Mind Magic

Similar to the process of hypnosis, the placebo effect arises because the patient’s consciousness is communicating with the subconscious and autonomic nervous system and using the mind to reshape their body on a cellular level.

This pain is powerful enough to alter not only our own genes but, as researchers in the field of epigenetics have discovered, the genes of subsequent generations. Our minds and bodies organize around preparations to prevent a similar trauma from happening in the future, and in the process, our consciousness becomes caught in reacting to a frighteni

our sense of agency is a story our brain tells us about our experience. When the story the brain tells us is that we do not have the power to perform the actions necessary to influence our circumstances for the better, we feel disheartened and lose our motivation; when the story tells us we do have the capacity to act on our desires, we feel empowe

The subconscious system has the power to separate our deeper intentions from the incessant chatter that makes constant demands on our attention. Because it latches on to the intention without being derailed by the chatter, it is capable of extreme focus on the task while remaining free from distraction. In this way, the subconscious maximizes the m

The Buddha similarly commented on the powerful ability of thoughts to shape our experience of the world when he said, “Whatever a monk keeps pursuing with his thinking and pondering, that becomes the inclination of his awareness.”

Humans have a limited ability to process information; they cannot attend to every aspect of a situation. As we will see in greater detail later, the salience of a thought, idea, or intention determines which bits of information will most likely grab one’s attention and have the greatest influence on one’s perception of the world.

The more fear we bring to an event, the more we are telling the amygdala that the salience of the event is very high and very threatening; and the less fear we bring, the less we are going to activate the threat salience, leaving our attention free to be directed as we choose.

The challenge of human life is that the vast majority of the habits that shape our lives are established before we are consciously aware of them. By the time we wake up to this fact, usually as the result of our lives not turning out as we would have liked, we discover we have been playing out conditioned patterns subconsciously, and these were the

Once that importance was established, her subconscious was primed to bring such experiences about in reality in order to get another hit of the same good feelings. Through repetition, we can make the intention we are attending to salient to the exclusion of other inputs. By doing so, we create what is known as salience bias or cognitive ease, causi