He did not even suspect that it was cancerous,
and since he was in his sixties, the lesion was growing
quite slowly . However , as soon as I told him that the lesion
was consistent with a diagnosis of lung cancer , he became
terribly agitated. Within a month he started to cough up
blood; within  three, he was dead. If his state of mind
contributed to this untoward haste, it apparently acted
quickly . This patient could live with his tumor , but he
couldn’t live with the diagnosis. Even more basic is this question: Is the “mind” that a
doctor is interested in the patient’s overall personality , his
subconscious, his attitudes, his deepest beliefs, or
something not yet understood and deﬁned by psychology? It may be that the releva nt aspect of the mind involved in
getting sick or getting well is not even speciﬁcally human. An Ohio University study of heart disease in the 1970s
was conducted by feeding quite toxic, high-cholesterol diets
to rabbits in order to block their arteries, duplic ating the
eﬀect that such a diet has on human arteries. Consistent
results began to appear in all the rabbit groups except for
one, which strangely displayed 60 percent fewer symptoms. Nothing in the rabbits’ physiology could account for their
high tolerance to the diet, until it was discovered by
accident that the studen t who was in charge of feeding
these particular rabbits liked to fondle and pet them. He
would hold each rabbit lovingly for a few minutes before
feeding it; astonishingly , this alone seemed to enable the
animals to overcome the toxic diet. Repeat experiments, in
which one group of rabbi ts was treated neutrally while the
others were loved, came up with similar results. Once
again, the mechanism that causes such immunity is quite
unknown—it is baﬄing to think that evolution has built intothe rabbit mind an immune response that needs to be
triggered by human cuddling. There is even a possibility , many doctors would contend,
that the mind is a ﬁction, medically speaking. When we
think that it is sick, what is really sick is the brain. By this
logic, the classical mental disorders—depression,
schizophrenia, and psychosis—are actually brain disorders. This logic has obvious inadequacies: it is like saying that
car wrecks should be blamed on automobiles. But the
brain, being  a physical organ that can be weig hed and
dissected, makes medicine feel more secure than does the
mind, which has proved impossible to deﬁne after many
centuries of introspection and analysis. Doctors are quite
happy not to be called upon as philosophers. The ability of today’s psychotropic, or mind-inﬂuencing,
drugs to relieve the major symptoms of mental illness, such
as depression, mania, anxiety , and hallucinations , is much
greater than any treatment available in the past. Chemical
psychiatry is likely to vie with its exact opposite, mind-body
medicine, as the medical revolution of our time. It has hard
clinical results to back it up, including numerous
indications that chemical imbalances in the brain are
directly linked to mental illness. Nothing could appear to be more all-encompassing than
the fullblown madness of a chronic schizophre nic, who
suﬀers from hallucinatory visions and inner voices,
distorted thinking, and often complete physical and mental
disorientation. To ask a schizophrenic what day it is can
throw him into bewilderment and shivering terror . However , the structural diﬀerence between this state of
mind and sanity may be traceable to one minute
biochemical called dopamine, which is secreted by the
brain. The dopamine connection, known for two decades,
held that schizophrenics overproduce this chemical, which
plays an important role in processing both emotions andperceptions—a hallucinat ion would thus be a perception of
the outside world that has gotten scrambled in the brain’s
chemical coding. This hypothesis was further simpliﬁed in 1984 when a
psychiatrist at the University of Iowa, Dr. Raﬁq Waziri,
reviewed what was known about the brain chemistry of
schizophrenics and narrowed the defect down to an even
smaller molecule called serine, a common amino acid found
in most protein foods. Serine is thought to be an early link
in the manufacture of dopamine. Unable to metabolize
serine corre ctly, the brains of schizophrenics apparently
overproduce dopamine to oﬀset the lack—the exact process
is still unknown. Could it be that full-blown schizophrenia,
considered the most bizarre and complex of mental
disorders, depends on how well you digest your food? Earlier ﬁndings at M.I.T . have already shown that the
brain’s basic chemistry is so variable that it can be
modiﬁed by a single meal. Dr. Waziri bolstered support for his theory by taking a
group of long-term schizophrenics and feeding them a
dietary supplement of glycine, a chemical that serine is
supposed to build as part of the dopamine mechanism. Perhaps the extra glycine would bypass the serine defect,
Waziri reasoned, and bring dopamine back into balance. In
the trial group, a few schizophrenics responded quite
dramatically—they were  able to stop their medications
without having any psych otic episodes. For the ﬁrst time in
years, their thinking was free from both their disease and
the mind-numbing drugs used to treat it. A dieta ry approach to mental illness would be far more
benign than current therapies. The possibility of ﬁnding
more dietary  links is also tantalizing. At least one best-
selling diet book has jumped the gun by listing “happy
foods” and “sad foods,” on the theory that the amino acids
in these foods go directly to the brain and are made intochemicals that produce either positive or negative moods. Milk, chicken, bananas, and leafy greens are among the
happy foods , because they stimulate dopamine and two
other “positive” brain chemicals. Sugary and fatty foods, on
the other hand, are typically sad foods, because they
stimulate acetylcholine, a “negative” chemical. Critics say,
quite justiﬁably , that brain chemicals are not so simple—
can a schizophrenic’s high dopamine levels be considered
positive? Nor does it seem that changing the intake of
amino acids  leads directly to more of a desir ed brain
chemical, just as the amount of cholesterol in your diet
does not directly correlate with the amount in your blood. If you can eat your way to sanity , or even a better mood,
then the basic issues in mind-body medicine become even
more confused. Can you trust the mind to cure arthritis and
at the same time hold that eating chocolate will make you
depressed? This would imply a self-contradiction, that mind
is dominant over matter except when matter is dominant
over mind. In the current atmosphere of ambiguous
ﬁndings, the two opposite positions—treat the body
through the mind, treat the mind through the body—are
equally up in the air . None of the confusion has been adequately clariﬁed, and
as a result, the subjecti ve world of the mind remains a
treacherous force, capricious in its ability to heal, equally
capricious in its ability to bring illness. Many doctors,
because of their materialistic bias, would be thrilled to
conclude that chemicals must be the answer to all our
mental and physical mysteries. I don’t think they can be. In my specialty of
endocrinology , some of the ﬁrst chemicals that aﬀect the
mind, the endocrine hormones, were discovered. Every day
I see patients who display mental symptoms that are
traceable to defects in their hormonal balance—the
distorted thinking of a diabetic going into a low-blood-sugarreaction, the mood shifts of the menstrual cycle, and even a
characteristic depression that is the earliest warning sign
of certain cancers (a tumor in the pancreas, for example,
may be too small to detect, yet it will release cortisol and
other “stress hormones” into the bloodstream, causing the
patient to feel depressed). Despite this, I see too many ﬂaws in the argumen t that a
deeper knowledge of body chemistry is all we need—the
body has too many chemicals (literally thousands of them),
they are produced in bewilderingly complex patterns, and
they come and go too fast, often in fractions of a second. What controls this consta nt ﬂux? We cannot leave the mind
out of the mind-body connection altogether . To say that the
body heals itself using only chemicals is like saying that a
car shifts gears using only the transmission. Clearly it takes
a driver who knows what he is doing. Although medicine
has spent several centur ies trying to hold on to the idea
that the body runs itself alone, like a self-motivated
machine, there must be a driver here, too. Otherwise, our
body’s chemistry would be a jumble of ﬂoating molecules
instead of the incredibly  ordered and precise machinery
that it so obviously is. In a more naïve age, the driver was thought to be a tiny
man, called the homunculus, who sat in the heart and
performed all the gear shifts needed to run the body. The
homunculus went out in the Renaissance, when anatomists
began for the ﬁrst time to dissect cadavers and verify what
was inside them. The homunculus wasn’t found inside the
heart (neithe r was the soul), but that left a huge , glaring
gap between the mind and the body. Many scientists since
have tried to ﬁll the gap with the brain, saying that the
brain’s funct ion is to order and control all other functions
in the physiology; but this answer begs the question,
because the brain is just another machine. The driver still
needs to be there. I will argue that he is, but he hasbecome something much more abstract than the
homunculus or even the brain—he is built into the
intelligent power that motivates us to live, move, and think. Can that be proved? The next step for us is to work our
way deeper into the body ’s inner intelligence, to try to ﬁnd
out what motivates it. The territory of mind-body medicine
has no givens and no inﬂexible rules, which is all to the
good. For decades,  medicine has known that much disease
has a psychosomatic component, yet dealing with that
component has been like trying to harness the wind. Inside
us there must be a “thin king body” that responds to the
mind’s comm ands, but where could it be and what is it
made of? EXPANDING THE TOPIC
One of the most baﬄing mysteries touched upon in this
chapter—where does a thought come from?—remains just
as baﬄing today . It may surprise you, but there is no
evidence that the brain is thinking. In fact, if you assume
that the mind arises from  the brain, which is the standard
working assumption in neuroscience, consciousne ss is just
an inference. Imagine an old-time player piano, the kind
that performed music by inserting a paper roll into the
mechanism. Punched holes in the paper roll activate the
keys, giving the appearance that an invisible pianist is
playing the “Maple Leaf R ag” or a Mozart sonata. No one would propose that the piano roll manufactured
itself . There must be a musician whose actual intentions lie
behind the “invisible” pianist. We infer his existence
without seeing him. The same is true about the mind when
you observe the brain. As its quadrillion connections
activate, using chemical signals and faint electrical
charges, the vast activ ity of mind—thoughts, feelings,sensations, and images—appears. To claim that this
happens automatically seems strange, but it’s the
materialist position, while in Quantum Healing  I said the
opposite: An invisible intelligence, comple te with
intentions, desires, hope s, dreams, and so on, is at work. The fact that you can’t see this entity , known as the self,
doesn’t prove that he doesn’t exist. It only proves that he
doesn’t exist  if you are a strict materialist, who will accept
nothing except physical phenomena. The bulk of this chapter was devoted to the reality  of the
mind-body connection, which is unassailable now. Over the
past thirty years the network that transmits messages
throughout the body has been studied in much greater
detail, leaving no doubt that every thought, feeling, mood,
and belief crosses the bridge from mental to physical. But
these detailed researches into hormones,
neurotransmitters, immunomodulators, peptides, and
thousands of products expressed by genes has obscured
the simplicity of the mind-body connection. In simple terms, the entire system is a feedback loop,
with only two factors to consider , input and output. Input
enters the brain, output  exits. This is the nexus where
every process, mental or physical, meets every other , like
trillions of train tracks converging on a train station and
then exiting the station  to go their separate ways. The
reason for simplifying the almost inﬁnite complexity of a
living mind and body comes down to practicalities. Each of
us wants to know the right and wrong kind of input that
will aﬀect us. Positive Input
Pure food, air , and water
Positive emotions
Strong self -esteemLow stress, good coping skills in the face of stress
Moderate exercise
Good sleep (eight to nine hours every night)
Loving, supportive relationships
Inner contentment, lack of conﬂicts and tensions
Satisfying work
Meditation and other contemplative practices
Abstaining from alcohol, tobacco, and recreational drugs
Minimizing the use of prescription drugs
Healing old wounds and self-destructive conditioning
from the past
The reason that little or none of these things seem new is
that they don’t need to be. After decades of public
information about prevention and the rise of the wellness
movement, we know a great deal about positive lifestyle
changes (this isn’t the same as knowing all we need to
know about why these changes work). Input, positive or
negative, registers in every cell of the body, down to the
expression of your genes (that is, their complex chemical
output). The ﬂy in the ointment is that information isn’t the same
as motivation. People may know what’s good for them, but
they continue to live otherwise. The most common kinds of
negative input remain a mainstay in the lives of people who
sincerely want to change, including overuse of alcohol,
tobacco, and drugs; eating processed and junk foods;
tolerating a high level of stress; going short on sleep;
taking little or no exercis e. The Gallup organization, which
surveys the wellbeing of populations around the world, has
a top catego ry known as “thriving.” These are the people
who describe  themselves  as happy , safe, ﬁnancially secure,
and healthy—in short, they are enjoying a level of wellbeing
that most Americans would consider a basic minimum. Yetthe percentage of people who are thriving around the world
is dismally low, often under 10–15 percent, and even in the
prosperous developed West, it rarely rises above 33
percent. The fact that the United States continues to
consume antidepressants and tranquilizers in record
numbers attests to our inner unease, and by some
estimates the abuse of prescription painkillers is now a
cause of death surpassing the total deaths from illegal
substances. No amount of preaching about these things will work
over the long run. Prevention implies a level of fear, and
fear is a bad motivator except in short bursts. The body
resists being  in a state of chronic stress, and worrying
about your health is a form of stress. The only successful
long-term motivation is inspiration. It, too, can ﬂicker out
quickly . But there’s a secure kind of inspiration that comes
from valuing yourself with such conviction that you like and
enjoy the experience of giving your mind and body positive
inputs all the time. When I wrote Quantum Healing  I wanted to give the
human side of the mind-body connection, realizing that a
term like feedback loop,  adopted from computers and
information theory , sound s cold and abstract. But the whole
game comes down to input-output in the end. Without dwelling on the negative, let’s say that you’ve
had a stressful day. You feel wiped out by ﬁve o’clock, so
you grab a burger and fries instead of cooking at home. You
settle in with a drink or two to unwind. Your workload is
heavy , so you catch up by taking some of it home with you,
and by bedtime you ﬁnd your mind is still so active that
getting to sleep takes a while. Your alarm clock goes oﬀ at
the usual time the next morning, but you’ve managed only
six hours of sleep. No matter , it’s time to start the whole
routine over again. In the back of your mind you promise
yourself to do better , a promise you may or may not keep.Yet as normal as this daily routine has beco me for
millions of people, adap ting to it is a challenge  for the
human body, because as we now realize, each deviation
from a positive lifestyle registers at the cellular level. Here’s a summary of what is happening. The consequences
of negative input are daunting. What Negative Input Does
Disturbs overall balance, leading to inﬂammation. Moves errati cally though  the body, obstructed by chronic
stress and the toxic debris of negative input from the
past. Reinforces old neural pathways, making it much harder
to break bad habits. Contributes to abnormal cell function, including
precancerous anomalies. Weakens the immune system, impairing resistance to
disease. Contributes to premature aging. Creates a general sense of dullness, discomfort, and dis-
ease, the opposite of wellbeing. Because Quantum Healing  focus ed on the drama of
spontaneous remissions from cancer—so-called miracle
cures—the bigger message might not have struck with
enough force. So let me state it in unmistakable terms:
Input is under your contr ol. Without antic ipating cancer or
any other disorder , your chief aim every day should be to
maximize positive input and minimize negative input. We are badly in need of a new model for wellbeing. Most
people segment their lives into work, leisure, and family . Little time is left for self-care. Yet caring for yourself today
is exactly what determines your life for decades to come.True self-care embraces a person’s entire life. Taking
charge of your own wellbeing reaches into every corner
because it has to. Your brain processes every experience,
physical, mental, and spiritual, as input. Look at the
contrast that self-care makes when compared  to self-
neglect. 10 Keys to Self -Care
1.Making happiness a high priority . Versus:  Coasting along with our present state of
happiness and unhappiness. 2.Making sure your life has purpose and meaning. Versus:  Focusing on daily practicalities, even those
that seem routine and meaningless. 3.Living according to a higher vision. Versus:  Living for externals like a better job, more
money , a bigger house, etc. 4.Expanding your awareness in every decade of life. Versus:  Viewing youth as the peak of life and old age
as a dwindling decline. 5.Devoting time and attention to personal growth. Versus:  Staying the same as you always were and
feeling proud about it. 6.Following a sensible regimen of good diet and physical
activity . Versus:  Eating a diet high in sugar , fat, and calories. Promising yourself to exercise tomorrow , or next week. 7.Allowing your brain to reset by introducing downtime
several times a day .Versus:  Working your brain to the point of exhaustion
before allowing yourself to take a break. 8.Getting to know your inner world through meditation,
contemplation, and self -reﬂection. Versus:  Avoiding what you really feel. Fearing what
you might ﬁnd if you dared to look inside yourself . 9.Practicing gratitude and appreciation. Versus:  Grabbing as much as you can for yourself . Never forgetting to look out for number one. 10.Learning how to love and be loved. Versus:  Leaving romance behind in the past. Not
looking into the deep source of love in yourself . As you can see, self-care goes far beyond eating our
vegetables and signing up for the gym. It amounts to a new
model for success and happiness, a model that abundant
medical evidence suppor ts. I’ll say more about that as we
proceed. There’s a reason for giving these general
principles ﬁrst. In a world where massive  attention is given
to the next fad diet, the gym-honed body, and the beauty of
youth, the truth is that a shift in consciousness produces
far greater beneﬁts. Getting peop le to turn inward is an important aspect, but
they have to know why. What Quantum Healing  aimed at
was far more radical: seeing yourself in a new way, as a
child of the universe. On the basis  of that realization, self-
care cannot help but begin at the source, where your
consciousness merges with cosmic consciousness. You can’t
truly value yourself until this happens, and then self-care is
like caring for Nature itself . OceanofPDF .comCounting the number of cells in the human body is no
easier than counting the number of people in the world, but
the accepted  estimate is 50 trillion, or about 10,000 times
the Earth’s present population. Isolated and placed under a
microscope, the various kinds of cells—heart, liver, brain,
kidney , et cetera—look rather alike to the untrained eye. A
cell is basically a bag, enclosed by an outer membrane, the
cell wall, and ﬁlled with a mixture of water and swirling
chemicals. At the cente r of all but the red blood cells is a
core, the nucleus, which safeguards the tightly  twisted
coils of DNA. If you hold a speck of liver tissue on your
ﬁngertip, it looks like calf’s liver; you would be hard-
pressed to discern that it is speciﬁcally human. Even a
skilled geneticist would detect only a 2 percent diﬀerence
between our DNA and a gorilla’s. Of the liver cell’s many
functions, over ﬁve hundred at latest count, you would not
have a clue simply by looking at it. As clouded as the mind-body issue has become, one thing
is indisputable: somehow human cells have evolved to a
state of formidable intelligence. At any one time, thenumber of activities being coordinated in our bodies is
quite literally inﬁnite. Like the Earth’s ecosystems, our
physiology appears to operate in separate comp artments
that in fact are invisibly connected: we eat, breathe, talk,
think, digest our food, ﬁght oﬀ infections, purify our blood
of toxins, renew our cells, discard wastes, vote for
Republicans, and much more besides. Each of these
activities weaves its way into the fabric of the whole. (Our
ecology is more plane tlike than most people  realize. Creatures roam our surface, as unmindful of our hugeness
as we are of their minuteness. Colonies of mites, for
example, spend their entire life cycle in our eyelashes.) Within the body’s vast array , the functions of any single
cell—such as one of the 15 billion neurons in the brain—ﬁll
a good-sized medical text. The volumes  devoted to any one
system of the body, such as the immune system or the
nervous system, take up several shelves in a medical
library . The healing mechanism resides somewhere in this overall
complexity , but it is elusive. There is no one organ of
healing. How does the body know what to do when it is
damaged, then? Medicine has no simple answer . Any one of
the processes involved in healing a superﬁcial cut—the
clotting of the blood, for example—is incredibly complex, so
much so that if the mechanism fails, as it does with
hemophiliacs, advanced scientiﬁc medicine is at a loss to
duplicate the impaired function. A doctor can prescribe
drugs that replace the missing clotting factor in the blood,
but these are temporary , artiﬁcial, and have numerous
undesirable side eﬀects. The body’s perfect timin g will be
absent, as well as the superb coordination of a dozen
related processes. By comparison, a man-made drug is a
stranger in a land where everyone else is blood kin. It can
never share the knowledge that everyone else was born
with.The body, we must admit, has a mind of its own. Once we
understand this mysterious aspect of our basic nature, then
the miraculous nature of curing cancer should disappear . Everyone’s body knows how to heal a cut, yet apparently
only a few people have  bodies that know how to cure
cancer . —
Every doctor realizes that it is nature who cures disease, a
statement ﬁrst written by Hippocrates two thousand years
ago. What is the diﬀerence , then, between natur e’s
ordinary form of healing and unusual or “miraculous”
healing? Perhaps the diﬀerence is small and exists only in
our heads. If you are peeling potatoes and cut your ﬁnger
with a slip of the knife, the cut heals by itself , and obviously
you are not wonder-struck, because the process of healing
—the clotting of the blood to close the wound, the
formation of a scab, and the regeneration of new skin and
blood vessels—seems altogether normal. Yet, we should be aware that this feeling of normalcy is
not the same as knowing what healing is or how to control
it. It is sobering to consider  how much of the knowle dge in
medical books pertains not to life but to death. By
performing autopsies on cadavers, examining tissue slides
under a microscope, and analyzing blood, urine, and other
isolated by-products of the body, the majority of medical
knowledge has been obtained. True, patients are examin ed
when they are alive, and tests can be run on many isolated
functions in their bodies. But the knowledge so acquired is
rudimentary compared to the volumes of super-
sophisticated data devoted to death. The poet Wordsworth
wrote this memorably terse line: “We murder to dissect.”
No truer statement has ever been made about the
limitations of medical research.The ﬁrst thing that is killed in the laboratory  is the
delicate web of intelligence that binds the body together . When a blood cell rushes to a wound site and begins to
form a clot, it has not traveled there at random. It actually
knows where  to go and what to do when it gets there, as
surely as a paramedic—i n fact, more surely , since it acts
completely spontaneously and without guesswork. Even if
we break down its know ledge into ﬁner and ﬁner bits,
looking for the secret in some minute hormone or
messenger enzyme, we will not ﬁnd a protein strand
labeled “intelligence,” and yet there is no doubt that
intelligence is at work. Part of this intelligence devotes itself to healing, and it
seems to be a very powerful force. Every fatal disease has
its mysterious survivors, not just cancer . Although I know of
no spontane ous cures of AIDS , there are long-term
survivors—those who remain alive after ﬁve years—whose
immune systems have somehow defended themselves
against a disease that under normal conditions is totally
devastating. Researchers tend to approach such
extraordinary physiologie s as biochemical freaks of nature. By taking samples of their blood and isolating any unusual
components that can be detected in the immune cells,
molecular biologists hope to discover the unknown
ingredient that is protecting these people. If that can be
accomplished—it is an extremely tedious, diﬀicult task,
given the complexity of the immune system—then after
years of testing and millions of dollars, a new drug may
emerge that can beneﬁt the population as a whole. Yet, what everyone really  needs is the ability to make this
wonder drug himself , just as the person who ﬁrst produced
it did, and that ability cannot be synthesized. Isn’t buying
the drug as good as making it? Not by a long shot. The so-
called active ingredient in a man-made drug contains very
little know-how compared to the original chemicalproduced by the body. It would almost be fairer to call the
drug an inert ingredient. The reason for this lies at the level of our cells. The outer
membrane of each cell, or the cell wall, is outﬁtted with
numerous sites called receptors. The cell wall itself is
smooth, but these receptors are “sticky”—they are made of
complex molecular chains whose last links are open-ended,
each one waiting for another molecule to come along and
bind with it. In other words, receptors are like keyholes
into which only very speciﬁc keys will ﬁt. For a drug to
work—whether morphine, Valium, digitalis, or almost
anything else—it must be the key that ﬁts some precisely
chosen receptor on the cell wall and no other . The hormones, enzymes, and other biochemicals
produced by our bodies  have superb knowled ge about
which receptors they should ﬁt into. The molecules
themselves actually seem able to pick and choose among
various sites—it is uncanny to follow their tracks under an
electron microscope as they make a beeline to where they
are needed. Also, the body can release hundreds of
diﬀerent chemicals at a time and orchestrate each  one with
regard to the whole. If you hear a hot rod backﬁre on the street outside your
window and jump in your chair , your insta ntaneous
reaction is the outcome of a complex internal event. The
trigger for the event is a burst of adrenaline from your
adrenal glands. Carried into the bloodstream, this
adrenaline signals reacti ons from your heart, which starts
to pump blood faster; from your blood vessels, which
contract and force up your blood pressure; from your liver,
which puts out extra fuel in the form of glucose; from your
pancreas, which secretes insulin so that more glucose can
be metaboliz ed; and from your stomach and intestines,
which immediately stop digesting food so that more energy
can be shunted elsewhere.All this activity , happeni ng at a furious pace and with
powerful eﬀects everywhere in your body, is coordinated by
the brain, which uses the pituitary gland to guide many of
the hormonal signals just described, not to mention various
other chemical signals that go racing down your neurons to
focus your eyes, prick up your ears, jerk your back muscles
upright, and swivel your head in alarm. To make this whole react ion happen and then to make it
go away again (for the body, unlike a man-made drug,
knows how to reverse every one of these processes just as
neatly as it began), the same key-in-the-lock mechanism is
employed everywhere. It is all so deceptively simple, yet if
you attempt to duplicate this event with a drug, the results
are nowhere near as precise, orderly , and beautifully
orchestrated. In fact, they are chaotic. Injecting adrenaline,
insulin, or glucose separa tely into the body gives it a crude
jolt. The chemicals immediately ﬂood all the receptor sites
without coordination from the brain. Instead of talking to
the body, they assault it with single-minded insistence. Even though the chem ical make-up of adrenaline is
identical no matter where it is derived, the critical
ingredient of intelligence must be present; other wise, the
drug’s action is a mockery of the real thing. Here is a related example to show the complicated
results of giving a drug that seems simple. Hypertension
patients are generally told to bring down their elevated
blood pressure with diuretics—drugs that take water from
the cells and pass it out of the system through urination. This is exactly what the kidneys do all the time as they
delicately monitor your blood chemistry to make sure that
the balance of water , waste products, and the necessary
salts, or electrolytes, is precisely maintained. A diuretic,
however , has only one idea in mind, and obsessed with that
one idea, it careens through the body, demanding, “Water! Water!” from every cell it meets.The result is that the ﬂuid tension in the blood vessels is
reduced, which is what the doctor wants to happen, but the
water level everywhere else is aﬀected at the same time. The brain may be forced to give up some of its water , which
under normal conditions it does only in the direst
emergency , causing the patient to feel dizzy and drowsy . In
many cases nothing more  serious happens, but sometimes
other brain functions may also then be thrown oﬀ,
especially in older patients: if they happen to drink alcohol,
even in moderation, these people can become so confused
that they forget to drink  enough water or to eat properly . This can lead to malnutrition combined with severe
dehydration. In the view of some endocrinologists, the
dehydration induced by diuretics in the presence of alcohol
or tranquilizers is the leading cause of death among older
Americans. All of these consequences, whether mild or severe, are
usually called the undesirable “side eﬀects” of diuretics,
but that is not an accurate name. They are just its eﬀects—
the good and bad ones necessarily come together in the
same package. A diuretic basically work s by latching onto
sodium atoms, causing the body to discard excess  salt, and
this in turn indirectly brings down the water level in the
tissues, since  water is bound up with salt in our bodies, just
as in sea water . The diuretic cannot help it if too much salt
is taken where water is still needed. Since potassium is
close to sodium in its atomic structure, the diuretic also
causes it to be depleted, leading to weakness, fatigue, and
leg cramps. (Less-adverse eﬀects are generally noticed by
the leaching  of other trace elements, such as zinc and
magnesium.) Besides these common signs of potassium
deﬁciency , there can be other complications—digitalis, the
drug commonly given to heart patients to strengthen their
weak heartbeat, becomes more toxic if the body is low on
potassium. Ironically , a potassium deﬁciency is nowsuspected to be a causal link in high blood pressure, which
means that the diuretic may be promoting the very
condition it was meant to cure. The frustrating reality , as far as medical researchers are
concerned, is that we already know that the living body is
the best pharmacy ever devised. It produces diuretics,
painkillers, tranquilizers, sleeping pills, antibiotics, and
indeed everything manufactured by the drug companies,
but it makes them much, much better . The dosage is always
right and given on time; side eﬀects are minimal or
nonexistent; and the directions for using the drug are
included in the drug itself , as part of its built-in
intelligence. —
Thinking about these well-known facts has led me to three
conclusions. First, that intelligence is present everywhere
in our bodies. Second, that our own inner intelligence is far
superior to any we can try to substitute from the outside. Third, that intelligence is more important than the actual
matter of the body, since without it, that matter would be
undirected, formless, and chaotic. Intelligence makes the
diﬀerence between a house designed by an architect and a
pile of bricks. For the moment, let’s keep our deﬁnition of the word
intelligence  as simple and practica l as possible. Rather
than referring to the intelligence of a genius, which may
seem both exalted and abstract, I deﬁne it simply as “know-
how.” There is no doubt, whatever you think about
intelligence in the abstract, that the body must be credited
with an immense fund of know-how . The body’s inner intelligence is so powerful that when it
goes awry, the physician is faced with a truly formidable
antagonist. Every cell in the body is programmed by itsDNA, for example, to divide at a certain rate, producing
two new cells after the mother cell splits in half. Like
everything else regulated by our inner intelligence, this
process is not purely mechanical. A cell divides in response
to its own internal need combined with signals generated
from the cells around it, the brain, the faraway organs that
are “talking” to it via chemical messages. Cell division is a
carefully considered and well-thought-out decision—except
in the case of cancer . Cancer is wild, anti-social behavior , whereby a single cell
reproduces itself without check, heeding no signals from
anywhere except, apparently , its own demented DNA. Why
this occurs, no one know s. It is a good bet that the body
itself knows how to reverse the process, but for some
reason, equally unknow n to science, it doesn’t always
succeed. It is only a matter of time, once the process
begins, before the cancer cells overwhelm a vital organ,
crowd out its normal cells, and cause death. When the ﬁnal
crisis comes, the cancer  cells perish with the rest of the
body, doomed by their ungoverned appetite for self-
expansion. Medicine has so far not ﬁgured out a way to send a
message to the cancer cells in time to ward oﬀ the tragic
fate they have created. The chemicals a physician might
use against cancer are not at all eﬀective on the level of
intelligence. Cancer is endowed with mad genius, while
drugs are simple-minded . So the oncologist resort s to a
much cruder assault, a form of poisoning. The anti-cancer
drug that is administere d is generally toxic to the entire
body, but because cancer cells are growing at a much
faster rate than normal cells, they ingest more of the
poison and die oﬀ ﬁrst. The whole strategy is a calculated
risk. The patient must be fortunate; his physician must be
extremely knowledgeable about the dosage and timing of
the chemotherapy , both of which are absolutely vital. Thenthe cancer may be defea ted, adding years of useful life to
the patient’s existence. Ironically , the therapy may fail because it strips the body
of the very intelligence that usually guards it from  disease. Many anti-cancer drugs are extremely damaging to the
body’s immune system; they directly suppress the bone
marrow , which manufa ctures our white cells, with
devastating eﬀect on the white-cell count in the blood. As
the course of chemotherapy continues, the patient  becomes
more and more susceptib le to new forms of cancer , and in a
certain numb er of cases—as high as 30 percent for breast
cancer—new cancer appears and the patient dies. Moreover , it is sometimes not statistically possible to kill
every malign ant cell. It has been estimated that a typical
cancer patient may have 10 billion cancer cells. If his
chemotherapy is 99.99 percent eﬀective, there would still
be 1 million survivors, more than enough to start over
again. Cancer cells are not created equal; some are hardier than
others and therefore more diﬀicult to kill. It may be that
destroying the weaker cells acts as a kind of Darwinian
selection, leaving the ﬁttest to survive. In that case,
chemotherapy would actually promote a more virulent
disease than it cured. (Likewise, the persistent
staphylococcus infections  that patients come down with in
hospitals are often highly resistant to antibiotics, because
only the most vicious bacteria can live in the sterile
environment of operating rooms and withstand the
continual bombardment of penicillin injections.) One can
easily conceive of a strain of “super cancer” that might
arise from one or two malignant cells that had the
strongest resistance to treatment. In any case, the early promise that chemotherapy would
wipe out cancer in our generation, widely believed in the
1950s, has sobered. Now a few cancers at a time aredefeated, such as lymph ocytic leukemia in children and
some kinds of Hodgkin’s lymphoma, while other major
killers, such as lung and brain cancers, are virtually
untouchable through chemotherapy . —
Nothing I have said so far about the body’s know-how is
hypothetical. We have all been informed, doctors and public
alike, about the body’s wondrous intricacy . Yet we persist in
thinking of the body in an obsolete mold, as basically
matter , but with a smart technician inside who moves the
matter around. This technician was once called a soul; now
it tends to be demoted to a ghost inside the machine, but
the same emphasis remains. Because we see and touch our
bodies, carry  their solid weight around with us, and bump
into doors if we don’t watch out, the reality of the body
appears to be primarily material—such is the bias of our
world. But the bias has a huge blind spot in it. Despite the
overwhelming superiority  of the body’s know-how , which
scientists freely acknowledge, a minute amount of time and
money is spent trying to grasp the living body as a whole,
and for very good reason. The Greek philosopher
Heraclitus made the famous remark, “You cannot step into
the same river twice,” because the river is constantly being
changed by new water rushing in. The same holds true for
the body . All of us are much more like a river than anything
frozen in time and space. If you could see your body as it really is, you would never
see it the same way twice. Ninety-eight percent of the
atoms in your body were not there a year ago. The skeleton
that seems so solid was not there three months ago. The
conﬁguration of the bone  cells remains somewhat constant,
but atoms of all kinds pass freely back and forth throughthe cell walls, and by that means you acquire a new
skeleton every three months. The skin is new every month. You have a new stomach
lining every four days, with the actual surface cells that
contact food being renew ed every ﬁve minutes. The cells in
the liver turn over very slowly , but new atoms still ﬂow
through them , like water in a river course, making a new
liver every six weeks. Even within the brain, whose cells
are not replaced once they die, the content of carbon,
nitrogen, oxygen, and so on is totally diﬀerent today from a
year ago . It is as if you lived in a building whose brick s were
systemically taken out and replaced every year. If you keep
the same blueprint, then it will still look like the same
building. But it won’t be the same in actuality . The human
body also stands there looking much the same from day to
day, but through the processes of respiration, digestion,
elimination, and so forth, it is constantly and ever in
exchange with the rest of the world. Certain atoms—carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen
—pass through the body very quickly , being an essential
part of the things we use up the fastest—food, air, and
water . If it were up to only these four elements, we would
be creating new bodies for ourselves literally every month. However , the pace of renewal is slowed by other elements
that do not ﬂow through us very rapidly . The calcium bound
into our bones can take a whole year to replace itself—
some authorities extend the time to several years. Iron, the
component that makes red blood cells red, is held onto
quite tenaciously , being lost mainly through the sloughing
of dead skin cells or the actual loss of blood. Even though  the rates of change may diﬀer , change is
always there. What I am calling “intelligence” takes on the
role of guidin g this change so that we do not collapse into a
heap of brick s. That is one of the most obvious facts aboutthe physiology , but intelligence is so changeable, so quick
on the move—in other  words, so alive —that medical
textbooks devote almost no space to it at all. To get an idea of how limited our current knowle dge is,
consider the structure of a neuron. The neurons that
compose the brain and central nervous system “talk” to one
another across gaps called synapses. These gaps separate
the tiny branchlike ﬁlaments, the dendrites, that grow at
the ends of each nerve cell. Everyone possesses billions of
these cells, divided between the brain and the central
nervous system, and as we saw, each one is capable of
growing dozens or even hundreds of dendrites (the total
estimated at 100 million million), meaning that at any one
time, the possible combi nations of signals jumpin g across
the synapses  of the brain exceed the number of atoms in
the known universe. The signals also communicate with
one another at lightning speed. To read this sentence, your
brain takes a few milliseconds to arrange a precise pattern
of millions of signals, only to dissolve them instantly , never
to be repeated again in exactly the same way . In medical school, we were taught a simple model of how
neurons communicate: an electrical charge forms on one
side of the synapse, and when the charge is large enough,
it jump s like a spark across the gap to deliver a signal to
another nerve cell. Assuming that this is the correct
mechanism (in reality it isn’t), the description we learned in
our neurology textbook in 1966 told us next to nothing
about how neurons act in real life; the book model makes
sense only for a single nerve cell, isolated, stopped in time,
and stripped of context. In truth, the action taking  place at
the gaps in the nervous system is like that of a cosmic
computer reduced to a microcosmic scale. This awesome
computer operates continuously , handles hundreds of
programs at a time, deals in multiple billions of “bytes” ofinformation every second, and, most miraculous ly of all,
knows how to run itself . It is not really our medical training that was at fault here. How can any textbook possibly describe this whole
process? To think is to form patterns inside ourselves that
are just as complex, ﬂeeting, and rich in their diversity as is
reality itself . Thinking is the mirror of the world, and
nothing less. Science simply does not have the tools to look
at such a phenomenon, which is at once inﬁnite and alive. The living body will not stop to be studied, certain ly not as
a whole. So when it delivers a shock to science, as in a
spontaneous cure of cancer , medicine all but halts in its
tracks, bewildered to ﬁnd that life does not behave as
neatly as the laboratory model. In 1986, a shock was delivered that could turn the whole
ﬁeld of brain research on its head: a Mexican neuro-
surgeon, Dr. Ignacio Madrazo, successfully implanted
healthy new cells into the brain of a patient with
Parkinson’s disease. Not only did the transplant take, which previously was
considered impossible, but the patient showed an amazing
85 percent return to normal functioning. Before the
surgery , the patient, a Mexican farmer in his late thirties,
had been rendered virtually helpless by his disease. Parkinson’s strikes about 1 percent of people over age 50. It begins with muscle tremors, rigidity of the limbs, or a
tendency to move very slowly . The immedia te cause of
these symptoms is a deﬁciency of dopamine, the same
brain chemic al that leads to schizophrenia when it is in
oversupply . For reasons not yet known, the nerve cells that
produce dopamine, located in a part of the brain stem
called the substantia nigra, begin to die, creating the
deﬁciency . Without enou gh dopamin e, the brain’s ability to
regulate muscle movement is impaired and ﬁnally lost.Any or all three of Parkinson’s symptoms grows worse
over time, until the patient is totally incapacitated. The
playwright Eugene O’Neill contracted Parkinson’s in his
ﬁfties. It became increasingly diﬀicult for him to write as
his shaking became more  severe. He had planned a cycle of
four plays that were to be his masterpiece, but his disease
destroyed everything: one glance at the surviving
manuscripts reveals that O’Neill could barely form the
cramped, spidery , pathetically illegible letters. Through
heroic endurance, he managed to commit his words to
paper , but no one has ever been able to decipher what they
say. In Mexico, Madrazo’s patient, though considerably
younger than most Parkinson’s victims, had been  conﬁned
to his bed, suﬀering from constant, rhythmic tremors that
made him unable to walk without assistance. After the
surgery , he could walk, run, feed himself , work in his
garden, and, as a moving ﬁlm of him shows, once again
take his young children in his arms. Dr. Madrazo’s operation opened the door for other
Parkinson’s patients, of which there are over a million in
the United States alone. By the end of 1987, two hundred
similar operations had been performed throughout the
world. Madrazo performed twenty of these, all with
considerable success. (Previous attempts at the same
surgery had failed, as have many since. Madrazo believes
that his success is due to the exact location he chooses for
his implants.) But the long-term consequences are just now
being considered—sudden ly, and with little warning, neuro-
researchers are confronted with the science-ﬁction
possibility of a “brain transplant.”
What makes any brain-ti ssue graft such a shock is that
medicine has always believed that the brain could not heal
itself—which is why almost all brain damage, either by
accident or disease, has been considered irreversible. Onlyin 1969 did a researcher in Cambridge, Godfrey Raisman,
prove with an electron microscope that damag ed nerve
cells can sprout new growth. Now Madrazo has shown that
the brain not only can heal itself but will accept tissue from
other organs. His transplant for Parkinson’s was done with
cells from the adrenal gland, which also produces
dopamine; the surgery can also be performed using brain
tissue from another person or even from a pig fetus. Neuroscientists currently  hypothesize that the brain is
endowed with a complex chemical repair system that was
almost totally unknown a few years ago. A Swedish
research team has shown that memory loss in rats can be
reversed by injecting them with one of the brain’s major
repair chemicals, a key protein called NGF , or nerve growth
factor . By analogy , the brain damage associated with
Alzheimer’s disease, which also involves memory loss, may
be treatable in the same way. The Swedish experiment also
implies an advance over the brain-tissue graft, because it
did not use live tissues or require surgery . One after another , the basic tenets of brain physiology
are having to be reconsidered and drastically modiﬁed. The
breakthroughs continue  to be revolutionary: another
Swedish team has shown that nerve cells can be implanted
onto the retina of the eye, whose surface is just an
extension and spreading out of the optic nerve. After they
are implanted, the cells begin to grow new branches,
conﬁrming that regeneration in the brain is possible and
normal. Once again,  this research involved laboratory
animals and not human subjects, but the applications for
treating blind people are obvious; likewise, other grafts
may beneﬁt victims of traumatic brain injury , strokes, and
various brain disorders. I want to emphasize that none of these advances would
have been possible witho ut a change of concept on the part
of science. It is disturbing to think that the same doctorswho conﬁden tly speak today of healing the brain just as
conﬁdently pronounced it impossible in 1985. The roots of
the brain graft actually go back many years, to 1912, when
Elizabeth Dunn, a researcher at Rockefeller Institute,
successfully implanted nerve cells into a mouse ’s brain. Her research was greete d with total indiﬀerence . (One is
reminded that penicillium mold was observed to kill
bacteria more than 140 times, and accordingly written up
in the literature, before Alexander Fleming “discovered”
this fact. Previous to him, all the other researchers had
been annoyed that their carefully grown laboratory
cultures were being spoiled by the intrusion of the green
mold. Fleming himself threw out his infested bacter ia
cultures, only later realizing that he had a wonder drug in
the making.) Another pioneer in brain-graft research, Don M. Gash,
now at the University of Rochester , was pulled aside by a
senior facult y member at the beginning of his career and
told, “Dr. Gash, you’re a young man with a promising
career ahead of you. Don’t waste your time on a silly idea
that can’t be true.”
The very notion that there is a transplant at work arouses
intense skepticism. Critics of Madrazo’s procedure have
noted that the recovery time of his patients, which begins
within a few weeks after the brain cells are implanted, is
far too fast for the new tissue to “take.” It may be that the
brain is repairing itself totally on its own, releasing
chemicals in response to the surgical wound rather than
from the new cells (rather like an oyster releasing mother-
of-pearl in response to a bit of grit under its shell). —
Perhaps these ﬁndings are telling us not so much to
perform more transplant surgery but rather to look for new
abilities in the brain as a living, dynamic organ. For all thatit has been gloriﬁed by modern medicine, the brain has
been the most frozen part of the frozen sculpture model of
the body, since it alone could not repair itself . On the face
of it, this is a suspicious claim. All the cells in your body,
whether a hair follicle, a neuron, or a heart cell, grew out
of one double strand of DNA at the moment of conception. Everything you can do—think, speak, run, play the violin, or
rule a country—builds on a capacity programmed into that
one original  molecule. Therefore, to say that a neuron
cannot heal itself is the same as saying that its DNA has
been crippled. Is this a reasonable assumption? Certainly
the DNA has decided to become a brain cell instead of a
heart cell, and that involves expressing certain parts of its
potential while suppressing others. But this is totally diﬀerent from saying that any ability in
the DNA has been lost. Nothing is lost in DNA. Each cell in
the body contains all of DNA’s inﬁnite possibilities all of the
time, from the moment of conception until the moment of
death. Proof of this exists in the procedure called cloning:
theoretically , one can take a cell from the inside of your
cheek and, given the right conditions, produce an identical
copy of you, or a million identical copies. The genius of
nature is that she did not settle for a million identical
clones; indeed, only the lowest organisms consist of
identical cells, and most of them are single-celled, like the
amoeba. Yet, the distinction between an amoeba and a
human being  breaks down at the level of DNA, in this
sense: all of the amoeba is contained in its little packet of
DNA, and all of you is contained in yours. So it should not
be so surprising that a neuron actually can (under
circumstances we do not quite understand) decide to drop
its rule about not repairi ng itself and suddenly begin to do
just that. Its DNA is not crippled. The truth of the matter is that the brain is too complex to
be turned into a model, and science by deﬁnition workswith models. Models are useful, but without exception they
have blind spots built into them. To see brain function, or
any function  in the body, without a model, you would have
to see it as a very abstract and seemingly contradictory
thing, as non-change being preserved in the midst of
dynamic change. As non-change, the body is solid and stable, like a frozen
sculpture. As change, it is mobile and ﬂowing, like a river. In the scientiﬁc worldview inherited from Newton, it has
been almost impossible to hold both these aspects together
in one’s mind at the same time. I remember a physicist
remarking that for Newton, nature was like a billiard game. What he meant was that classical physics studies a
collection of solid objects—the billiard balls—moving along
straight lines propelled by ﬁxed laws of motion. The game
is to predict their paths, speed, momentum, and so on, like
an English gentleman at his evening game of snooker . To
make these calculations, however , you have to stop the
game and draw a model of it, complete with formulas for
the proper angles, trajectories, and so on. Science has accepted essentially a frozen, geometric way
of mapping out everything that happens in the material
world, so quite naturally the idea of the sculpture took
precedence over the idea of the river. But the river has not
stopped just to please science—the beauty of the human
body is that it is new every moment. Yet, how do you make
a map of the body for every moment? That is the next
dilemma we have to confront. If we can solve it, we will
come much closer to what we want, not more knowledge to
put into libraries, but new abilities to program  into our
cosmic computer . EXPANDING THE TOPICThe theme of this chapte r is that the body should  be freed
from any ﬁxed model of how it works. In a word, you should
think of your own body as a verb, not a noun. If change
were the only constant, obviously we’d all desire positive
change. I’ve already simpliﬁed this into positive inputs
versus negative inputs. But I was trained in medical school
to treat ﬁxed processes, with the primary focus on those
processes that have become so impaired that disease has
begun to appear . Not just a model of the human body is
involved in such training  but an entire worldview , which is
why Quantum Healing  had to be so ambitious in its aims. Fortunately , steady progress has been made in the area of
wellness, and now a totally disease-oriented approach isn’t
as dominant. Self-directed change, conducted outside the
doctor’s oﬀice, has caug ht on. Pioneering studies by Dr.
Dean Ornish, ﬁrst published in the British medical journal
The Lancet  in 1990, tested the proposition that lifestyle
changes could create radical improvements in the body. Starting with a one-year study , Ornish took patients already
suﬀering from coronary artery disease, the primary cause
of heart attacks. One group of subjects was followed with normal medical
care while the others were enlisted in a lifestyle program
that consisted of whole foods, stress management,
moderate exercise, and social support. The speciﬁc form of
stress mana gement was yoga and meditati on. The
program’s diet included a drastic reduction in the amount
of fat consumed per day. These measu res sound rather
routine today , but Ornish produced a result that astounded
the medical community at the time. The patients  in the
control group showed no improvement in their heart
disease, and quite often the stenosis in their coronary
arteries (narrowing due to the buildup of fatty plaques) had
worsened after a year. In the group  following the lifestyle
protocols, however , the coronary vessels had slightlyopened, which was the ﬁrst time that coronary artery
disease had ever been reversed by any means, including
drugs. The door had opened to a new world of self-care, as other
studies replicated Ornish’s results. Recent progress has
been even more dramatic. In 2008, Ornish, working in
collaboration with Nobel laureate Elizabeth Blackburn,
showed that lifestyle changes improve gene expression. That is, the genes responsible for disease prevention were
turned on while the gene s responsible for cancer and heart
disease were turned oﬀ. This simple statement hardly
conveys the magnitude of the ﬁnding. It would have
seemed utterly impossible when Quantum Healing  was
written that the way a person thinks and acts has a direct
inﬂuence on their genes. Nor are we talking about minor changes. Within three
months of undertaking Ornish’s program, hundreds of
genetic changes were observed. One of the most exciting
has to do with the production of an enzyme known as
telomerase, which seems  to be crucial in the aging process. Each strand of DNA is capped at the end, like a period
ending a sentence, by a structure known as a telomere. With age, it appears that telomeres weaken, causing the
genetic sequence to fray at the ends. It is thought,  with considerable supporting research, that
increased telomerase, the enzyme that builds telomeres,
might signiﬁcantly retard aging. The Ornish-Blackburn
study discovered that telomerase did in fact increase in
subjects following the positive lifestyle program. I was
excited by these ﬁndings and wondered how far they might
extend. In collaborat ion with a number of universities, the
Chopra Center for Wellbeing is conducting an ongoing
study , the largest of its kind to date, that focuses primarily
on consciousness.Subjects are divided into two groups, with one group
spending a week at the center learning to meditate and
engaging in a multidime nsional program that deals with
mind, body, and spirit. The control group spend s the week
engaging in an unstructu red spa program that is a pleasant
change from their ordinary routine. Dozens of biomarkers
are carefully analyzed, and the results are a magniﬁcation
of the original Ornish- Blackburn ﬁndings. Even more
genetic markers were found to improve, and the changes
occurred within mere days of beginning to meditate. The beneﬁcial eﬀects of meditating were well enough
known that I had conﬁdence in them when writing
Quantum Healing . These new ﬁndings, however , go far
beyond the accepted understanding that meditation can
lower blood pressure, decrease heart rate, increase
immunity to disease, and reduce the eﬀects of stress. Those
key ﬁndings haven’t changed, but now we know that
meditation leads to far more holistic beneﬁts, and that they
occur very quickly—it’s not a matter of dedicating years at
a time to master an esoteric Eastern discipline. The chart below summa rizes what happens when any
kind of positive input enters the mind-body feedback loop. What P ositive Input Does
Promotes overall balance, or homeostasis. Moves easily  through the system, without obstruc tion or
blockages. Generates new neural pathways. Promotes the production of new brain cells. Improves gene expression. Allows every cell to function normally , without anomalies
or aberrant behavior .Supports the immune system, increasing resistance to
disease. Counteracts the eﬀects over time of entropy and aging. Increases a sense of wellbeing: The person feels healthy ,
vibrant, and alive. The shape of the future is becoming clear . Two new
concepts are emerging. The ﬁrst is radical wellbeing, the
notion that through lifestyle modiﬁcation a person can
attain a state of wellness that reaches far beyond disease
prevention. The second is self-directed biological
transformation (SDBT), the notion that the genetic switches
that create and govern every cell can be consciously
directed. In a word, you can consciously guide your own
personal evolution. Unlike conventional wellbeing, in
radical wellbeing making the right choices isn’t optional. Every thought you have is already encoding a biological
choice right this minute, pointing to a positive outcome
(wellbeing) or a negative one (imbalance, physical decline,
disease, or death). That our cells change by the instant holds the key to a
higher state of health and the possibility of conscious
evolution. If you want to see what your thoughts were like
yesterday , look at your body today . If you want to see what
your body will be like tomorrow , look at your thoughts and
feelings today . Benign neglect isn’t good enough—once you
see that mind and body form a continuous, all-embracing
feedback loop, there is nothing that doesn’t  have an eﬀect. The cell mem brane of all 50 trillion cells in the body is a
vast communication center that is responsive to every
aspect of your life. Although the brain has traditionally
been considered the seat of mind, there is intelligence in
every cell, with an equal complexity and ability to respond
to the environment.These are the themes I broached in Quantum Healing,
and they have become only more potent over time. OceanofPDF .comTo climb to Machu Picchu, the fortress city of the Incas, is a
formidable task. One crosses a sixteen-thousand-foot pass
in the high Andes, where the oxygen is already low enough
to cause giddiness, and once the city is in sight above the
clouds, its walls are reach ed by three thousand stone steps. This was the last stronghold captured by Pizarro  when he
conquered Peru in 1532. One is astonished to think that
foot-runners connected Machu Picchu with every village
along the two thousand miles of the Incan empire. They
were swift messengers of almost inhuman endurance. They
ran barefoot, covering immense distances every day—at
times the equivalent of two or three Olympic marathons. Some of their trails began at the height of a mountain peak
in the Colorado Rockies  and ascended more than a mile
higher . It must have been these runners, the eyes and ears of the
emperor Atahualpa, who warned him of the approaching
Spanish. By treachery , Pizarro collected a fortune in
ransom when he kidnapped (and later murdered)
Atahualpa. One hopes the legends are true which say thatthe most priceless Incan  gold was secreted away in time. (Pizarro, who was unusually greedy , even for a
conquistador , was himself murdered by jealous rivals in
1541.) If you think of the human brain as the fortress at Machu
Picchu, then it too must have runners to carry its
commands to the farthest outposts of its empire—in this
case, the big toe. The physical routes are certainly visible—
the central nervous system runs down the spinal column,
branching out on either side at each vertebra in the
backbone; these major nerves then branch into millions of
tinier pathways that communicate to every region of the
body. The early anatomists saw the major nerves in the
sixteenth century , but the nervous system kept a secret. Who were the runners that took the messages to and from
the brain? Many people still think that the nerves work electrically ,
like a telegraph system, because until ﬁfteen years ago,
that is what medical texts contended. However , in the
1970s, a series of impor tant discoveries began, centering
on a new class of minute chemicals called
neurotransmitters. As their name implies, these chemicals
transmit nerve impulses; they act in our bodies as
“communicator molecule s,” whereby the neuron s of the
brain can talk to the rest of the body . Neurotransmitters are the runners that race to and from
the brain, telling every organ inside us of our emotions,
desires, memories, intuitions, and dreams. None of these
events are conﬁned to the brain alone. Likewise, none of
them are strictly mental, since they can be coded into
chemical messages. Neurotransmitters touch the life of
every cell. Wherever a thought wants to go, these
chemicals must go too, and without them, no thoughts can
exist. To think is to practice brain chemistry , promoting a
cascade of responses throughout the body. We have alreadyseen that intelligence, as know-how , pervades the
physiology—now it has acquired a material basis. That gives away the plot of this chapter , but with none of
the drama.
Quantum_Healing_by_Deppak_Chopra.txt
Summarize the following text section accurately and concisely. Maintain specific details and numerical information, and use anti-repetition mechanisms:

        He did not even suspect that it was cancerous,
and since he was in his sixties, the lesion was growing
quite slowly. However, as soon as I told him that the lesion
was consistent with a diagnosis of lung cancer, he became
terribly agitated. Within a month he started to cough up
blood; within  three, he was dead. If his state of mind
contributed to this untoward haste, it apparently acted
quickly. This patient could live with his tumor, but he
couldn’t live with the diagnosis. Even more basic is this question: Is the “mind” that a
doctor is interested in the patient’s overall personality, his
subconscious, his attitudes, his deepest beliefs, or
something not yet understood and deﬁned by psychology. It may be that the releva nt aspect of the mind involved in
getting sick or getting well is not even speciﬁcally human. An Ohio University study of heart disease in the 1970s
was conducted by feeding quite toxic, high-cholesterol diets
to rabbits in order to block their arteries, duplic ating the
eﬀect that such a diet has on human arteries. Consistent
results began to appear in all the rabbit groups except for
one, which strangely displayed 60 percent fewer symptoms. Nothing in the rabbits’ physiology could account for their
high tolerance to the diet, until it was discovered by
accident that the studen t who was in charge of feeding
these particular rabbits liked to fondle and pet them. He
would hold each rabbit lovingly for a few minutes before
feeding it; astonishingly, this alone seemed to enable the
animals to overcome the toxic diet. Repeat experiments, in
which one group of rabbi ts was treated neutrally while the
others were loved, came up with similar results. Once
again, the mechanism that causes such immunity is quite
unknown—it is baﬄing to think that evolution has built intothe rabbit mind an immune response that needs to be
triggered by human cuddling. There is even a possibility, many doctors would contend,
that the mind is a ﬁction, medically speaking. When we
think that it is sick, what is really sick is the brain. By this
logic, the classical mental disorders—depression,
schizophrenia, and psychosis—are actually brain disorders. This logic has obvious inadequacies: it is like saying that
car wrecks should be blamed on automobiles. But the
brain, being  a physical organ that can be weig hed and
dissected, makes medicine feel more secure than does the
mind, which has proved impossible to deﬁne after many
centuries of introspection and analysis. Doctors are quite
happy not to be called upon as philosophers. The ability of today’s psychotropic, or mind-inﬂuencing,
drugs to relieve the major symptoms of mental illness, such
as depression, mania, anxiety, and hallucinations, is much
greater than any treatment available in the past. Chemical
psychiatry is likely to vie with its exact opposite, mind-body
medicine, as the medical revolution of our time. It has hard
clinical results to back it up, including numerous
indications that chemical imbalances in the brain are
directly linked to mental illness. Nothing could appear to be more all-encompassing than
the fullblown madness of a chronic schizophre nic, who
suﬀers from hallucinatory visions and inner voices,
distorted thinking, and often complete physical and mental
disorientation. To ask a schizophrenic what day it is can
throw him into bewilderment and shivering terror. However, the structural diﬀerence between this state of
mind and sanity may be traceable to one minute
biochemical called dopamine, which is secreted by the
brain. The dopamine connection, known for two decades,
held that schizophrenics overproduce this chemical, which
plays an important role in processing both emotions andperceptions—a hallucinat ion would thus be a perception of
the outside world that has gotten scrambled in the brain’s
chemical coding. This hypothesis was further simpliﬁed in 1984 when a
psychiatrist at the University of Iowa, Dr. Raﬁq Waziri,
reviewed what was known about the brain chemistry of
schizophrenics and narrowed the defect down to an even
smaller molecule called serine, a common amino acid found
in most protein foods. Serine is thought to be an early link
in the manufacture of dopamine. Unable to metabolize
serine corre ctly, the brains of schizophrenics apparently
overproduce dopamine to oﬀset the lack—the exact process
is still unknown. Could it be that full-blown schizophrenia,
considered the most bizarre and complex of mental
disorders, depends on how well you digest your food. Earlier ﬁndings at M. I. T. have already shown that the
brain’s basic chemistry is so variable that it can be
modiﬁed by a single meal. Dr. Waziri bolstered support for his theory by taking a
group of long-term schizophrenics and feeding them a
dietary supplement of glycine, a chemical that serine is
supposed to build as part of the dopamine mechanism. Perhaps the extra glycine would bypass the serine defect,
Waziri reasoned, and bring dopamine back into balance. In
the trial group, a few schizophrenics responded quite
dramatically—they were  able to stop their medications
without having any psych otic episodes. For the ﬁrst time in
years, their thinking was free from both their disease and
the mind-numbing drugs used to treat it. A dieta ry approach to mental illness would be far more
benign than current therapies. The possibility of ﬁnding
more dietary  links is also tantalizing. At least one best-
selling diet book has jumped the gun by listing “happy
foods” and “sad foods,” on the theory that the amino acids
in these foods go directly to the brain and are made intochemicals that produce either positive or negative moods. Milk, chicken, bananas, and leafy greens are among the
happy foods, because they stimulate dopamine and two
other “positive” brain chemicals. Sugary and fatty foods, on
the other hand, are typically sad foods, because they
stimulate acetylcholine, a “negative” chemical. Critics say,
quite justiﬁably, that brain chemicals are not so simple—
can a schizophrenic’s high dopamine levels be considered
positive. Nor does it seem that changing the intake of
amino acids  leads directly to more of a desir ed brain
chemical, just as the amount of cholesterol in your diet
does not directly correlate with the amount in your blood. If you can eat your way to sanity, or even a better mood,
then the basic issues in mind-body medicine become even
more confused. Can you trust the mind to cure arthritis and
at the same time hold that eating chocolate will make you
depressed. This would imply a self-contradiction, that mind
is dominant over matter except when matter is dominant
over mind. In the current atmosphere of ambiguous
ﬁndings, the two opposite positions—treat the body
through the mind, treat the mind through the body—are
equally up in the air. None of the confusion has been adequately clariﬁed, and
as a result, the subjecti ve world of the mind remains a
treacherous force, capricious in its ability to heal, equally
capricious in its ability to bring illness. Many doctors,
because of their materialistic bias, would be thrilled to
conclude that chemicals must be the answer to all our
mental and physical mysteries. I don’t think they can be. In my specialty of
endocrinology, some of the ﬁrst chemicals that aﬀect the
mind, the endocrine hormones, were discovered. Every day
I see patients who display mental symptoms that are
traceable to defects in their hormonal balance—the
distorted thinking of a diabetic going into a low-blood-sugarreaction, the mood shifts of the menstrual cycle, and even a
characteristic depression that is the earliest warning sign
of certain cancers (a tumor in the pancreas, for example,
may be too small to detect, yet it will release cortisol and
other “stress hormones” into the bloodstream, causing the
patient to feel depressed). Despite this, I see too many ﬂaws in the argumen t that a
deeper knowledge of body chemistry is all we need—the
body has too many chemicals (literally thousands of them),
they are produced in bewilderingly complex patterns, and
they come and go too fast, often in fractions of a second. What controls this consta nt ﬂux. We cannot leave the mind
out of the mind-body connection altogether. To say that the
body heals itself using only chemicals is like saying that a
car shifts gears using only the transmission. Clearly it takes
a driver who knows what he is doing. Although medicine
has spent several centur ies trying to hold on to the idea
that the body runs itself alone, like a self-motivated
machine, there must be a driver here, too. Otherwise, our
body’s chemistry would be a jumble of ﬂoating molecules
instead of the incredibly  ordered and precise machinery
that it so obviously is. In a more naïve age, the driver was thought to be a tiny
man, called the homunculus, who sat in the heart and
performed all the gear shifts needed to run the body. The
homunculus went out in the Renaissance, when anatomists
began for the ﬁrst time to dissect cadavers and verify what
was inside them. The homunculus wasn’t found inside the
heart (neithe r was the soul), but that left a huge, glaring
gap between the mind and the body. Many scientists since
have tried to ﬁll the gap with the brain, saying that the
brain’s funct ion is to order and control all other functions
in the physiology; but this answer begs the question,
because the brain is just another machine. The driver still
needs to be there. I will argue that he is, but he hasbecome something much more abstract than the
homunculus or even the brain—he is built into the
intelligent power that motivates us to live, move, and think. Can that be proved. The next step for us is to work our
way deeper into the body ’s inner intelligence, to try to ﬁnd
out what motivates it. The territory of mind-body medicine
has no givens and no inﬂexible rules, which is all to the
good. For decades,  medicine has known that much disease
has a psychosomatic component, yet dealing with that
component has been like trying to harness the wind. Inside
us there must be a “thin king body” that responds to the
mind’s comm ands, but where could it be and what is it
made of. EXPANDING THE TOPIC
One of the most baﬄing mysteries touched upon in this
chapter—where does a thought come from. —remains just
as baﬄing today. It may surprise you, but there is no
evidence that the brain is thinking. In fact, if you assume
that the mind arises from  the brain, which is the standard
working assumption in neuroscience, consciousne ss is just
an inference. Imagine an old-time player piano, the kind
that performed music by inserting a paper roll into the
mechanism. Punched holes in the paper roll activate the
keys, giving the appearance that an invisible pianist is
playing the “Maple Leaf R ag” or a Mozart sonata. No one would propose that the piano roll manufactured
itself. There must be a musician whose actual intentions lie
behind the “invisible” pianist. We infer his existence
without seeing him. The same is true about the mind when
you observe the brain. As its quadrillion connections
activate, using chemical signals and faint electrical
charges, the vast activ ity of mind—thoughts, feelings,sensations, and images—appears. To claim that this
happens automatically seems strange, but it’s the
materialist position, while in Quantum Healing  I said the
opposite: An invisible intelligence, comple te with
intentions, desires, hope s, dreams, and so on, is at work. The fact that you can’t see this entity, known as the self,
doesn’t prove that he doesn’t exist. It only proves that he
doesn’t exist  if you are a strict materialist, who will accept
nothing except physical phenomena. The bulk of this chapter was devoted to the reality  of the
mind-body connection, which is unassailable now. Over the
past thirty years the network that transmits messages
throughout the body has been studied in much greater
detail, leaving no doubt that every thought, feeling, mood,
and belief crosses the bridge from mental to physical. But
these detailed researches into hormones,
neurotransmitters, immunomodulators, peptides, and
thousands of products expressed by genes has obscured
the simplicity of the mind-body connection. In simple terms, the entire system is a feedback loop,
with only two factors to consider, input and output. Input
enters the brain, output  exits. This is the nexus where
every process, mental or physical, meets every other, like
trillions of train tracks converging on a train station and
then exiting the station  to go their separate ways. The
reason for simplifying the almost inﬁnite complexity of a
living mind and body comes down to practicalities. Each of
us wants to know the right and wrong kind of input that
will aﬀect us. Positive Input
Pure food, air, and water
Positive emotions
Strong self -esteemLow stress, good coping skills in the face of stress
Moderate exercise
Good sleep (eight to nine hours every night)
Loving, supportive relationships
Inner contentment, lack of conﬂicts and tensions
Satisfying work
Meditation and other contemplative practices
Abstaining from alcohol, tobacco, and recreational drugs
Minimizing the use of prescription drugs
Healing old wounds and self-destructive conditioning
from the past
The reason that little or none of these things seem new is
that they don’t need to be. After decades of public
information about prevention and the rise of the wellness
movement, we know a great deal about positive lifestyle
changes (this isn’t the same as knowing all we need to
know about why these changes work). Input, positive or
negative, registers in every cell of the body, down to the
expression of your genes (that is, their complex chemical
output). The ﬂy in the ointment is that information isn’t the same
as motivation. People may know what’s good for them, but
they continue to live otherwise. The most common kinds of
negative input remain a mainstay in the lives of people who
sincerely want to change, including overuse of alcohol,
tobacco, and drugs; eating processed and junk foods;
tolerating a high level of stress; going short on sleep;
taking little or no exercis e. The Gallup organization, which
surveys the wellbeing of populations around the world, has
a top catego ry known as “thriving. ” These are the people
who describe  themselves  as happy, safe, ﬁnancially secure,
and healthy—in short, they are enjoying a level of wellbeing
that most Americans would consider a basic minimum. Yetthe percentage of people who are thriving around the world
is dismally low, often under 10–15 percent, and even in the
prosperous developed West, it rarely rises above 33
percent. The fact that the United States continues to
consume antidepressants and tranquilizers in record
numbers attests to our inner unease, and by some
estimates the abuse of prescription painkillers is now a
cause of death surpassing the total deaths from illegal
substances. No amount of preaching about these things will work
over the long run. Prevention implies a level of fear, and
fear is a bad motivator except in short bursts. The body
resists being  in a state of chronic stress, and worrying
about your health is a form of stress. The only successful
long-term motivation is inspiration. It, too, can ﬂicker out
quickly. But there’s a secure kind of inspiration that comes
from valuing yourself with such conviction that you like and
enjoy the experience of giving your mind and body positive
inputs all the time. When I wrote Quantum Healing  I wanted to give the
human side of the mind-body connection, realizing that a
term like feedback loop,  adopted from computers and
information theory, sound s cold and abstract. But the whole
game comes down to input-output in the end. Without dwelling on the negative, let’s say that you’ve
had a stressful day. You feel wiped out by ﬁve o’clock, so
you grab a burger and fries instead of cooking at home. You
settle in with a drink or two to unwind. Your workload is
heavy, so you catch up by taking some of it home with you,
and by bedtime you ﬁnd your mind is still so active that
getting to sleep takes a while. Your alarm clock goes oﬀ at
the usual time the next morning, but you’ve managed only
six hours of sleep. No matter, it’s time to start the whole
routine over again. In the back of your mind you promise
yourself to do better, a promise you may or may not keep. Yet as normal as this daily routine has beco me for
millions of people, adap ting to it is a challenge  for the
human body, because as we now realize, each deviation
from a positive lifestyle registers at the cellular level. Here’s a summary of what is happening. The consequences
of negative input are daunting. What Negative Input Does
Disturbs overall balance, leading to inﬂammation. Moves errati cally though  the body, obstructed by chronic
stress and the toxic debris of negative input from the
past. Reinforces old neural pathways, making it much harder
to break bad habits. Contributes to abnormal cell function, including
precancerous anomalies. Weakens the immune system, impairing resistance to
disease. Contributes to premature aging. Creates a general sense of dullness, discomfort, and dis-
ease, the opposite of wellbeing. Because Quantum Healing  focus ed on the drama of
spontaneous remissions from cancer—so-called miracle
cures—the bigger message might not have struck with
enough force. So let me state it in unmistakable terms:
Input is under your contr ol. Without antic ipating cancer or
any other disorder, your chief aim every day should be to
maximize positive input and minimize negative input. We are badly in need of a new model for wellbeing. Most
people segment their lives into work, leisure, and family. Little time is left for self-care. Yet caring for yourself today
is exactly what determines your life for decades to come. True self-care embraces a person’s entire life. Taking
charge of your own wellbeing reaches into every corner
because it has to. Your brain processes every experience,
physical, mental, and spiritual, as input. Look at the
contrast that self-care makes when compared  to self-
neglect. 10 Keys to Self -Care
1. Making happiness a high priority. Versus:  Coasting along with our present state of
happiness and unhappiness. 2. Making sure your life has purpose and meaning. Versus:  Focusing on daily practicalities, even those
that seem routine and meaningless. 3. Living according to a higher vision. Versus:  Living for externals like a better job, more
money, a bigger house, etc. 4. Expanding your awareness in every decade of life. Versus:  Viewing youth as the peak of life and old age
as a dwindling decline. 5. Devoting time and attention to personal growth. Versus:  Staying the same as you always were and
feeling proud about it. 6. Following a sensible regimen of good diet and physical
activity. Versus:  Eating a diet high in sugar, fat, and calories. Promising yourself to exercise tomorrow, or next week. 7. Allowing your brain to reset by introducing downtime
several times a day. Versus:  Working your brain to the point of exhaustion
before allowing yourself to take a break. 8. Getting to know your inner world through meditation,
contemplation, and self -reﬂection. Versus:  Avoiding what you really feel. Fearing what
you might ﬁnd if you dared to look inside yourself. 9. Practicing gratitude and appreciation. Versus:  Grabbing as much as you can for yourself. Never forgetting to look out for number one. 10. Learning how to love and be loved. Versus:  Leaving romance behind in the past. Not
looking into the deep source of love in yourself. As you can see, self-care goes far beyond eating our
vegetables and signing up for the gym. It amounts to a new
model for success and happiness, a model that abundant
medical evidence suppor ts. I’ll say more about that as we
proceed. There’s a reason for giving these general
principles ﬁrst. In a world where massive  attention is given
to the next fad diet, the gym-honed body, and the beauty of
youth, the truth is that a shift in consciousness produces
far greater beneﬁts. Getting peop le to turn inward is an important aspect, but
they have to know why. What Quantum Healing  aimed at
was far more radical: seeing yourself in a new way, as a
child of the universe. On the basis  of that realization, self-
care cannot help but begin at the source, where your
consciousness merges with cosmic consciousness. You can’t
truly value yourself until this happens, and then self-care is
like caring for Nature itself. OceanofPDF. comCounting the number of cells in the human body is no
easier than counting the number of people in the world, but
the accepted  estimate is 50 trillion, or about 10,000 times
the Earth’s present population. Isolated and placed under a
microscope, the various kinds of cells—heart, liver, brain,
kidney, et cetera—look rather alike to the untrained eye. A
cell is basically a bag, enclosed by an outer membrane, the
cell wall, and ﬁlled with a mixture of water and swirling
chemicals. At the cente r of all but the red blood cells is a
core, the nucleus, which safeguards the tightly  twisted
coils of DNA. If you hold a speck of liver tissue on your
ﬁngertip, it looks like calf’s liver; you would be hard-
pressed to discern that it is speciﬁcally human. Even a
skilled geneticist would detect only a 2 percent diﬀerence
between our DNA and a gorilla’s. Of the liver cell’s many
functions, over ﬁve hundred at latest count, you would not
have a clue simply by looking at it. As clouded as the mind-body issue has become, one thing
is indisputable: somehow human cells have evolved to a
state of formidable intelligence. At any one time, thenumber of activities being coordinated in our bodies is
quite literally inﬁnite. Like the Earth’s ecosystems, our
physiology appears to operate in separate comp artments
that in fact are invisibly connected: we eat, breathe, talk,
think, digest our food, ﬁght oﬀ infections, purify our blood
of toxins, renew our cells, discard wastes, vote for
Republicans, and much more besides. Each of these
activities weaves its way into the fabric of the whole. (Our
ecology is more plane tlike than most people  realize. Creatures roam our surface, as unmindful of our hugeness
as we are of their minuteness. Colonies of mites, for
example, spend their entire life cycle in our eyelashes. ) Within the body’s vast array, the functions of any single
cell—such as one of the 15 billion neurons in the brain—ﬁll
a good-sized medical text. The volumes  devoted to any one
system of the body, such as the immune system or the
nervous system, take up several shelves in a medical
library. The healing mechanism resides somewhere in this overall
complexity, but it is elusive. There is no one organ of
healing. How does the body know what to do when it is
damaged, then. Medicine has no simple answer. Any one of
the processes involved in healing a superﬁcial cut—the
clotting of the blood, for example—is incredibly complex, so
much so that if the mechanism fails, as it does with
hemophiliacs, advanced scientiﬁc medicine is at a loss to
duplicate the impaired function. A doctor can prescribe
drugs that replace the missing clotting factor in the blood,
but these are temporary, artiﬁcial, and have numerous
undesirable side eﬀects. The body’s perfect timin g will be
absent, as well as the superb coordination of a dozen
related processes. By comparison, a man-made drug is a
stranger in a land where everyone else is blood kin. It can
never share the knowledge that everyone else was born
with. The body, we must admit, has a mind of its own. Once we
understand this mysterious aspect of our basic nature, then
the miraculous nature of curing cancer should disappear. Everyone’s body knows how to heal a cut, yet apparently
only a few people have  bodies that know how to cure
cancer. —
Every doctor realizes that it is nature who cures disease, a
statement ﬁrst written by Hippocrates two thousand years
ago. What is the diﬀerence, then, between natur e’s
ordinary form of healing and unusual or “miraculous”
healing. Perhaps the diﬀerence is small and exists only in
our heads. If you are peeling potatoes and cut your ﬁnger
with a slip of the knife, the cut heals by itself, and obviously
you are not wonder-struck, because the process of healing
—the clotting of the blood to close the wound, the
formation of a scab, and the regeneration of new skin and
blood vessels—seems altogether normal. Yet, we should be aware that this feeling of normalcy is
not the same as knowing what healing is or how to control
it. It is sobering to consider  how much of the knowle dge in
medical books pertains not to life but to death. By
performing autopsies on cadavers, examining tissue slides
under a microscope, and analyzing blood, urine, and other
isolated by-products of the body, the majority of medical
knowledge has been obtained. True, patients are examin ed
when they are alive, and tests can be run on many isolated
functions in their bodies. But the knowledge so acquired is
rudimentary compared to the volumes of super-
sophisticated data devoted to death. The poet Wordsworth
wrote this memorably terse line: “We murder to dissect. ”
No truer statement has ever been made about the
limitations of medical research. The ﬁrst thing that is killed in the laboratory  is the
delicate web of intelligence that binds the body together. When a blood cell rushes to a wound site and begins to
form a clot, it has not traveled there at random. It actually
knows where  to go and what to do when it gets there, as
surely as a paramedic—i n fact, more surely, since it acts
completely spontaneously and without guesswork. Even if
we break down its know ledge into ﬁner and ﬁner bits,
looking for the secret in some minute hormone or
messenger enzyme, we will not ﬁnd a protein strand
labeled “intelligence,” and yet there is no doubt that
intelligence is at work. Part of this intelligence devotes itself to healing, and it
seems to be a very powerful force. Every fatal disease has
its mysterious survivors, not just cancer. Although I know of
no spontane ous cures of AIDS, there are long-term
survivors—those who remain alive after ﬁve years—whose
immune systems have somehow defended themselves
against a disease that under normal conditions is totally
devastating. Researchers tend to approach such
extraordinary physiologie s as biochemical freaks of nature. By taking samples of their blood and isolating any unusual
components that can be detected in the immune cells,
molecular biologists hope to discover the unknown
ingredient that is protecting these people. If that can be
accomplished—it is an extremely tedious, diﬀicult task,
given the complexity of the immune system—then after
years of testing and millions of dollars, a new drug may
emerge that can beneﬁt the population as a whole. Yet, what everyone really  needs is the ability to make this
wonder drug himself, just as the person who ﬁrst produced
it did, and that ability cannot be synthesized. Isn’t buying
the drug as good as making it. Not by a long shot. The so-
called active ingredient in a man-made drug contains very
little know-how compared to the original chemicalproduced by the body. It would almost be fairer to call the
drug an inert ingredient. The reason for this lies at the level of our cells. The outer
membrane of each cell, or the cell wall, is outﬁtted with
numerous sites called receptors. The cell wall itself is
smooth, but these receptors are “sticky”—they are made of
complex molecular chains whose last links are open-ended,
each one waiting for another molecule to come along and
bind with it. In other words, receptors are like keyholes
into which only very speciﬁc keys will ﬁt. For a drug to
work—whether morphine, Valium, digitalis, or almost
anything else—it must be the key that ﬁts some precisely
chosen receptor on the cell wall and no other. The hormones, enzymes, and other biochemicals
produced by our bodies  have superb knowled ge about
which receptors they should ﬁt into. The molecules
themselves actually seem able to pick and choose among
various sites—it is uncanny to follow their tracks under an
electron microscope as they make a beeline to where they
are needed. Also, the body can release hundreds of
diﬀerent chemicals at a time and orchestrate each  one with
regard to the whole. If you hear a hot rod backﬁre on the street outside your
window and jump in your chair, your insta ntaneous
reaction is the outcome of a complex internal event. The
trigger for the event is a burst of adrenaline from your
adrenal glands. Carried into the bloodstream, this
adrenaline signals reacti ons from your heart, which starts
to pump blood faster; from your blood vessels, which
contract and force up your blood pressure; from your liver,
which puts out extra fuel in the form of glucose; from your
pancreas, which secretes insulin so that more glucose can
be metaboliz ed; and from your stomach and intestines,
which immediately stop digesting food so that more energy
can be shunted elsewhere. All this activity, happeni ng at a furious pace and with
powerful eﬀects everywhere in your body, is coordinated by
the brain, which uses the pituitary gland to guide many of
the hormonal signals just described, not to mention various
other chemical signals that go racing down your neurons to
focus your eyes, prick up your ears, jerk your back muscles
upright, and swivel your head in alarm. To make this whole react ion happen and then to make it
go away again (for the body, unlike a man-made drug,
knows how to reverse every one of these processes just as
neatly as it began), the same key-in-the-lock mechanism is
employed everywhere. It is all so deceptively simple, yet if
you attempt to duplicate this event with a drug, the results
are nowhere near as precise, orderly, and beautifully
orchestrated. In fact, they are chaotic. Injecting adrenaline,
insulin, or glucose separa tely into the body gives it a crude
jolt. The chemicals immediately ﬂood all the receptor sites
without coordination from the brain. Instead of talking to
the body, they assault it with single-minded insistence. Even though the chem ical make-up of adrenaline is
identical no matter where it is derived, the critical
ingredient of intelligence must be present; other wise, the
drug’s action is a mockery of the real thing. Here is a related example to show the complicated
results of giving a drug that seems simple. Hypertension
patients are generally told to bring down their elevated
blood pressure with diuretics—drugs that take water from
the cells and pass it out of the system through urination. This is exactly what the kidneys do all the time as they
delicately monitor your blood chemistry to make sure that
the balance of water, waste products, and the necessary
salts, or electrolytes, is precisely maintained. A diuretic,
however, has only one idea in mind, and obsessed with that
one idea, it careens through the body, demanding, “Water. Water. ” from every cell it meets. The result is that the ﬂuid tension in the blood vessels is
reduced, which is what the doctor wants to happen, but the
water level everywhere else is aﬀected at the same time. The brain may be forced to give up some of its water, which
under normal conditions it does only in the direst
emergency, causing the patient to feel dizzy and drowsy. In
many cases nothing more  serious happens, but sometimes
other brain functions may also then be thrown oﬀ,
especially in older patients: if they happen to drink alcohol,
even in moderation, these people can become so confused
that they forget to drink  enough water or to eat properly. This can lead to malnutrition combined with severe
dehydration. In the view of some endocrinologists, the
dehydration induced by diuretics in the presence of alcohol
or tranquilizers is the leading cause of death among older
Americans. All of these consequences, whether mild or severe, are
usually called the undesirable “side eﬀects” of diuretics,
but that is not an accurate name. They are just its eﬀects—
the good and bad ones necessarily come together in the
same package. A diuretic basically work s by latching onto
sodium atoms, causing the body to discard excess  salt, and
this in turn indirectly brings down the water level in the
tissues, since  water is bound up with salt in our bodies, just
as in sea water. The diuretic cannot help it if too much salt
is taken where water is still needed. Since potassium is
close to sodium in its atomic structure, the diuretic also
causes it to be depleted, leading to weakness, fatigue, and
leg cramps. (Less-adverse eﬀects are generally noticed by
the leaching  of other trace elements, such as zinc and
magnesium. ) Besides these common signs of potassium
deﬁciency, there can be other complications—digitalis, the
drug commonly given to heart patients to strengthen their
weak heartbeat, becomes more toxic if the body is low on
potassium. Ironically, a potassium deﬁciency is nowsuspected to be a causal link in high blood pressure, which
means that the diuretic may be promoting the very
condition it was meant to cure. The frustrating reality, as far as medical researchers are
concerned, is that we already know that the living body is
the best pharmacy ever devised. It produces diuretics,
painkillers, tranquilizers, sleeping pills, antibiotics, and
indeed everything manufactured by the drug companies,
but it makes them much, much better. The dosage is always
right and given on time; side eﬀects are minimal or
nonexistent; and the directions for using the drug are
included in the drug itself, as part of its built-in
intelligence. —
Thinking about these well-known facts has led me to three
conclusions. First, that intelligence is present everywhere
in our bodies. Second, that our own inner intelligence is far
superior to any we can try to substitute from the outside. Third, that intelligence is more important than the actual
matter of the body, since without it, that matter would be
undirected, formless, and chaotic. Intelligence makes the
diﬀerence between a house designed by an architect and a
pile of bricks. For the moment, let’s keep our deﬁnition of the word
intelligence  as simple and practica l as possible. Rather
than referring to the intelligence of a genius, which may
seem both exalted and abstract, I deﬁne it simply as “know-
how. ” There is no doubt, whatever you think about
intelligence in the abstract, that the body must be credited
with an immense fund of know-how. The body’s inner intelligence is so powerful that when it
goes awry, the physician is faced with a truly formidable
antagonist. Every cell in the body is programmed by itsDNA, for example, to divide at a certain rate, producing
two new cells after the mother cell splits in half. Like
everything else regulated by our inner intelligence, this
process is not purely mechanical. A cell divides in response
to its own internal need combined with signals generated
from the cells around it, the brain, the faraway organs that
are “talking” to it via chemical messages. Cell division is a
carefully considered and well-thought-out decision—except
in the case of cancer. Cancer is wild, anti-social behavior, whereby a single cell
reproduces itself without check, heeding no signals from
anywhere except, apparently, its own demented DNA. Why
this occurs, no one know s. It is a good bet that the body
itself knows how to reverse the process, but for some
reason, equally unknow n to science, it doesn’t always
succeed. It is only a matter of time, once the process
begins, before the cancer cells overwhelm a vital organ,
crowd out its normal cells, and cause death. When the ﬁnal
crisis comes, the cancer  cells perish with the rest of the
body, doomed by their ungoverned appetite for self-
expansion. Medicine has so far not ﬁgured out a way to send a
message to the cancer cells in time to ward oﬀ the tragic
fate they have created. The chemicals a physician might
use against cancer are not at all eﬀective on the level of
intelligence. Cancer is endowed with mad genius, while
drugs are simple-minded. So the oncologist resort s to a
much cruder assault, a form of poisoning. The anti-cancer
drug that is administere d is generally toxic to the entire
body, but because cancer cells are growing at a much
faster rate than normal cells, they ingest more of the
poison and die oﬀ ﬁrst. The whole strategy is a calculated
risk. The patient must be fortunate; his physician must be
extremely knowledgeable about the dosage and timing of
the chemotherapy, both of which are absolutely vital. Thenthe cancer may be defea ted, adding years of useful life to
the patient’s existence. Ironically, the therapy may fail because it strips the body
of the very intelligence that usually guards it from  disease. Many anti-cancer drugs are extremely damaging to the
body’s immune system; they directly suppress the bone
marrow, which manufa ctures our white cells, with
devastating eﬀect on the white-cell count in the blood. As
the course of chemotherapy continues, the patient  becomes
more and more susceptib le to new forms of cancer, and in a
certain numb er of cases—as high as 30 percent for breast
cancer—new cancer appears and the patient dies. Moreover, it is sometimes not statistically possible to kill
every malign ant cell. It has been estimated that a typical
cancer patient may have 10 billion cancer cells. If his
chemotherapy is 99. 99 percent eﬀective, there would still
be 1 million survivors, more than enough to start over
again. Cancer cells are not created equal; some are hardier than
others and therefore more diﬀicult to kill. It may be that
destroying the weaker cells acts as a kind of Darwinian
selection, leaving the ﬁttest to survive. In that case,
chemotherapy would actually promote a more virulent
disease than it cured. (Likewise, the persistent
staphylococcus infections  that patients come down with in
hospitals are often highly resistant to antibiotics, because
only the most vicious bacteria can live in the sterile
environment of operating rooms and withstand the
continual bombardment of penicillin injections. ) One can
easily conceive of a strain of “super cancer” that might
arise from one or two malignant cells that had the
strongest resistance to treatment. In any case, the early promise that chemotherapy would
wipe out cancer in our generation, widely believed in the
1950s, has sobered. Now a few cancers at a time aredefeated, such as lymph ocytic leukemia in children and
some kinds of Hodgkin’s lymphoma, while other major
killers, such as lung and brain cancers, are virtually
untouchable through chemotherapy. —
Nothing I have said so far about the body’s know-how is
hypothetical. We have all been informed, doctors and public
alike, about the body’s wondrous intricacy. Yet we persist in
thinking of the body in an obsolete mold, as basically
matter, but with a smart technician inside who moves the
matter around. This technician was once called a soul; now
it tends to be demoted to a ghost inside the machine, but
the same emphasis remains. Because we see and touch our
bodies, carry  their solid weight around with us, and bump
into doors if we don’t watch out, the reality of the body
appears to be primarily material—such is the bias of our
world. But the bias has a huge blind spot in it. Despite the
overwhelming superiority  of the body’s know-how, which
scientists freely acknowledge, a minute amount of time and
money is spent trying to grasp the living body as a whole,
and for very good reason. The Greek philosopher
Heraclitus made the famous remark, “You cannot step into
the same river twice,” because the river is constantly being
changed by new water rushing in. The same holds true for
the body. All of us are much more like a river than anything
frozen in time and space. If you could see your body as it really is, you would never
see it the same way twice. Ninety-eight percent of the
atoms in your body were not there a year ago. The skeleton
that seems so solid was not there three months ago. The
conﬁguration of the bone  cells remains somewhat constant,
but atoms of all kinds pass freely back and forth throughthe cell walls, and by that means you acquire a new
skeleton every three months. The skin is new every month. You have a new stomach
lining every four days, with the actual surface cells that
contact food being renew ed every ﬁve minutes. The cells in
the liver turn over very slowly, but new atoms still ﬂow
through them, like water in a river course, making a new
liver every six weeks. Even within the brain, whose cells
are not replaced once they die, the content of carbon,
nitrogen, oxygen, and so on is totally diﬀerent today from a
year ago. It is as if you lived in a building whose brick s were
systemically taken out and replaced every year. If you keep
the same blueprint, then it will still look like the same
building. But it won’t be the same in actuality. The human
body also stands there looking much the same from day to
day, but through the processes of respiration, digestion,
elimination, and so forth, it is constantly and ever in
exchange with the rest of the world. Certain atoms—carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen
—pass through the body very quickly, being an essential
part of the things we use up the fastest—food, air, and
water. If it were up to only these four elements, we would
be creating new bodies for ourselves literally every month. However, the pace of renewal is slowed by other elements
that do not ﬂow through us very rapidly. The calcium bound
into our bones can take a whole year to replace itself—
some authorities extend the time to several years. Iron, the
component that makes red blood cells red, is held onto
quite tenaciously, being lost mainly through the sloughing
of dead skin cells or the actual loss of blood. Even though  the rates of change may diﬀer, change is
always there. What I am calling “intelligence” takes on the
role of guidin g this change so that we do not collapse into a
heap of brick s. That is one of the most obvious facts aboutthe physiology, but intelligence is so changeable, so quick
on the move—in other  words, so alive —that medical
textbooks devote almost no space to it at all. To get an idea of how limited our current knowle dge is,
consider the structure of a neuron. The neurons that
compose the brain and central nervous system “talk” to one
another across gaps called synapses. These gaps separate
the tiny branchlike ﬁlaments, the dendrites, that grow at
the ends of each nerve cell. Everyone possesses billions of
these cells, divided between the brain and the central
nervous system, and as we saw, each one is capable of
growing dozens or even hundreds of dendrites (the total
estimated at 100 million million), meaning that at any one
time, the possible combi nations of signals jumpin g across
the synapses  of the brain exceed the number of atoms in
the known universe. The signals also communicate with
one another at lightning speed. To read this sentence, your
brain takes a few milliseconds to arrange a precise pattern
of millions of signals, only to dissolve them instantly, never
to be repeated again in exactly the same way. In medical school, we were taught a simple model of how
neurons communicate: an electrical charge forms on one
side of the synapse, and when the charge is large enough,
it jump s like a spark across the gap to deliver a signal to
another nerve cell. Assuming that this is the correct
mechanism (in reality it isn’t), the description we learned in
our neurology textbook in 1966 told us next to nothing
about how neurons act in real life; the book model makes
sense only for a single nerve cell, isolated, stopped in time,
and stripped of context. In truth, the action taking  place at
the gaps in the nervous system is like that of a cosmic
computer reduced to a microcosmic scale. This awesome
computer operates continuously, handles hundreds of
programs at a time, deals in multiple billions of “bytes” ofinformation every second, and, most miraculous ly of all,
knows how to run itself. It is not really our medical training that was at fault here. How can any textbook possibly describe this whole
process. To think is to form patterns inside ourselves that
are just as complex, ﬂeeting, and rich in their diversity as is
reality itself. Thinking is the mirror of the world, and
nothing less. Science simply does not have the tools to look
at such a phenomenon, which is at once inﬁnite and alive. The living body will not stop to be studied, certain ly not as
a whole. So when it delivers a shock to science, as in a
spontaneous cure of cancer, medicine all but halts in its
tracks, bewildered to ﬁnd that life does not behave as
neatly as the laboratory model. In 1986, a shock was delivered that could turn the whole
ﬁeld of brain research on its head: a Mexican neuro-
surgeon, Dr. Ignacio Madrazo, successfully implanted
healthy new cells into the brain of a patient with
Parkinson’s disease. Not only did the transplant take, which previously was
considered impossible, but the patient showed an amazing
85 percent return to normal functioning. Before the
surgery, the patient, a Mexican farmer in his late thirties,
had been rendered virtually helpless by his disease. Parkinson’s strikes about 1 percent of people over age 50. It begins with muscle tremors, rigidity of the limbs, or a
tendency to move very slowly. The immedia te cause of
these symptoms is a deﬁciency of dopamine, the same
brain chemic al that leads to schizophrenia when it is in
oversupply. For reasons not yet known, the nerve cells that
produce dopamine, located in a part of the brain stem
called the substantia nigra, begin to die, creating the
deﬁciency. Without enou gh dopamin e, the brain’s ability to
regulate muscle movement is impaired and ﬁnally lost. Any or all three of Parkinson’s symptoms grows worse
over time, until the patient is totally incapacitated. The
playwright Eugene O’Neill contracted Parkinson’s in his
ﬁfties. It became increasingly diﬀicult for him to write as
his shaking became more  severe. He had planned a cycle of
four plays that were to be his masterpiece, but his disease
destroyed everything: one glance at the surviving
manuscripts reveals that O’Neill could barely form the
cramped, spidery, pathetically illegible letters. Through
heroic endurance, he managed to commit his words to
paper, but no one has ever been able to decipher what they
say. In Mexico, Madrazo’s patient, though considerably
younger than most Parkinson’s victims, had been  conﬁned
to his bed, suﬀering from constant, rhythmic tremors that
made him unable to walk without assistance. After the
surgery, he could walk, run, feed himself, work in his
garden, and, as a moving ﬁlm of him shows, once again
take his young children in his arms.
Within a month, he started to cough up blood; within three months, he was dead.
Why did the patient's state of mind contribute to his death?
The author argues that the mind plays a crucial role in the healing process, and that it is not just a physical organ.
What is the author's argument about the role of the mind in healing?
The body heals by itself, whereas a diuretic only gives a crude, artificial solution that may have negative side effects.
What is the difference between the way the body heals and the way a diuretic works?
The author argues that the body's intelligence is more complex and powerful than can be replicated by external factors like diet and lifestyle.
What is the main issue with the idea that the body can be treated through diet and lifestyle changes?
The author believes that the mind and body are interconnected and that the mind plays a crucial role in the body's functioning, contradicting the idea that the body is just a machine.
What is the author's view on the relationship between the mind and the body?