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Fire Up Your Brain
Strategies For Greater Performance Using The Mind/Body Connection
Dr. Larry Iverson
Mind-Body Beginnings
The mind-body connection is a new concept for many people. But is it really new? It’s actually been around for millennia.
In ancient Egypt, Greece and Persia there were sleep temples. Sleep temples were places where people would go to assist themselves in handling illnesses, adjust their attitudes, build stronger relationships between them and their religious figures of authority, to help them move into better athletic performance or work.
The description of a sleep temple in ancient Egypt was that it was a darkened temple where you would recline on large floor pillows. In one corner of the room they would have a flute or a lute playing.
While that very light music was being played in the background, someone would enter and sit beside you. They would ask, “What do you want to do? What do you want to change?” They would then talk to you about healing your physical illness, performing better at your sport, having a better relationship with your wife or husband, having a better child birth, feeling more at ease—whatever issue needed change or enhancement.
In ancient Greece this same practice was most commonly used with women prior to a birthing experience. They would begin this process as soon as they knew they were pregnant, and would spend time lying in these sleep temples with a midwife telling them how the baby was going to be beautiful and healthy. That the experience was going to be easy and that they would feel in control throughout it. They would tell the expectant mother that the birth would happen quickly. And so on.
The application of the mind-body connection—of using your brain to affect your physiology and your performance, began thousands of years ago in the ancient sleep temples.
Helping Oneself
A Persian physician by the name of Ibn Sina in 1027AD wrote “The Book of Healing”. He talked about using the mind and the body together to create better health, to create a more positive life, to have your entire physiological system work together more harmoniously. He was the first to have used the term “mind-body system” in his scholarly writings.
Paracelsus, 1530 in Switzerland, developed a process to get people to imagine improved health. He would have patients visualize improving health inside their body, and the physiology would respond. Their health would improve rapidly over time. Again mind-body work is not new news; it’s been around for a long time.
In the 19th century there was a Scottish surgeon by the name of James Braid who wrote about helping ourselves through focusing our mind in specific ways. He described the ability to have a mental focus that allowed your brain and your body to work together to bring about rapid change very effectively. He did this with thousands of his patients over time prior to, and after surgery, to assist them in healing.
An American psychologist by the name of William James wrote about this same process in detail in “The Principles of Psychology.” Dr. Johannes Schultz, a German psychiatrist created a process called autogenic training which used the mind and the body so that ailments could be overcome more easily, and life goals could be achieved faster.
As you can see, the mind-body work began thousands of years ago. What we will do now, is look at how you can use this to grow your success.
Whether the success you desire is in improved health, with your business, in your personal relationships, with athletic performance, or in learning more rapidly. There is a mind-body connection component that can assist you in achieving the goals you desire, faster and easier than you ever have in your past.
More Detailed Intervention
This mind-body connection research really came to the fore in the early 20th century through stress management research.
If you fast forward through the first 50 years of the 20th century, there was major work being done in psychosomatic, mind-body processes. Doctors like Alfred Adler, Otto Rank, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and Edmund Jacobson began analyzing and applying how we can make this mind-body interaction work to make more effective lives.
Sir William Osler was one of the first professors at John Hopkins Medical School, and ultimately was the Chairman of Medicine at Oxford University. In the early 1900s he wrote, “The care of tuberculosis depends more on what a patient has in their head, than what they have in their chest.”
Dr. Osler was known for bringing medicine into the modern day, and deepening the process of clinical trials and medical observation.
Triggering The Immune System
Dr. Rene’ Dubos, a Pulitzer Prize winning author and micro-biologist at Rockefeller University, made a major inroads and contribution to the study of mind-body medicine.
In 1965, Dr. Dubos had a group of a hundred and fifty students participate in a very detailed mind-body study, conducted in a double blind format.
He injected all students with bacteria that would not make them sick, but would stimulate their white blood cell count to go up. After the injection, he took blood samples from the study participants every few hours during the next 48 hour period. He was watching what happened in the blood system, and how long it took for the white blood cell count to double.
He then waited a week, and did another injection, with a different non-sickness producing bacteria. And every few hours did a blood draw to see how long it took their white blood cells to double in response to this bacterial invader in the body.
What Dr. Dubos found, was on average it took 24 to 48 hours for the student’s white blood cell count to double. During the next 30 days he had half of these 150 students just go about their normal lives, then come back a month later for retesting.
He had the second group practice daily for ten minutes, imagining that large quantities of white blood cells were flowing out of their tissues and bones while they thought of it happening. He had them imagine that the white blood cells were being produced as a result of the focus on the production of them.
He then brought all 150 students back to the lab one month later, and injected them again with a different strain of non-sickness producing bacteria, to see how long it took their body to double the white blood cell count.
What he found was that the 75 students who had done nothing it took approximately 24 to 48 hours for their white blood cell count to double. This was the same as it had been with each of the previous types of bacteria.
But, with those students who had been practicing this mental process of triggering and increase of white blood cells in their body, it was an entirely different story.
When those students mentally imagined massive amounts of white blood cells being produced after the injection of bacteria, their white blood cell count doubled on average in 1.5 hours—instead of 24 to 48 hours! Dr. Dubos’ conclusion—that through using our mind, we can trigger our immune system to more rapidly heal our physiology.
Secrets to Applying the Mind-Body Connection
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