http://www.brucelipton.com/about-bruce/
New, Amazing, and Hard to Believe Scientific Discoveries from Dr. Bruce Lipton:
1. “In the eighties, when Lipton
discovered that the cell membrane is its brain, his breakthrough research
suggested that environmental signals
whether of love or another emotion are
primary in creating illness…”
“Lipton clarifies that this new area of study reveals that environmental influences are more prominent
in causing illness than genes. He says new cancer research suggests that
genetic factors influence the occurrence of illness a mere 10% of the time. In
other words, the perception of our environment is responsible for our body’s
health 90% of the time…”
“Even more interesting, Lipton reports current research demonstrates how
our protein structures are more highly
activated by non-physical signals than chemical signals. In other words,
our environmental perceptions have a more powerful influence on our health than
drugs. Thus science is telling us, we
have more innate capacity to heal our ills than the pharmacy” (Lipton).
2. “Until recently, conventional
medicine dismissed the role of the mind in the functioning of the body, except for one pesky exception — the placebo effect, which demonstrates that
the mind has the power to heal the body
when people hold a belief that a particular drug or procedure will effect a
cure, even if the remedy is actually
a sugar pill with no known pharmaceutical value. Medical students learn
that one third of all illnesses heal via the magic of the placebo effect”
(Lipton).
“One compelling example of the
mind’s power over biology can be gleaned from the mysterious dysfunction
commonly referred to as multiple personality disorder, more officiously known
as dissociative identity disorder
(DID). A person with DID actually loses his or her own ego identity and takes
on the unique personality and behavioral traits of a completely different
person.
How could this be? Well, it’s like listening to a radio station in your
car and, as you travel, the station becomes staticky and fades out as a
different station on the same frequency grows stronger. This can be jarring if,
for example, you are cruising with The Beach Boys and, a couple of choppy
moments later, you find yourself in the midst of a fire-and-brimstone,
Bible-thumping revival.
Neurologically, multiple personalities resemble radio-controlled
biological robots whose “station identification” uncontrollably fades from one
ego identity to another. The unique behavior and personality expressed by each
ego can be as vastly different as folk music is from acid rock.
While almost all attention has been placed on the psychiatric
characteristics of persons affected with DID, there are also some surprising physiological consequences
that accompany ego change. Each of the
alternate personalities has a unique electroencephalogram (EEG) profile,
which is a biomarker equivalent to a neurological
fingerprint. Simply put, each individual persona comes with its own unique
brain programming.
Incredible as that may seem, many persons with multiple personalities change eye color in the short interval
it takes to transition from one ego to the next. Some have scars in one personality that
inexplicably disappear as another personality emerges. Many exhibit allergies and sensitivities in one personality but not in another.
How is this possible?
DID individuals might help us answer that question because they are the
poster children for a burgeoning new field of science called psychoneuroimmunology, which, in
people-speak, means the science (—ology) of how the mind (psycho—) controls the
brain (—neuro—), which in turn controls the immune system (—immun—).
The paradigm-shattering implications of this new science are simply this:
while the immune system is the guardian
of our internal environment, the
mind controls the immune system, which means the mind shapes the character
of our health. While DID represents a dysfunction, it undeniably reveals the fact that programs in our mind control our
health and well-being as well as our diseases and our ability to overcome those
diseases” (Lipton).
“What does science say about this mind over matter stuff? The answer
depends upon which science you ask.
The science of conventional medicine tries
to reassure us that none of the phenomena we just described actually exists.
That’s because today’s biology textbooks and mass media describe the body and
its component cells as machines made of biochemical building blocks.
This perception has programmed the general public to accept the belief in
genetic determinism, which is the
notion that genes control physical and behavioral traits. This sad
interpretation is that our fate is inextricably linked to ancestral
characteristics determined by genetic blueprints derived from our parents and
their parents and their parent’s parents, ad infinitum. This causes people to
believe that they are victims of
heredity.
Fortunately, the Human Genome
Project (HGP) has pulled the rug out from under conventional science’s
beliefs concerning genetic control. This is ironic because it set out to prove
the opposite. According to conventional belief, the complexity of a human should require vastly more genes than are
found in a simple organism.
Surprisingly, the HGP discovered that humans have nearly the same number of genes as lowly animals, a
finding that inadvertently reveals a fundamental myth-perception underlying
genetic determinism. Science’s pet dogma has long outlived its usefulness and
needs to be mercifully put to sleep.
So, if genes do not control life, what does?
The answer is: we do.
Evolving new-edge science reveals
that our power to control our lives originates from our minds and is not
preprogrammed in our genes.
This is great news. The power for change is within us. However, to
activate the amazing power of mind over genes we must reconsider our
fundamental beliefs—our perceptions and
misperceptions—of life” (Lipton).
3. How Your Beliefs Control Your Biology:
“Conventional physics sees the human body as a machine made of atoms and
molecules but the quantum physicists
reveal that underneath that apparent physical structure there is nothing other
than energy. That means we are energy beings interacting with
everything in the entire energy field. What we are beginning to recognize
is that there is an invisible world that we have not dealt with in regard to
understanding the nature of our health. In other words, rather than focusing on
matter, in a quantum world we focus on
energy. In the world we live in we are entangled
in an unfathomable number of energy vibrations and we are connected to all of
them! In trying to understand a person’s health, if you only focus on the physical, you miss the energy. If you only
focus on the person, you miss the influence of the field. We are coming into a
more holistic way of studying the fact that everything is one whole.” (Lipton).
“In quantum physics we also
encounter a world of uncertainty. We
have to let go of our Newtonian belief that we can determine everything,
control everything and dominate nature, and come back to the natural theology
approach that said to learn the patterns as best we can and live in harmony”
(Lipton).
“Our thoughts are part of the
energy field as is the energy from other living organisms and from non-living
things. Everything is giving off energy.
As we are doing neurological processing of the world that we live in, including
our thoughts and beliefs, we are actually creating a magnetic vibration, like a
tuning fork that emanates from our head out into the field. Scientists have
found that if they take our magnetic field and direct it back into the head
they can influence brain activity.
Why this becomes relevant in our lives and in quantum mechanics is that we go back to the quote by Einstein: “The
field is the sole governing agency of the particle.” If we apply this
understanding of Einstein’s to the field that we generate with our thoughts, we
can see that there is a connection wherein our thoughts can give shape to the
particles that are the world we live in. All of a sudden we see that we are not
disconnected little pieces moving around on the planet. We are little broadcast
devices, giving the field shape and the shape that we generate manifests as the
life experiences that we have” (Lipton).
“It has been well known for a long time that in “crowd effects” or “mass
event effects” where you get enough
people together with their thoughts coherent, major events can occur on the
planet” (Lipton).
“In fact, when quantum physics was first becoming accepted as the
mechanisms by which the universe operates, the physicists had trouble with this
themselves. They could say, “Well, I can see these ideas working at the level
of atoms and molecules but I can’t bring that kind of weirdness into my life.”
So there was an arbitrary decision back in the 1920s to say, “Let’s restrict quantum mechanics to the
world of atoms and molecules and use Newtonian physics to describe the rest of
the world.” That is why biology went on its merry way using Newtonian physics. Yet we are today
beginning to see work by very reputable scientists that says the universe is
created by our observations; we create the field and the field shapes the particle.
The big lesson is that what you think or ask for, as the Asians would say, is
what you are going to get. It is not a coincidence; we are actively involved in
physically shaping the world that we experience” (Lipton).
"How It Works: the Biology
To understand how it works, we are
going to talk about the biology. We start with the fact that we are made of
cells and cells are living organisms made from protein building blocks…
The blueprints for the gears are the genes. When I need to make gears for myself I have to go get the blueprint from the DNA, copy
the blueprint, which is called RNA, and then use that RNA to build the proteins…
Life is a result of proteins being
engaged by signals in a lock and key fashion. Newtonian-based conventional biology considers that all the signals
that control biology must be chemical. As a result, the pharmaceutical
industry was created to make new, life-controlling signals called drugs. Conventional medicine believes that if your biology is not working
appropriately, your gears are not engaging correctly. Therefore, if we
change the signals in your system we can change the regulation and functioning
of the protein gears and take you from a diseased state into a state of health
by changing your chemistry. But quantum
mechanics questions whether the “signal” has to be a physical chemical. In
fact, invisible energy signals are a
hundred times more efficient in signaling proteins than are actual chemical
signals. To summarize, proteins provide the function-creating gears;
protein movement, driven by the binding of signals, provides for life; and the
signals can be of two kinds: chemical
signals or the more efficient energy signals…
The energy signals are the medium that unites most complementary medicine
modalities. Asian medicine, for
example, with its meridians and acupuncture points, is based on dealing with energy fields. Western
medicine tries to manipulate the body’s
physical components while Eastern medicine tries to change the body’s energy fields. It is important to note that quantum physics, which describes the mechanics of the universe,
emphasizes that energy signals are a
hundred times more efficient than drugs”
(Lipton).
“What Can Go Wrong?
If you are expressing a
dysfunction or a disease, to what can you attribute it? It is probably due either
to the proteins not having the right
structure, or the presence of
inappropriate signals. How can the protein structure be off? Defective genes alter a protein’s amino
acid sequence, causing proteins to be
assembled incorrectly and as a result not function appropriately, thus
leading to disease. But here’s the catch. Only a very small percentage of people actually have genetic defects that
can cause a disease, far less than five percent of the population. That means
ninety-five percent of us arrived on this planet with genes that were capable
of providing us with a healthy existence. For ninety-five percent of the
population, if they are failing in health it is not something wrong with the
genes and the proteins, it is something
wrong with the body’s signals. Inappropriate
signals are the source of most human illnesses and dysfunctions.
What could cause the signals to be off? The first cause is trauma, damage from an accident that interferes with the conduction of signals
from the brain. The second is from toxins,
chemicals that shouldn’t be in the body but when present interfere with the body’s signaling chemistry. And the third, most important and predominant source of
incorrect signaling is the mind. If the mind sends the wrong information at
inappropriate times, our systems become imbalanced, leading to dysfunctions and
diseases. Therefore rather than focusing on the genes and the body’s chemistry,
which is the myopic focus of conventional allopathic medicine, the new physics and the new biology reveal that we should be focusing on both the physical signals
and the energetic signals, which
include thought.
The surface of our cells may have over a hundred thousand protein
receptors waiting for their complementary signals to show up. The cell reads
both the physical and non-physical elements of the environment through these
proteins. Signals generally provoke a response that causes the cell to maintain
its survival. “Food is out there; take it in. Toxins are out there; escape and
avoid them.” The skin of the cell and the skin of the human body carry out the
exact same functions. They’re “read and respond to” signals” (Lipton).
“The Role of Perception:
On the surface of the cell at any
one time there are over a hundred thousand different switches prepared to
respond to a massive variety of environmental signals. While we can describe
the nature of one signal engaging one response, we have to incorporate the complexity of wholeness when thousands of signals are
acted upon at the same time. If we really want to know what the cell is
doing we can’t look at any one switch; we have to identify what a hundred
thousand switches are doing…
These protein switches control the functions of our lives through awareness of the environment. That is
precisely the definition for the word perception: an awareness of the elements
of the environment through a physical sensation. These membrane switches are
fundamental units of perception; they read an environmental perception and adjust the biology to the need required.
This becomes very personal because it is the way we perceive the world that
controls our behavior. Perception controls behavior
If our perceptions are accurate then the opportunity of survival is very
great. But if we are programmed with misperceptions and read the environment
inaccurately, then that means we will inappropriately engage our responses.
Consider an anorexic person looking in a mirror. While we may see that person
as dangerously thin, the anorexic perceives himself or herself as very large
and fat. That misperception signals their biology to get rid of more fat and
that misreading of environmental cues can lead to their death. The significance
is very clear: when our perceptions are
inaccurate, our behaviors are no longer synchronized to support our survival.
Perception also controls the read-out of the genes. It is how we see life
that determines which genes will be activated to provide for our survival.
Again, emphasizing the role of misperception, if we inappropriately activate genes because we sent the wrong signal at an
inappropriate time, then we can subvert the function of the biology and
actually cause disease and dysfunction. We are not so much the victims of
genes as we are the creator of our
lives, selecting genes to control our systems, based upon our perception of
reality.
It is true that we have a period of development from conception to the
fetal stage wherein the body plan is being laid down and the structure is being
coordinated by the genes. Information feedback between the embryo, its
environment and the genes controls this developmental period. This is a period
where genes are the primary source of control. From the fetal stage on, our
perceptions of the environment determine what is going to happen to the rest of
our development” (Lipton).
“Dealing With Stress:
Survival is very much tied in with
growth mechanisms that replace the number of cells we lose every day as a
result of normal attrition. But another part of our survival behavior engages a
completely different set of mechanisms: those we use for our protection. Protection shuts down growth processes and allocates energy to
behaviors needed to sustain us in a threatening situation. We engage in
either growth or protection
mechanisms every moment of our lives, funding these activities with our life
energy. It takes energy to grow and it takes energy to protect ourselves. When
we engage in protection mechanisms, we close ourselves down and conserve energy
by shutting off growth.
Nature designed us to use protection in acute responses like running away
from a saber tooth tiger. But if we
maintain protection for too long, we compromise our survival. What really
becomes important is this: how much of
our lives are in growth and how much in protection? The more we live in fear, the more we allocate our energy into
protection. The more afraid we become, the more we shut down growth-to the
extent that we can be scared to death. In the world that we live in today, the
protection response has become a greater and greater percentage of our everyday
life experience; most of us are living
in very high levels of stress and are continuously
debilitating our system by interfering with growth. Cells cannot move in
both directions at the same time. They are either
in growth, open to the environment and assimilating what’s going on, or in protection, shutting themselves
down waiting for the environment to clear itself before again expressing their
normal functions. We are a community of cells that responds to perceptions
generated by our central nervous system.
Today we have fears from which we seemingly can’t escape. Who is Al-Qaeda
and where are they? Where is the bird flu? We are presented with fears that
threaten our survival, perceptions that cause us to question whether we can
stay alive. Those perceptions cause us to get into a protection posture and
shut down life-conserving growth. This is important because it affects almost
everybody on the planet today.
We have two different protection mechanisms. The immune system deals with internal threats like viruses, bacteria,
parasites, or cancer cells. The adrenal
system secretes stress hormones that protect us against exterior threats
like a poisonous snake or an attacker. Stress
hormones cause the blood vessels of the gut to constrict and they also cause the immune system to shut off.
The reason for that is very obvious: if you are being chased by a lion, you
don’t put energy into fighting off a bacterial infection; you put it all into
running. The medical professional has known for years that stress hormones shut
off the immune system. They provide recipients of grafted tissues or organs
with stress hormones, so that their immune systems do not reject the grafted
foreign tissue. But what does this mean in the operation of our day-to-day
lives? Every day, as we experience stress
we’re debilitating our immune system.
As we repress the immune system,
common everyday things can start to take over and create disease. Most
people are very familiar with this because as we find more stress in our lives
we get weaker and sicknesses becomes the way of life. Kids at school, for
example, are more likely to get sick around exam time. The concept that we have to catch something is silly because it turns
out that most of us have almost all of the pathogens that affect humans in our
bodies already. The stress that inhibits the immune system also shuts down
growth processes that replace cells lost to normal attrition. With enough
stress, there will be a point where the numbers of cells lost and not replaced
will compromise our functions and we will start to express a disease.
There is another factor of stress that I refer to as
“adding-insult-to-injury.” Stress hormones cause the blood vessels in the
forebrain to constrict, forcing the blood to the hindbrain to nourish the
high-speed reflex center used in stressful conditions. Basically, constricting the blood vessels in the
forebrain shuts down consciousness and intelligence. So an interesting and
unwanted aspect of the stress response is that we become less intelligent when we are under stress. Therefore, a
group of people or a nation that is bathed in fear is less intelligent than a
nation that is living in growth and harmony; those living in fear will make
“hindbrain” reflex decisions that may be inappropriate. This may account for
some of the conditions of the world we live in right now because the fear
levels are so great. It becomes incumbent upon us to recognize that our biology
doesn’t know the difference between a real fear and a made-up fear. The simple
reality is that our perceptions and
beliefs, whether right or wrong, are still going to control our biology.
Our biology did not intend for us to engage stress mechanisms as a
twenty-four hour, 365 days a year event. It was designed as a response to an
acute event; the rest of the time we should be maintaining growth. Yet the world that we have chosen (the media,
the government, et cetera) really encourages us to live in ongoing fear and it
causes great debilitation of our physiological maintenance and the neurological
and immunological characters that we express. It is important for us to
understand that if we change our
perceptions, we can change our biology and our world. We must stop living
in fear because it is killing us as individuals and
threatening our existence as a species” (Lipton).
Biology of Belief - by Bruce Lipton (full documentary)
Compare what
we just read from Dr. Bruce Lipton with that of what the famous self-help guru,
Anthony “Tony” Robbins, author of Awaken
the Giant Within writes:
Chapter 4:
Belief Systems- The Power To Create And The Power To Destroy
“Beliefs are
not limited to impacting our emotions or actions. They can literally change our bodies in a matter of moments. I had
the pleasure of interviewing Yale professor and best-selling author Dr. Bernie
Siegel. As we began to speak about the power of belief, Bernie shared with me
some of the research he’d done on people
with Multiple Personality Disorders. Incredibly, the potency of these people’s beliefs that they had become a different person resulted in an
unquestioned command to their nervous system to make measurable changes in their
biochemistry. The result? Their bodies
would literally transform before the researchers’ eyes and begin to reflect a
new identity at a moment’s notice. Studies document such remarkable
occurrences as patients’ eye color
actually changing as their personality changes, or physical marks disappearing and reappearing! Even diseases such as diabetes or high blood
pressure come and go depending on the person’s belief as to which personality they’re
manifesting.
Beliefs even have the capacity to
override the impact of drugs on the body. While most people believe that drugs heal, studies in the
new science of psychoneuroimmunology (the mind-body relationship) have begun to
bear out what many others have suspected for centuries: our beliefs about the illness and its treatment play as significant a
role, maybe an even more significant
role, than the treatment itself. Dr. Henry Beecher from Harvard University
has done extensive research that clearly demonstrates that we often give credit
to a drug, when in reality it’s the patient’s belief that makes the difference”
(76).
“One
demonstration of this was a groundbreaking experiment in which 100 medical
students were asked to participate in testing two new drugs. One was described
to them as a super-stimulant in a red capsule, the other as a
super-tranquilizer in a blue capsule. Unbeknownst to the students, the contents
had been switched: the red capsule was actually a barbiturate, and the blue
capsule was actually an amphetamine. Yet half of the students developed physical
reactions that went along with their expectations- exactly the opposite of the chemical reaction the drugs should have
produced in their bodies! These students were not just given placebos; they
were given actual drugs. But their beliefs overrode the chemical impact
of the drug on their bodies. As Dr. Beecher later stated, a drug’s usefulness
‘is a direct result of not only the chemical properties of the drug, but also the
patient’s belief in the usefulness and effectiveness of the drug’” (76-77).
“Drugs are
not always necessary, [but] belief in recovery always is.”
-
Norman
Cousins
“I had the privilege
of knowing Norman Cousins for almost seven years, and I was fortunate enough to
have the last taped interview with him just one month before he passed on. In that
interview, he shared a story about how strongly our beliefs affect our physical
bodies. At a football game in Monterey
Park, a Los Angeles suburb, several people experienced the symptoms of food
poisoning. The examining physician deduced that the cause was a certain soft
drink from the dispensing machines because all of his patients had purchased
some prior to becoming ill. And announcement was made over the loudspeaker
requesting that no one patronize the dispensing machine, saying some people had
become ill and describing the symptoms. Pandemonium
immediately broke out in the stands as people retched and fainted in droves. Even
a few people who had not even gone near the machine became ill! Ambulances from
local hospitals did a booming business that day, as they drove back and forth
to the stadium, transporting multitudes of stricken fans. When it was
discovered that the dispensing machine
was not the culprit, people immediately and ‘miraculously’ recovered” (77).
“We need to
realize that our beliefs have the capacity to make us sick or make us healthy in a moment. Beliefs have been
documented to affect our immune systems” (77).
