Mindhacks

Mind controls body in extreme experiments

By William J. Cromie, Harvard Gazette Staff

In a monastery in northern India, thinly clad Tibetan monks sat quietly in a room where the temperature was a chilly 40 degrees Fahrenheit. Using a yoga technique known as g Tum-mo, they entered a state of deep meditation. Other monks soaked 3-by-6-foot sheets in cold water (49 degrees) and placed them over the meditators’ shoulders. For untrained people, such frigid wrappings would produce uncontrolled shivering.

 If body temperatures continue to drop under these conditions, death can result. But it was not long before steam began rising from the sheets. As a result of body heat produced by the monks during meditation, the sheets dried in about an hour.

Picture Left: A Buddhist monk has his vital signs measured as he prepares to enter an advanced state of meditation in Normandy, France. During meditation, the monk’s body produces enough heat to dry cold, wet sheets put over his shoulders in a frigid room (Photo by Herbert Benson).

Attendants removed the sheets, then covered the meditators with a second chilled, wet wrapping. Each monk was required to dry three sheets over a period of several hours.

Why would anyone do this? Herbert Benson, who has been studying g Tum-mo for 20 years, answers that “Buddhists feel the reality we live in is not the ultimate one. There’s another reality we can tap into that’s unaffected by our emotions, by our everyday world. Buddhists believe this state of mind can be achieved by doing good for others and by meditation. The heat they generate during the process is just a by-product of g Tum-mo meditation.”

Benson is an associate professor of medicine at the Harvard Medical School and president of the Mind/Body Medical Institute at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. He firmly believes that studying advanced forms of meditation “can uncover capacities that will help us to better treat stress-related illnesses.”

Benson developed the “relaxation response,” which he describes as “a physiological state opposite to stress.” It is characterized by decreases in metabolism, breathing rate, heart rate, and blood pressure. He and others have amassed evidence that it can help those suffering from illnesses caused or exacerbated by stress. Benson and colleagues use it to treat anxiety, mild and moderate depression, high blood pressure, heartbeat irregularities, excessive anger, insomnia, and even infertility. His team also uses this type of simple meditation to calm those who have been traumatized by the deaths of others, or by diagnoses of cancer or other painful, life-threatening illnesses.

“More than 60 percent of visits to physicians in the United States are due to stress-related problems, most of which are poorly treated by drugs, surgery, or other medical procedures,” Benson maintains.

The Mind/Body Medical Institute is now training people to use the relaxation response to help people working at Ground Zero in New York City, where two airplanes toppled the World Trade Center Towers last Sept. 11. Facilities have been set up at nearby St. Paul’s Chapel to aid people still working on clearing wreckage and bodies. Anyone else who feels stressed by those terrible events can also obtain help at the chapel. “We are training the trainers who work there,” Benson says.

The relaxation response involves repeating a word, sound, phrase, or short prayer while disregarding intrusive thoughts. “If such an easy-to-master practice can bring about the remarkable changes we observe,” Benson notes. “I want to investigate what advanced forms of meditation can do to help the mind control physical processes once thought to be uncontrollable.”

Next: Breathtaking Results: Read More >>

From Forbes Magazine contributor Vanessa Gisquet

Woody Allen once said, “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work…I want to achieve it through not dying.”

Much to humanity’s collective dismay, there is no way to defy death. But you can try.

Many people think they know what’s good for them. Who wouldn’t like to think that being rich, sleeping with supermodels and eating caviar every day would increase their longevity.

After all, Hugh Hefner looks pretty good for a man of 78. But this is more wishful thinking than practical science.

If you really want to live longer, then you can start with your attitude. Your way of thinking can not only impact the quality of your life, but also how long you actually live.

In 2002, researchers at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., found that optimistic people decreased their risk of early death by 50% compared with those who leaned more towards pessimism.

“The exact mechanism of how personality acts as a risk factor for early death or poorer health is unclear,” says Dr. Toshihiko Maruta, the main investigator in the study. Most likely, it has to do with the fact that pessimists have an increased chance for future problems with their physical health, career achievements and emotional stress–particularly depression.

“Yet another possibility could be more directly biological, like changes in the immune system,” Maruta adds.

Besides optimism, are there other personality traits that can help us live longer, healthier lives? According to Dr. Howard Friedman, a psychologist at the University of California at Riverside, conscientiousness is related to mortality in a significant way. The Terman Life-Cycle Study, which ran from 1921 to 1991, examined an array of factors like personality, habits, social relations, education, physical activites and cause of death.

“Those low on adult conscientiousness died sooner,” Friedman concluded. Conscientiousness does not mean looking both ways before crossing the street; it means looking both ways when the light turns green so you don’t accidentally run down some slow-moving pedestrian.

Beyond that, a conscientious person’s long-living qualities probably have to do with the fact that they are predisposed to constructively reacting to emotional and social situations, and are more likely to create work and living environments that promote good health.

Besides looking at the world through rosier-colored glasses, there are also more traditional practices that the aspiring centenarian can take. People should stop smoking, eat a balanced diet and maintain a healthy weight. While these may sound “nannyish,” they are factors that cannot be overlooked. This might not sound like much fun, but it’s a lot more fun than dying.

Research shows that obesity, for example, contributes to a slew of medical conditions, including diabetes, heart disease and various cancers. So powerful are certain lifestyle choices that recommended diets along with maintenance of physical activity and appropriate body mass can, over time, reduce the incidence of cancer by 30% to 40%, according to the American Institute for Cancer Research.

Animal lovers will be happy to know that having a pet can add years to your life, as well. One of the first studies in this arena, which appeared in Public Health Reports in 1980, showed that the survival rates of heart attack victims who had a pet were 28% higher than those of patients who didn’t have an animal companion. “The health effects seem to be very real and by no means mystical,” says Alan Beck, director of the Center for the Human-Animal Bond at Purdue University. “Contact with companion animals triggers a relaxation response,” he says.

Rebecca Johnson, a professor of gerontological nursing at the University of Missouri at Columbia, showed that interaction with pets does, in fact, reduce levels of the stress hormone cortisol. The ability of companion pets to reduce our overall stress level probably accounts for most of their life-extending qualities.

“For many people, pets also provide a reason to get moving,” adds Johnson. How many people, after all, would actually get any exercise if it weren’t for their over-enthusiastic dog?

To many people, quality of life is equally as important as life span. It is a good thing, then, that many of the things that can improve your longevity can also improve your quality of life.

Visit this Link to See a Slideshow on Forbes.com on 10 Ways to Live Longer >>

by Burt Goldman

It was Amy who had come to me hoping that I could help with her problem. She wanted me to Alphatize her and wave a magic wand so that her depression would go away. I told her that I didn’t have a wand but that sometimes trance worked so well it almost seems like magic.

Alphatize: A method of relaxing a person into the alpha area of mind that is similar to meditation and hypnosis but is neither. More like an alpha trance.

Alphasis: A descriptive term that denotes the art of putting a person into an alpha trance.

Before using Alphasis I asked her a question our of curiosity. “How do you get depressed?”

“What do you mean how? I just do.” She looked at me and raised her eyebrows. “I think it’s chemical.”

“No, it ‘s more than that. Oh I know it could be chemical. But let’s find out. Whether you realize it or not you use a process for depression. If you can figure out what the process is, I will teach you how to reverse it so you become un-depressed.

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Adam is a 19-year-old high school student in Vancouver, Canada who seems to possess energetic healing power.

On July 13 2006, ABC News Primetime ran an hour-long special report on this amazing young man. You can view the full show by following the links below.

You can view the entire documentary from the links below.  The documentary has been broken in 5 smaller and is viewable from Youtube.com.

Click Here to Start Viewing >>

What you believe to be, is. As simple as that and as complex, for once you understand that statement, freedom is yours.

A belief is mental acceptance of something as being true. That acceptance can be based on trust for an authority, on reason, or on prejudice. A belief can also be a thing that has been programmed or conditioned by outside agencies so that the acceptance is not supported by reason but acted on nevertheless as though the thing were totally reliable.

Belief is a powerful force. There are occurrences, nicely documented by Deirdre Davis Brigham in her excellent work, ‘Imagery for Getting Well,’ (W.W. Norton & Co. 1994,) that substantiate the idea that believing in a thing often brings it about.

She notes that in cases of multiple personality it is not uncommon for one personality to have diabetes, and a second or third personality, of the same person, who displays a normal production of insulin and blood sugar showing no signs of the disease at all. Another case noted is that of personality number one who had a case of the flu with all its attending symptoms, difficulty in breathing, congested chest, running nose, and laryngitis. When personality number two came out all the symptoms disappeared in just about six seconds. No congestion, no running nose, no symptoms of the flu. Same body, two different beliefs.

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For decades, Dalia Isicoff has suffered the agony of rheumatoid arthritis—joint pain, spinal fusion, multiple hip surgeries. Painkillers dull the aches, but it wasn’t until she took a course at the University of Maryland’s Center for Integrative Medicine that Isicoff discovered a powerful weapon inside her own body: her mind. Using a meditative practice called Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, or MBSR, Isicoff learned to acknowledge her pain, rather than fight it. Her negative and debilitating thought patterns—"This is getting worse," "I’m going to end up in a wheelchair"—began to dissipate, and she was able to cut back on her medication.

Click here to read more.

Doctors are finding that many people manage to get cured when they are given fake medication, called placebos, which usually consist of nothing more than sugar pills or distilled water, and then told by their doctors that they were taking real medication.

There is no explanation for why the placebo effect works, except that somehow, the patient’s belief that they are getting cured triggers some sort of self-healing ability within the patient. The placebo effect is probably the best-documented way in which the mind is known to affect the body.

Click here to read more.

In  1950, a new drug called Krebiozen had received sensational national publicity as a “cure” for cancer and was being tested by the American Medical Association (AMA) and the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). One of the researchers involved in this testing was a doctor called Bruno Klopfer.

One of Dr. Klopfer’s patients, a Mr. Wright was suffering from cancer of the lymph nodes. All standard treatments had been exhausted, and Wright appeared to have little time left.  His neck, armpits, chest, abdomen, and groin were filled with tumors the size of oranges, and his spleen and liver were so enlarged that two quarts of milky fluid had to be drained out of his body each day.

The following story will challenge your idea of just how much your mind influences your body.

You can read the story here.