The Holographic Universe (14 page)

Then they subjected the
patients to an equally extensive array of psychological tests, including
exercises in which patients were asked to draw images of themselves, their
cancers, their treatments, and their immune systems. The blood tests offered
some information about the patients’ condition, but provided no major
revelations. However, the results of the psychological tests, particularly the
drawings, were encyclopedias of information about the status of the patients’
health. Indeed simply by analyzing patients’ drawings Achterberg late achieved
a 95 precept rate of accuracy in predicting who would die within a few months
and who would beat their illness and go into remission.

Basketball Games
of the Mind

As incredible as the
evidence culled by the above-mentioned researchers is, it is just the tip of
the iceberg when it comes to the control the holographic mind has over the
physical body. And the practical applications of such control are not limited
strictly to the matters of health. Numerous studies conducted around the world
have shown that imagery also has an enormous effect on physical and athletic
performance.

In a recent experiment,
psychologist Shlomo Breznitz at Hebrew university, Jerusalem had several groups
of Israeli soldiers march forty kilometers (about twenty five miles), but gave
each group different information. He had some groups march thirty kilometers,
and then told them they had another ten to go. He told others they were going
to march sixty kilometers, but in reality only marched them forty. He allowed
some to see distance markers, and provided no clue to others as to how far they
had walked. At the end of the study
Breznitz found that the stress hormone levels
in the soldiers’ blood always reflected their estimates and not the actual
distance they had marched. In other words,
their bodies responded not to
reality, but to what they were imaging as reality.

According to Dr. Charles
A. Garfield, a former National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)
researcher and current president of the Performance Sciences Institute in
Berkeley, California, the Soviets have extensively researched the relationship
between imagery and physical performance. In one study a phalanx of world-class
Soviet athletes was divided into four groups. The first group spent 100 percent
of their training time in training. The second spent 75 percent of their time
training and 25 percent of their time visualizing the exact movements and
accomplishments they wanted to achieve in their sport. The third spent 50
percent of their time training and 50 percent visualizing, and the fourth spent
25 percent training and 75 percent visualizing. Unbelievably, at the 1980
Winter Games in Lake Placid, New York, the fourth group showed the greatest
improvement in performance, followed by groups three, two, and one, in that
order.

Garfield, who has spent
hundreds of hours interviewing athletes and sports researchers around the
world, says that the Soviets have incorporated sophisticated imagery techniques
into many of their athletic programs and that they believe mental images act as
precursors in the process of generating neuromuscular impulses. Garfield
believes imagery works because movement is recorded holographically in the
brain. In his book
Peak Performance: Mental Training Techniques of the
World's Greatest Athletes
, he states, “These images are holographic and
function primarily at the subliminal level. The holographic imaging mechanism
enables you to quickly solve spatial problems such as assembling a complex
machine, choreographing a dance routine, or running visual images of plays
through your mind.”

Australian psychologist
Alan Richardson has obtained similar results with basketball players. He took
three groups of basketball players and tested their ability to make free throws.
Then he instructed the first group to spend twenty minutes a day practicing
free throws. He told the second group not to practice, and had the third group
spend twenty minutes a day visualizing that they were shooting perfect baskets.
As might be expected, the group that did nothing showed no improvement. The
first group improved 24 percent, but through the power of imagery alone, the
third group improved an astonishing 23 percent, almost as much as the group
that practiced.

The Lack of
Division Between Health and Illness

Physician Larry Dossey
believes that imagery is not the only tool the holographic mind can use to
effect changes in the body. Another is simply the recognition of the unbroken
wholeness of all things. As Dossey observes, we have a tendency to view illness
as external to us. Disease comes from without and besieges us, upsetting our
well-being. But if space and time, and all other things in the universe, are
truly inseparable, then we cannot make a distinction between health and
disease.

How can we put this
knowledge to practical use in our Jives? When we stop seeing illness as
something separate and instead view it as part of a larger whole, as a milieu
of behavior, diet, sleep, exercise patterns, and various other relationships
with the world at large, we often get better, says Dossey. As evidence he calls
attention to a study in which chronic headache sufferers were asked to keep a
diary of the frequency and severity of their headaches. Although the record was
intended to be a first step in preparing the headache sufferers for further
treatment, most of the subjects found that when they began to keep a diary,
their headaches disappeared!
^l

In another experiment
cited by Dossey, a group of epileptic children and their families
were
videotaped as they interacted
with one
another. Occasionally, there were
emotional outbursts during the sessions, which were often followed by actual
seizures. When the children were shown the tapes and saw the relationship
between these emotional events and their seizures, they became almost
seizure-free. Why? By keeping a diary or watching a videotape, the subjects
were able to see their condition in relationship to the larger pattern of their
lives. When this happens, illness can no longer be viewed “as an”
:
intruding disease originating elsewhere, but as part of a process of living
which can accurately be described as an unbroken whole,” says Dossey. “When our
focus is toward a principle of relatedness and oneness, and away from
fragmentation and isolation, health ensues.”

Dossey feels the word
patient
is as misleading as the word
particle.
Instead of being separate and
fundamentally isolated biological units, we are essentially dynamic processes
and patterns that are no more analyzable into parts than are electrons. More
than this, we are connected, connected to the forces that create both sickness
and health, to the beliefs of our society, to the attitudes of our friends, our
family, and our doctors, and to the images, beliefs, and even the very words we
use to apprehend the universe.

In a holographic
universe we are also connected to our bodies, and in the preceding pages we
have seen some of the ways these connections manifest themselves. But there are
others, perhaps even an infinity of others. As Pribram states, “If indeed every
part of our body is a reflection of the whole, then there must be all kinds of
mechanisms to control what's going on. Nothing is firm at this point” Given our
ignorance in the matter, instead of asking
how
the mind controls the
body holographic, perhaps a more important question is, What is the extent of
this control? Are there any limitations on it, and if so, what are they? That
is the question to which we now turn our attention.

The Healing
Power of Nothing at All

Another medical phenomenon
that provides us with a tantalizing glimpse of the control the mind has over
the body is the placebo effect. A placebo is any medical treatment that has no
specific action on the body but is given either to humor a patient, or as a
control in a double-blind experiment, that is, a study in which one group of
individuals is given a real treatment and another group is given a fake
treatment In such experiments neither the researchers nor the individuals being
tested know which group they are in so that the effects of the real treatment
can be assessed more accurately. Sugar pills are often used as placebos in drug
studies. So is saline solution (distilled water with salt in it), although
placebos need not always be drugs. Many believe that any medical benefit
derived from crystals, copper bracelets, and other nontraditional remedies is
also due to the placebo effect.

Even surgery has been
used as a placebo. In the 1950s, angina pectoris, recurrent pain in the chest
and left arm due to decreased blood flow to the heart, was commonly treated
with surgery. Then some resourceful doctors decided to conduct an experiment
Rather than perform the customary surgery, which involved tying off the mammary
artery, they cut patients open and then simply sewed them back up again. The
patients who received the sham surgery reported just as much relief as the
patients who had the full surgery. The full surgery, as it turned out, was only
producing a placebo effect. Nonetheless, the success of the sham surgery
indicates that somewhere deep in all of us we have the ability to control
angina pectoris.

And that is not all. In
the last half century the placebo effect has been extensively researched in
hundreds of different studies around the world. We now know that on average 35
percent of all people who receive a given placebo will experience a significant
effect, although this number can vary greatly from situation to situation. In
addition to angina pectoris, conditions that have proved responsive to placebo
treatment include migraine headaches, allergies, fever, the common cold, acne,
asthma, warts, various kinds of pain, nausea and seasickness, peptic ulcers,
psychiatric syndromes such as depression and anxiety, rheumatoid and
degenerative arthritis, diabetes, radiation sickness, Parkinsonism, multiple
sclerosis, and cancer.

Clearly these range from
the not so serious to the life threatening, but placebo effects on even the
mildest conditions may involve physiological changes that are near miraculous.
Take, for example, the lowly wart. Warts are a small tumorous growth on the
skin caused by a virus. They are also extremely easy to cure through the use of
placebos, as is evidenced by the nearly endless folk rituals—ritual itself
being a kind of placebo—that are used by various cultures to get rid of them.
Lewis Thomas, president emeritus of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in
New York, tells of one physician who regularly rid his patients of warts simply
by painting a harmless purple dye on them. Thomas feels that explaining this
small miracle by saying it's just the unconscious mind at work doesn't begin to
do
the placebo effect justice. “If my unconscious can figure out how to
manipulate the mechanisms needed for getting around that virus, and for
deploying all the various cells in the correct order for tissue rejection, then
all I have to say is that my unconscious is a lot further along than I am,” he
states.

The effectiveness of a
placebo in any given circumstance also varies greatly. In nine double-blind
studies comparing placebos to aspirin, placebos proved to be 54 percent as
effective as the actual analgesic. From this one might expect that placebos
would be even less effective when compared to a much stronger painkiller such
as morphine, but this is not the case. In six double-blind studies placebos
were found to be 56 percent as effective as morphine in relieving pain!

Why? One factor that can
affect the effectiveness of a placebo is the method in which it is given.
Injections are generally perceived as more potent than pills, and hence giving
a placebo in an injection can enhance its effectiveness. Similarly, capsules
are often seen as more effective than tablets, and even the size, shape, and
color of a pill can play a role. In a study designed to determine the suggestive
value of a pill's color, researchers found that people tend to view yellow or
orange pills as mood manipulators, either stimulants or depressants. Dark red
pills are assumed to be sedatives; lavender pills, hallucinogens; and white
pills, painkillers.

Another factor is the
attitude the doctor conveys when he prescribes the placebo. Dr. David Sobel, a
placebo specialist at Kaiser Hospital, California, relates the story of a
doctor treating an asthma patient who was having an unusually difficult time keeping
his bronchial tubes open. The doctor ordered a sample of a potent new medicine
from a pharmaceutical company and gave it to the man. Within minutes the man
showed spectacular improvement and breathed more easily. However, the next time
he had an attack, the doctor decided to see what would happen if he gave the
man a placebo. This time the man complained that there must be something wrong
with the prescription because it didn't completely eliminate his breathing
difficulty. This convinced the doctor that the sample drug was indeed a potent
new asthma medication—until he received a letter from the pharmaceutical
company informing him that instead of the new drug, they had accidentally sent
him a placebo! Apparently it was the doctor's unwitting enthusiasm for the
first placebo, and not the second, that accounted for the discrepancy.

In terms of the
holographic model, the man's remarkable response to the placebo asthma
medication can again be explained by the mind/ body's ultimate inability to
distinguish between an imagined reality and a real one. The man believed he was
being given a powerful new asthma drug, and this belief had as dramatic a
physiological effect on his lungs as if he had been given a real drug.
Achterberg's warning that the neural holograms that impact on our health are
varied and multifaceted is also underscored by the fact that even something as
subtle as the doctor's slightly different attitude (and perhaps body language)
while administering the two placebos was enough to cause one to work and the
other to fail. It is clear from this that even information received
subliminally can contribute greatly to the beliefs and mental images that
impact on our health. One wonders how many drugs have worked (or not worked)
because of the attitude the doctor conveyed while administering them.