence. Some 80 percent of the alcoholics were able to control their cravings and stay off alcohol. The training also seemed to affect their blood chemistry, increasing their levels of beta-endorphin, another “feel-good” brain chemical. Biofeedback, combined with work on their self-image, eventually eliminated much of their dysfunctional behavior and transformed them into better people.54
Joe Kamiya, a psychologist at the University of Chicago, demonstrated the amazing specificity of brain-wave biofeedback through some remarkable brain research. He attached EEG electrodes to the rear sides of the scalps of several volunteers, over the portion of the brain where alpha brain waves are most prominent. At the sound of a tone, his participants had to guess whether their brains waves were predominantly alpha. After comparing their answers with the information recorded on the EEG machines, Kamiya let them know whether they were right or wrong. By the second day, one of his participants was able to guess correctly two-thirds of the time, and two days after that, virtually all the time. A second participant discovered a means of putting himself into a particular brain-wave state on cue.55
EEG biofeedback has now developed into a sophisticated means of controlling the range and type of frequencies emitted by the brain. It works particularly well with trauma patients suffering from depression,56 helps students concentrate, and enhances creativity and focus. It may well be that intention can be used to control the brain, brain wave by brain wave.
Hypnosis is also a type of intention—an instruction to the brain during an altered state. Hypnotists continually demonstrate that the brain or body is susceptible to the power of directed thought.
One dramatic example of the power of mental suggestion concerned a small group of people with a mysterious congenital illness called ichthyosi-form erythroderma, known disparagingly as fish-skin disease because unsightly fish-like scales cover most of the body. In one study, five patients were hypnotized and told to focus on a part of their body and visualize the skin becoming normal. Within just a few weeks, 80 percent of each patient’s body had completely healed. The skin remained smooth and clear.57
Through hypnotic intention, spinal-surgery patients about to undergo their operations have reduced blood loss by nearly half, simply by directing their blood supply away from the site of the surgery.58 Pregnant women have been able to turn their babies from breech positions, burn victims have sped up their healing, and people suffering hemorrhages in the gastrointestinal tract have willed their bleeding to stop.59 Clearly, during an altered state, roughly corresponding to the hyperalert state of intense meditation, conscious thought can convince the body to endure pain, cure many serious diseases, and change virtually any condition.
Surgeon Dr. Angel Escudero of Valencia, Spain, has carried out more than 900 cases of complex surgery without anesthesia. BBC cameras were invited into his operating room and captured on film a woman who was having such an operation without anesthetic. All she had to do was keep her mouth full of saliva and keep repeating to herself, “My leg is anesthetized.” An affirmation like hers is another form of intention. A dry mouth is one of the mind’s first warning signals of danger. When the mouth is kept lubricated, the brain relaxes, assumes all is well, and turns off its pain receptors, assured that anesthetics have been given.60
A fascinating study by David Spiegel, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University, offers a glimpse of what happens to the brain when an intention is given under hypnosis. His participants were shown a colored grid painting, similar to a Mondrian, and were asked to imagine the color draining from the picture, leaving only black and white. Through the use of positron emission tomography (PET) scans, which record physical activity in the brain, Spiegel showed that blood flow and activity were noticeably diminishing in the part of the brain dealing with the perception of color, while the areas that process black, white, and gray images were being stimulated.
When the experiment was reversed, and the participants in the study were asked to imagine gray images turning into color, the opposite changes in brain perception patterns resulted.61
This illustrated another instance in which the brain was the maidservant of thoughts. The brain’s visual cortex, the area responsible for processing images, could not distinguish between a real image and an imagined one. The mental instructions were more important than the actual visual image.
The placebo effect has shown that beliefs are powerful, even when the belief is false. The placebo is a form of intention—an instance of intention trickery. When a doctor gives a patient a placebo, or sugar pill, he or she is counting on the patient’s belief that the drug will work. It is well documented that belief in a placebo will create the same physiological effects as that of an active agent—so much so that it causes the pharmaceutical industry enormous difficulty when designing drug trials. So many patients receive the same relief and even the same side effects with a placebo as with the drug itself that a placebo is not a true control. Our bodies do not distinguish between a chemical process and the thought of a chemical process. Indeed, a recent analysis of 46,000 heart patients, half of whom were taking a placebo, made the astonishing discovery that patients taking a placebo fared as well as those on the heart drug. The only factor determining survival seemed to be belief that the therapy would work and a willingness to follow it religiously. Those who stuck to the doctor’s orders to take their drug three times a day fared equally well whether they were taking a drug or just a sugar pill. Patients who tended not to survive were those who had been lax with their regimen, regardless of whether they had been given a placebo or an actual drug.62
The power of the placebo was best illustrated by a group of patients treated for Parkinson’s disease, a motor system disorder in which the body’s system for releasing the brain chemical dopamine is faulty. The standard treatment for Parkinson’s is a synthetic form of dopamine. In a study at the University of British Columbia, a team of doctors demonstrated with PET scanning that when patients given placebos were told they had received dopamine, their brains substantially increased the release of their own stores of the chemical.63 In another dramatic instance, at Methodist Hospital in Houston, Dr. Bruce Moseley, a specialist in orthopedics, recruited 150 patients with severe osteoarthritis of the knee and divided them into three groups. Two-thirds were given either arthroscopic lavage (which washes out degenerative tissue and debris with the aid of a little viewing tube) or another form of debridement (which sucks such tissue out with a tiny vacuum cleaner). The third group were given a sham operation: the patients were surgically prepared, placed under anesthesia, and wheeled into the operating room. Incisions were made in their knees, but no procedure was carried out.
Over the next two years, during which time none of the patients knew who had received the real operations and who had received the placebo treatment, all three groups reported moderate improvements in pain and function. In fact, the placebo group reported better results than some who had received the actual operation.64 The mental expectation of healing was enough to marshal the body’s healing mechanisms. The intention, brought about by the expectation of a successful operation, produced the physical change.
Extreme instances of intention and expectation can also be manifested physically. The phenomenon of stigmata, in which religious fervor produces blood, bruising, or wounds on people’s hands, feet, and sides that mirror the wounds of Christ during his crucifixion, are a form of intention. The Association for the Scientific Study of Anomalous Phenomena has recorded at least 350 such instances of stigmata resulting from identification with Christ. Saybrook University psychologist Stanley Krippner and his colleagues witnessed this firsthand with Brazilian sensitive Amyr Amiden. As soon as their talk turned to Jesus Christ, red spots and drops of blood appeared on the backs of each of Amiden’s hands and on his palms and forehead.65 A similar situation occurred during the three weeks before Easter Sunday with a young African-American Baptist girl who had been profoundly moved by a television movie about the crucifixion and was preoccupied with Christ’s suffering. She bled on the palm of her left hand two to six times a day.66 Krippner knew of three Anglicans who regularly developed stigmata.67
Cases of spontaneous cures are an instance of an extreme intention that reverses almost certain death. People with what is considered a terminal illness defy the textbook description of their disease progression and the prognoses of their doctors and beat it virtually overnight, without the aid of the tools of modern medicine.
The Institute of Noetic Sciences has gathered together all scientifically recorded cases of so-called miracle cures.68 Although the received wisdom is that these cases are rare, a scan of the medical literature is instructive. One in eight skin cancers heals spontaneously, as does nearly one in five genitourinary cancers. Virtually all types of illnesses, including diabetes, Addison’s disease, and atherosclerosis, where vital organs or body parts are supposedly irretrievably damaged, have spontaneously healed.69 A small body of research concerns terminal cancer patients, who with little or no medical intervention end up beating the odds.
Although these cases are labeled instances of “spontaneous remission,” as though the illness has suddenly decided to go into hiding but might suddenly spring out at any moment, in many instances they represent another example of the body’s ability to self-correct through the power of intention. Case after case of spontaneous remission describes people up against a major roadblock in their lives: unremitting stress, unresolved trauma, prolonged hostility, marked isolation, profound dissatisfaction, or quiet despair.70 Such cases often describe people who have lost their role as the protagonist in their own life drama.71
Many cases of spontaneous remission seem to occur after someone makes a massive psychological shift, and re-creates a life that is engaging and purposeful. In these instances, the patient gets rid of the source of the psychological heartache72 and takes full responsibility for his illness and treatment.73 Some people, this would suggest, get ill because they lose all hope of life’s ever being good—because they are thinking the wrong thoughts. These cases of spontaneous remission suggested to me that casual thoughts that run through our minds every day together become our life’s intention.
We can use intention to gain control over virtually any bodily process and perhaps even life-threatening illnesses. But can our thoughts about others be as potent as our thoughts about ourselves?
Psychologist William Braud is one of the few scientists who have examined this question. He gathered a group of volunteers and asked them to carry out biofeedback on themselves. After pairing off the group members, he attached one member of each pair to the biofeedback equipment, but asked the other partner to respond to the readings and carry out the sending of mental instructions. According to Braud’s evidence, the results were equivalent to those that occurred when the patients on the equipment used biofeedback on themselves. Somebody else’s good intentions for you may be as powerful as your own.74
Braud’s other studies also suggested that we can most influence others to become more “ordered” when we ourselves are ordered. For instance, in his studies, calm people were the most successful at sending mental influence to calm down highly nervous people, and focused people the best at helping distracted people focus.75 Braud’s work also suggests that the greatest effects occur when the person most needs help.76
Scientific evidence also reveals that we can affect virtually any other living thing as well. The enormous body of research on healing gathered by Dr. Daniel Benor shows that thoughts can have powerful effects on a variety of plants, seeds, single-celled organisms such as bacteria and yeast, and insects and other small animals.77 Most recently, a series of double-blind experiments carried out over two years by Dr. Serena Roney-Dougal in Somerset showed that lettuce seeds that were sent intention yielded 10 percent more crops with significantly less fungal disease than those grown conventionally.78
The evidence convinced me that we can improve our health, enhance our performance in every area of our lives, and possibly even affect the future by consciously using intention. The intention should be a highly specific aim or goal, which you should visualize in your mind’s eye as having already occurred while you are in a state of concentrated focus and hyper-awareness. When you imagine this future event, hold a mental picture of it as if it were occurring to you at that moment. Engage all five senses to visualize it in detail. The centerpiece of this mental picture should be the moment you achieve the goal.
A doctor might improve the survival rate of his patients by never giving a negative diagnosis.79 A surgeon could improve his patients’ recovery by mentally rehearsing the surgery before heading into the operating room. Indeed, we might no longer need drugs, but simply good intentions. Since intention has been shown to affect the chemistry in our bodies, we should be able to speed up, slow down, or improve any physiological processes. We might develop many more breakthrough medicines by mentally targeting their effectiveness and minimizing their side effects.
We could raise the quality of our daily endeavors just by carrying out a detailed mental rehearsal. At home, we might be able to send intentions to our children to perform better at school or be more loving to their friends. Human intention might be powerful enough to affect every element of our lives.
All these possibilities suggest that we have an awesome level of responsibility when generating our thoughts. Each of us is a potential Frankenstein, with an extraordinary power to affect the living world around us. How many of us, after all, are sending out mostly positive thoughts?