The science of voodoo: The reverse placebo effect detailed

The science of voodoo: When mind attacks body

5.13.09 / Helen Pilcher / New Scientist

Late one night in a small Alabama cemetery, Vance Vanders had a run-in with the local witch doctor, who wafted a bottle of unpleasant-smelling liquid in front of his face, and told him he was about to die and that no one could save him.

Back home, Vanders took to his bed and began to deteriorate. Some weeks later, emaciated and near death, he was admitted to the local hospital, where doctors were unable to find a cause for his symptoms or slow his decline. Only then did his wife tell one of the doctors, Drayton Doherty, of the hex.

Doherty thought long and hard. The next morning, he called Vanders’s family to his bedside. He told them that the previous night he had lured the witch doctor back to the cemetery, where he had choked him against a tree until he explained how the curse worked. The medicine man had, he said, rubbed lizard eggs into Vanders’s stomach, which had hatched inside his body. One reptile remained, which was eating Vanders from the inside out.

Great ceremony

Doherty then summoned a nurse who had, by prior arrangement, filled a large syringe with a powerful emetic. With great ceremony, he inspected the instrument and injected its contents into Vanders’ arm. A few minutes later, Vanders began to gag and vomit uncontrollably. In the midst of it all, unnoticed by everyone in the room, Doherty produced his pièce de résistance – a green lizard he had stashed in his black bag. “Look what has come out of you Vance,” he cried. “The voodoo curse is lifted.”

Vanders did a double take, lurched backwards to the head of the bed, then drifted into a deep sleep. When he woke next day he was alert and ravenous. He quickly regained his strength and was discharged a week later.

The facts of this case from 80 years ago were corroborated by four medical professionals. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about it is that Vanders survived. There are numerous documented instances from many parts of the globe of people dying after being cursed.

With no medical records and no autopsy results, there’s no way to be sure exactly how these people met their end. The common thread in these cases, however, is that a respected figure puts a curse on someone, perhaps by chanting or pointing a bone at them. Soon afterwards, the victim dies, apparently of natural causes.

Voodoo nouveau

You might think this sort of thing is increasingly rare, and limited to remote tribes. But according to Clifton Meador, a doctor at Vanderbilt School of Medicine in Nashville, Tennessee, who has documented cases like Vanders, the curse has taken on a new form.

Take Sam Shoeman, who was diagnosed with end-stage liver cancer in the 1970s and given just months to live. Shoeman duly died in the allotted time frame – yet the autopsy revealed that his doctors had got it wrong. The tumour was tiny and had not spread. “He didn’t die from cancer, but from believing he was dying of cancer,” says Meador. “If everyone treats you as if you are dying, you buy into it. Everything in your whole being becomes about dying.”

He didn’t die from cancer but from believing he was dying of cancer

Cases such as Shoeman’s may be extreme examples of a far more widespread phenomenon. Many patients who suffer harmful side effects, for instance, may do so only because they have been told to expect them. What’s more, people who believe they have a high risk of certain diseases are more likely to get them than people with the same risk factors who believe they have a low risk. It seems modern witch doctors wear white coats and carry stethoscopes.

The nocebo effect

The idea that believing you are ill can make you ill may seem far-fetched, yet rigorous trials have established beyond doubt that the converse is true – that the power of suggestion can improve health. This is the well-known placebo effect. Placebos cannot produce miracles, but they do produce measurable physical effects.

The placebo effect has an evil twin: the nocebo effect, in which dummy pills and negative expectations can produce harmful effects. The term “nocebo”, which means “I will harm”, was not coined until the 1960s, and the phenomenon has been far less studied than the placebo effect. It’s not easy, after all, to get ethical approval for studies designed to make people feel worse.

What we do know suggests the impact of nocebo is far-reaching. “Voodoo death, if it exists, may represent an extreme form of the nocebo phenomenon,” says anthropologist Robert Hahn of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia, who has studied the nocebo effect.

Life threatening

In clinical trials, around a quarter of patients in control groups – those given supposedly inert therapies – experience negative side effects. The severity of these side effects sometimes matches those associated with real drugs. A retrospective study of 15 trials involving thousands of patients prescribed either beta blockers or a control showed that both groups reported comparable levels of side effects, including fatigue, depressive symptoms and sexual dysfunction. A similar number had to withdraw from the studies because of them.

Occasionally, the effects can be life-threatening (see “The overdose”). “Beliefs and expectations are not only conscious, logical phenomena, they also have physical consequences,” says Hahn.

Nocebo effects are also seen in normal medical practice. Around 60 per cent of patients undergoing chemotherapy start feeling sick before their treatment. “It can happen days before, or on the journey on the way in,” says clinical psychologist Guy Montgomery from Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York. Sometimes the mere thought of treatment or the doctor’s voice is enough to make patients feel unwell. This “anticipatory nausea” may be partly due to conditioning – when patients subconsciously link some part of their experience with nausea – and partly due to expectation.

Catching

Alarmingly, the nocebo effect can even be catching. Cases where symptoms without an identifiable cause spread through groups of people have been around for centuries, a phenomenon known as mass psychogenic illness. One outbreak (see “It’s catching”) inspired a recent study by psychologists Irving Kirsch and Giuliana Mazzoni of the University of Hull in the UK.

They asked some of a group of students to inhale a sample of normal air, which all participants were told contained “a suspected environmental toxin” linked to headache, nausea, itchy skin and drowsiness. Half of the participants also watched a woman inhale the sample and apparently develop these symptoms. Students who inhaled were more likely to report these symptoms than those who did not. Symptoms were also more pronounced in women, particularly those who had seen another apparently become ill – a bias also seen in mass psychogenic illness.

The study shows that if you hear of or observe a possible side effect, you are more likely to develop it yourself. That puts doctors in a tricky situation. “On the one hand people have the right to be informed about what to expect, but this makes it more likely they will experience these effects,” says Mazzoni.

Catch 22

This means doctors need to choose their words carefully so as to minimise negative expectations, says Montgomery. “It’s all about how you say it.”

Hypnosis might also help. “Hypnosis changes expectancies, which decreases anxiety and stress, which improves the outcome,” Montgomery says. “I think hypnosis could be applied to a wide variety of symptoms where expectancy plays a role.”

Is the scale of the nocebo problem serious enough to justify such countermeasures? We just don’t know, because so many questions remain unanswered. In what circumstances do nocebo effects occur? And how long do the symptoms last?

It appears that, as with the placebo response, nocebo effects vary widely, and may depend heavily on context. Placebo effects in clinical settings are often much more potent than those induced in the laboratory, says Paul Enck, a psychologist at the University Hospital in Tübingen, Germany, which suggests the nocebo problem may have profound effects in the real world. For obvious reasons, though, lab experiments are designed to induce only mild and temporary nocebo symptoms.

Real consequences

It is also unclear who is susceptible. A person’s optimism or pessimism may play a role, but there are no consistent personality predictors. Both sexes can succumb to mass psychogenic illness, though women report more symptoms than men. Enck has shown that in men, expectancy rather than conditioning is more likely to influence nocebo symptoms. For women, the opposite is true. “Women tend to operate more on past experiences, whereas men seem more reluctant to take history into a situation,” he says.

What is becoming clear is that these apparently psychological phenomena have very real consequences in the brain. Using PET scans to peer into the brains of people given a placebo or nocebo, Jon-Kar Zubieta of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, showed last year that nocebo effects were linked with a decrease in dopamine and opioid activity. This would explain how nocebos can increase pain. Placebos, unsurprisingly, produced the opposite response.

Meanwhile, Fabrizio Benedetti of the University of Turin Medical School in Italy has found that nocebo-induced pain can be suppressed by a drug called proglumide, which blocks receptors for a hormone called cholecystokinin (CCK). Normally, expectations of pain induce anxiety, which activates CCK receptors, enhancing pain.

Ultimate cause

The ultimate cause of the nocebo effect, however, is not neurochemistry but belief. According to Hahn, surgeons are often wary of operating on people who think they will die – because such patients often do. And the mere belief that one is susceptible to a heart attack is itself a risk factor. One study found that women who believed they are particularly prone to heart attack are nearly four times as likely to die from coronary conditions than other women with the same risk factors.

Despite the growing evidence that the nocebo effect is all too real, it is hard in this rational age to accept that people’s beliefs can kill them. After all, most of us would laugh if a strangely attired man leapt about waving a bone and told us we were going to die. But imagine how you would feel if you were told the same thing by a smartly dressed doctor with a wallful of medical degrees and a computerful of your scans and test results. The social and cultural background is crucial, says Enck.

Meador argues that Shoeman’s misdiagnosis and subsequent death shares many of the crucial elements found in hex death. A powerful doctor pronounces a death sentence, which is accepted unquestioningly by the “victim” and his family, who then start to act upon that belief. Shoeman, his family and his doctors all believed he was dying from cancer. It became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Nothing mystical

“Bad news promotes bad physiology. I think you can persuade people that they’re going to die and have it happen,” Meador says. “I don’t think there’s anything mystical about it. We’re uncomfortable with the idea that words or symbolic actions can cause death because it challenges our biomolecular model of the world.”

Perhaps when the biomedical basis of voodoo death is revealed in detail we will find it easier to accept that it is real – and that it can affect any one of us.

Editorial: Breaking the voodoo spell

The overdose

Depressed after splitting up with his girlfriend, Derek Adams took all his pills… then regretted it. Fearing he might die, he asked a neighbour to take him to hospital, where he collapsed. Shaky, pale and drowsy, his blood pressure dropped and his breaths came quickly.

Yet lab tests and toxicology screening came back clear. Over the next 4 hours Adams received 6 litres of saline, but improved little.

Then a doctor arrived from the clinical trial of an antidepressant in which Adams had been taking part. Adams had enrolled in the study about a month earlier. Initially he had felt his mood buoyed, but an argument with his ex-girlfriend saw him swallow the 29 remaining tablets.

The doctor revealed that Adams was in the control group. The pills he had “overdosed” on were harmless. Hearing this, Adams was surprised and tearfully relieved. Within 15 minutes he was fully alert, and his blood pressure and heart rate had returned to normal.

It’s catching

In November 1998, a teacher at a Tennessee high school noticed a “gasoline-like” smell, and began complaining of headache, nausea, shortness of breath and dizziness. The school was evacuated and over the next week more than 100 staff and students were admitted to the local emergency room complaining of similar symptoms.

After extensive tests, no medical explanation for the reported illnesses could be found. A questionnaire a month later revealed that the people who reported symptoms were more likely to be female, and to have known or seen a classmate who was ill. It was the nocebo effect on a grand scale, says psychologist Irving Kirsch at the University of Hull in the UK. “There was, as far as we can tell, no environmental toxin, but people began to feel ill.”

Kirsch thinks that seeing a classmate develop symptoms shaped expectancies of illness in other children, triggering mass psychogenic illness. Outbreaks occur all over the world. In Jordan in 1998, 800 children apparently suffered side effects after a vaccination and 122 were admitted to hospital, but no problem was found with the vaccine.

New York Times article on mind-body-health link

EMOTIONS FOUND TO INFLUENCE NEARLY EVERY HUMAN AILMENT

5.24.83 / Jane E. Brody / New York Times

The care of tuberculosis depends more on what the patient has in his head than what he has in his chest. – Sir William Osler (1849-1919), the father of modern medicine.

NEARLY a century after some leading physicians first recognized the powerful role of the mind in health and healing, scientists have begun to decipher exactly how stress and other emotional states can influence the onset and course of disease.

Aided by new biochemical techniques and a vastly expanded understanding of immunology and neurochemistry, their studies show that emotions, acting through the brain, can affect nervous system function, hormone levels and immunological responses, thereby changing a person’s susceptibility to a host of organic ills.

Depending on the circumstances, animal and human studies have revealed that emotional reactions can suppress or stimulate diseasefighting whiteblood cells and trigger the release of adrenal gland hormones and neurotransmitters, including endorphins, that in turn affect dozens of body processes.

The fast-growing field of research has even been given a new name – psychoneuroimmunology – and is finally beginning to win the respect of the modern medical establishment, which despite physicians like Dr. Osler had scorned or ignored previous suggestions of a strong mind-body link. Many of the studies are now being supported by various branches of the National Institutes of Health. More and more, as Dr. Osler recognized, the emotions are being considered necessary components of the cause as well as the treatment of most illness.

Although the influence of mind on body was well known to ancient healers and has dominated folklore to the present day, ‘’scientific” medicine has until recently focused almost exclusively on physical causes for bodily illness. Only a few so-called psychosomatic diseases, such as asthma and ulcers, were said to have an emotional basis.

The new studies strongly indicate, however, that virtually every ill that can befall the body – from the common cold to cancer and heart disease – can be influenced, positively or negatively, by a person’s mental state. By unveiling the mechanisms behind these effects, the studies point to new ways to prevent and treat some of the nation’s leading killing and crippling diseases. They strongly suggest that psychotherapy and behavioral techniques should be an integral part of preventive and therapeutic medicine.

These are among the possibilities:

- Among people considered at a high risk for developing lung cancer or heart disease, behavioral therapy to diminish their response to stressful life events may be partly protective.

- Mental images might be used to help cancer patients wage a more effective immunological war against their disease. Dr. Carl Simonton of the Cancer Counseling and Research Center in Fort Worth has been using such a method, though his work is highly controversial and has been criticized for making cancer patients think they caused their disease.

- By ”conditioning” someone to respond to an inert substance as if it were an active drug, it may be possible to treat an illness without experiencing the severe side effects associated with potent medication.

- Patients with autoimmune diseases, in which the body attacks itself as if it were a foreign tissue, might be trained to suppress their own destructive immune reactions. Similar techniques may be used in treating allergies, in which the immune system overreacts to an innocent substance.

- By testing people’s reactions to stress, it may be possible to identify biochemical or immunological ”markers” that can predict who is most likely to develop certain diseases. Physicians at the University of Nebraska, for example, are trying to identify people at high risk for heart attack or sudden death by examining the cardiovascular responses to stress triggered by catecholamines, a class of neurotransmitters.

According to Dr. George F. Solomon, a University of California psychiatrist who first suggested a link between immunity and emotions two decades ago, the new findings dispute the longstanding notion of classical immunology that the immune system functions independently of the brain. And, Dr. Solomon added, they finally put to rest the Cartesian dichotomy that has separated body and mind since the 17th century. Brain’s Physiological Role

”Mind and body are inseparable,” he said. ”The brain influences all sorts of physiological processes that were once thought not to be centrally regulated.”

The studies also show that the traditional concept of ‘’stress” as a demanding life event is too imprecise to use as a measurement of how stress affects health. What is distressing to one person may be stimulating to another. Rather, the researchers are finding, it is how a person responds to life events, not the events themselves, that influences susceptibility to disease. The studies indicate that failure to cope well with stress can impair a person’s ability to fight off illness, whereas adequate coping with a high-stress life may reflect ”psychological hardiness” that is actually protective.

For example, in preliminary results from a five-year study of heavy smokers, Dr. Margaret Linn and her colleagues at the Veterans Administration in Miami found that those who developed lung cancer experienced a similar number of emotional life events (such as marriage, divorce, family illness and job loss) as did smokers who thus far are free of cancer. But the cancer patients perceived these events to be more stressful and regarded themselves as more responsible for bad happenings.

Furthermore, Dr. Linn said, in the cancer patients with a high level of perceived stress, immunological reponses were significantly reduced even before the cancer developed. In another study at the Miami center, similar emotional factors were found among diabetics whose blood sugar frequently went out of control.

At Beth Israel Hospital in Boston, Dr. Steven Locke, director of the psychoimmunology research project there, has studied healthy undergraduate students. Like Dr. Linn, he found that those who reported high levels of psychological symptoms in response to stressful life events had only one-third the level of ”natural killer cell activity” as did students with the same number of life events but little psychological reaction to them. Natural killer cells are a type of white blood cell that can instantly recognize foreign cells without having been previously exposed to them.

Dr. Steven Schliefer, working with Dr. Marvin Stein and Dr. Steven Keller at the Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York, has studied the effects of bereavement on immune functions. Among husbands whose wives ultimately died of breast cancer, the researchers showed a decided decline in white blood cell function within two months of the death.

The new studies, which examine people before they become ill, are scientifically far more impressive than previous research, in which patients with certain diseases were questioned about psychological symptoms and recent stressful happenings. In the old studies it was impossible to tell whether the emotions caused the disease or the disease caused the emotional reactions.

Even more impressive, however, are recent animal studies that have begun to clarify seemingly contradictory findings of previous research. The new findings show that immunological responses to stress are not simple and straightforward but rather vary according to laboratory conditions, time of day, species, duration and frequency of the stress, whether the animals are able to do something about the stress, and even which kind of stress is applied.

Rotation-induced stress (whirling an animal on a turntable), which researchers at the Pacific Northwest Research Foundation in Seattle report to be highly stressful to laboratory mice, is of little or no consequence to monkeys, who apparently enjoy being whirled about.

Furthermore, Dr. Vernon Riley, who until his death last year had headed the foundation’s department of microbiology, showed that how the animals are housed can distort the experimental results. When he designed ”low-stress” housing for his research animals, results were far more reliable. He and his colleagues showed that stressed mice experience a dramatic increase in the blood levels of an adrenal gland hormone, corticosterone, which can impair immune responses. The stressed animals suffered a decline in disease-fighting white blood cells and a loss of tissue from the thymus gland, an important immunological organ.

Cancers also grew faster and killed sooner in the stressed animals, as did an injected cancer-causing virus. By contrast, animals partly protected from environmental stress in the special housing units developed many fewer spontaneous breast tumors than did conventionally housed mice.

As for timing, when the animals were subjected to stress before the injection of tumor virus, tumor growth was inhibited, while stress applied after exposure to the virus speeded up the cancer. However, when stress was prolonged, the tumors remained smaller and the animals died no sooner than did mice not subjected to any stress. Dr. Riley said his studies indicate that if no underlying disease is present, stress will have no effect on infections or cancers.

Dr. Darrel Spackman, who took over Dr. Riley’s studies, is now looking into the possibility of protecting animals against the harmful effects of stress. One prospect is a natural steroid hormone called DHEA (for dehydroepiandrosterone), secreted by the adrenal gland.

”If we can find protective, nontoxic compounds, perhaps we could give them to people at known stressful times, such as before surgery or during cancer treatment,” Dr. Spackman said.

Another avenue of study has demonstrated the brain’s involvement in the immune response and suggested a possible nontoxic route to controlling autoimmune diseases and administering ”drug” therapy. Dr. Robert Ader, a University of Rochester psychologist, and Dr. Nicholas Cohen, an immunologist, succeeded in ”conditioning” animals to suppress their immune systems when given an immunologically inert substance like saccharin. Involvement in Conditioning

”It’s hard to get conditioning without the involvement of the brain,” remarked Dr. Ader, who edited the signature volume of the field, ”Psychoneuroimmunology” (Academic Press, 1981).

In the experiment, sponsored by the National Institute of Neurological and Communicative Disorders and Stroke, mice with an autoimmune disease that mimics human systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) were initially given saccharin along with an immunosuppressant drug; later, their immune systems became suppressed when they were given saccharin alone, and the saccharin-conditioned animals had less active diseases and lower death rates.

This approach may make it possible to manipulate the immune system using a minimum of toxic drugs, Dr. Ader suggested. Another possibility would be to use a conditioned response to alternate an innocuous placebo with a real drug, thereby minimizing hazardous side effects without sacrificing therapeutic potential.

Studies at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York have also shown a a direct connection between the brain and immune responses. Dr. Marvin Stein and his colleagues were able to suppress immunological reactivity in guinea pigs by placing lesions on the hypothalamus, a master regulator in the brain. The animals with lesions were less likely to succumb to severe allergic attacks.

The care of tuberculosis depends more on what the patient has in his head than what he has in his chest. – Sir William Osler (1849-1919), the father of modern medicine.

NEARLY a century after some leading physicians first recognized the powerful role of the mind in health and healing, scientists have begun to decipher exactly how stress and other emotional states can influence the onset and course of disease.

Aided by new biochemical techniques and a vastly expanded understanding of immunology and neurochemistry, their studies show that emotions, acting through the brain, can affect nervous system function, hormone levels and immunological responses, thereby changing a person’s susceptibility to a host of organic ills.

Depending on the circumstances, animal and human studies have revealed that emotional reactions can suppress or stimulate diseasefighting whiteblood cells and trigger the release of adrenal gland hormones and neurotransmitters, including endorphins, that in turn affect dozens of body processes.

The fast-growing field of research has even been given a new name – psychoneuroimmunology – and is finally beginning to win the respect of the modern medical establishment, which despite physicians like Dr. Osler had scorned or ignored previous suggestions of a strong mind-body link. Many of the studies are now being supported by various branches of the National Institutes of Health. More and more, as Dr. Osler recognized, the emotions are being considered necessary components of the cause as well as the treatment of most illness.

Although the influence of mind on body was well known to ancient healers and has dominated folklore to the present day, ‘’scientific” medicine has until recently focused almost exclusively on physical causes for bodily illness. Only a few so-called psychosomatic diseases, such as asthma and ulcers, were said to have an emotional basis.

The new studies strongly indicate, however, that virtually every ill that can befall the body – from the common cold to cancer and heart disease – can be influenced, positively or negatively, by a person’s mental state. By unveiling the mechanisms behind these effects, the studies point to new ways to prevent and treat some of the nation’s leading killing and crippling diseases. They strongly suggest that psychotherapy and behavioral techniques should be an integral part of preventive and therapeutic medicine.

These are among the possibilities:

- Among people considered at a high risk for developing lung cancer or heart disease, behavioral therapy to diminish their response to stressful life events may be partly protective.

- Mental images might be used to help cancer patients wage a more effective immunological war against their disease. Dr. Carl Simonton of the Cancer Counseling and Research Center in Fort Worth has been using such a method, though his work is highly controversial and has been criticized for making cancer patients think they caused their disease.

- By ”conditioning” someone to respond to an inert substance as if it were an active drug, it may be possible to treat an illness without experiencing the severe side effects associated with potent medication.

- Patients with autoimmune diseases, in which the body attacks itself as if it were a foreign tissue, might be trained to suppress their own destructive immune reactions. Similar techniques may be used in treating allergies, in which the immune system overreacts to an innocent substance.

- By testing people’s reactions to stress, it may be possible to identify biochemical or immunological ”markers” that can predict who is most likely to develop certain diseases. Physicians at the University of Nebraska, for example, are trying to identify people at high risk for heart attack or sudden death by examining the cardiovascular responses to stress triggered by catecholamines, a class of neurotransmitters.

According to Dr. George F. Solomon, a University of California psychiatrist who first suggested a link between immunity and emotions two decades ago, the new findings dispute the longstanding notion of classical immunology that the immune system functions independently of the brain. And, Dr. Solomon added, they finally put to rest the Cartesian dichotomy that has separated body and mind since the 17th century. Brain’s Physiological Role

”Mind and body are inseparable,” he said. ”The brain influences all sorts of physiological processes that were once thought not to be centrally regulated.”

The studies also show that the traditional concept of ‘’stress” as a demanding life event is too imprecise to use as a measurement of how stress affects health. What is distressing to one person may be stimulating to another. Rather, the researchers are finding, it is how a person responds to life events, not the events themselves, that influences susceptibility to disease. The studies indicate that failure to cope well with stress can impair a person’s ability to fight off illness, whereas adequate coping with a high-stress life may reflect ”psychological hardiness” that is actually protective.

For example, in preliminary results from a five-year study of heavy smokers, Dr. Margaret Linn and her colleagues at the Veterans Administration in Miami found that those who developed lung cancer experienced a similar number of emotional life events (such as marriage, divorce, family illness and job loss) as did smokers who thus far are free of cancer. But the cancer patients perceived these events to be more stressful and regarded themselves as more responsible for bad happenings.

Furthermore, Dr. Linn said, in the cancer patients with a high level of perceived stress, immunological reponses were significantly reduced even before the cancer developed. In another study at the Miami center, similar emotional factors were found among diabetics whose blood sugar frequently went out of control.

At Beth Israel Hospital in Boston, Dr. Steven Locke, director of the psychoimmunology research project there, has studied healthy undergraduate students. Like Dr. Linn, he found that those who reported high levels of psychological symptoms in response to stressful life events had only one-third the level of ”natural killer cell activity” as did students with the same number of life events but little psychological reaction to them. Natural killer cells are a type of white blood cell that can instantly recognize foreign cells without having been previously exposed to them.

Dr. Steven Schliefer, working with Dr. Marvin Stein and Dr. Steven Keller at the Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York, has studied the effects of bereavement on immune functions. Among husbands whose wives ultimately died of breast cancer, the researchers showed a decided decline in white blood cell function within two months of the death.

The new studies, which examine people before they become ill, are scientifically far more impressive than previous research, in which patients with certain diseases were questioned about psychological symptoms and recent stressful happenings. In the old studies it was impossible to tell whether the emotions caused the disease or the disease caused the emotional reactions.

Even more impressive, however, are recent animal studies that have begun to clarify seemingly contradictory findings of previous research. The new findings show that immunological responses to stress are not simple and straightforward but rather vary according to laboratory conditions, time of day, species, duration and frequency of the stress, whether the animals are able to do something about the stress, and even which kind of stress is applied.

Rotation-induced stress (whirling an animal on a turntable), which researchers at the Pacific Northwest Research Foundation in Seattle report to be highly stressful to laboratory mice, is of little or no consequence to monkeys, who apparently enjoy being whirled about.

Furthermore, Dr. Vernon Riley, who until his death last year had headed the foundation’s department of microbiology, showed that how the animals are housed can distort the experimental results. When he designed ”low-stress” housing for his research animals, results were far more reliable. He and his colleagues showed that stressed mice experience a dramatic increase in the blood levels of an adrenal gland hormone, corticosterone, which can impair immune responses. The stressed animals suffered a decline in disease-fighting white blood cells and a loss of tissue from the thymus gland, an important immunological organ.

Cancers also grew faster and killed sooner in the stressed animals, as did an injected cancer-causing virus. By contrast, animals partly protected from environmental stress in the special housing units developed many fewer spontaneous breast tumors than did conventionally housed mice.

As for timing, when the animals were subjected to stress before the injection of tumor virus, tumor growth was inhibited, while stress applied after exposure to the virus speeded up the cancer. However, when stress was prolonged, the tumors remained smaller and the animals died no sooner than did mice not subjected to any stress. Dr. Riley said his studies indicate that if no underlying disease is present, stress will have no effect on infections or cancers.

Dr. Darrel Spackman, who took over Dr. Riley’s studies, is now looking into the possibility of protecting animals against the harmful effects of stress. One prospect is a natural steroid hormone called DHEA (for dehydroepiandrosterone), secreted by the adrenal gland.

”If we can find protective, nontoxic compounds, perhaps we could give them to people at known stressful times, such as before surgery or during cancer treatment,” Dr. Spackman said.

Another avenue of study has demonstrated the brain’s involvement in the immune response and suggested a possible nontoxic route to controlling autoimmune diseases and administering ”drug” therapy. Dr. Robert Ader, a University of Rochester psychologist, and Dr. Nicholas Cohen, an immunologist, succeeded in ”conditioning” animals to suppress their immune systems when given an immunologically inert substance like saccharin. Involvement in Conditioning

”It’s hard to get conditioning without the involvement of the brain,” remarked Dr. Ader, who edited the signature volume of the field, ”Psychoneuroimmunology” (Academic Press, 1981).

In the experiment, sponsored by the National Institute of Neurological and Communicative Disorders and Stroke, mice with an autoimmune disease that mimics human systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) were initially given saccharin along with an immunosuppressant drug; later, their immune systems became suppressed when they were given saccharin alone, and the saccharin-conditioned animals had less active diseases and lower death rates.

This approach may make it possible to manipulate the immune system using a minimum of toxic drugs, Dr. Ader suggested. Another possibility would be to use a conditioned response to alternate an innocuous placebo with a real drug, thereby minimizing hazardous side effects without sacrificing therapeutic potential.

Studies at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York have also shown a a direct connection between the brain and immune responses. Dr. Marvin Stein and his colleagues were able to suppress immunological reactivity in guinea pigs by placing lesions on the hypothalamus, a master regulator in the brain. The animals with lesions were less likely to succumb to severe allergic attacks.

Cognitive dissonance – One major self-sabotage mechanism, and how it works

Cognitive Dissonance & the Human Mind

Dan Eden / Viewzone.com

When “Robbie” the robot was told to shoot a weapon at a man in the movie Forbidden Planet, his electronic brain sparked and short-circuited. His creator had programmed him to never harm a human and so the conflicting ideas paralyzed him.

Human beings often are presented with opposing thoughts also, but our brains have developed a way of resolving these conflicts through a process call cognitive dissonance.

We are taught, like “Robbie,” that killing is prohibited — but what about war? And many anti-abortionists support the death penalty… conflicting behavior is all around us. So how exactly does that work?

Simply put, congitive dissonance theory states that when you have two opposing ideas (or ideologies) at the same time, you will act upon the one that causes the less distortion to your ego.

According to Wikipedia:Cognitive dissonance is an uncomfortable feeling caused by holding two contradictory ideas simultaneously. The “ideas” or “cognitions” in question may include attitudes and beliefs, and also the awareness of one’s behavior. The theory of cognitive dissonance proposes that people have a motivational drive to reduce dissonance by changing their attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors, or by justifying or rationalizing their attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. Cognitive dissonance theory is one of the most influential and extensively studied theories in social psychology. Dissonance normally occurs when a person perceives a logical inconsistency among his or her cognitions. This happens when one idea implies the opposite of another. For example, a belief in animal rights could be interpreted as inconsistent with eating meat or wearing fur. Noticing the contradiction would lead to dissonance, which could be experienced as anxiety, guilt, shame, anger, embarrassment, stress, and other negative emotional states. When people’s ideas are consistent with each other, they are in a state of harmony or consonance. If cognitions are unrelated, they are categorized as irrelevant to each other and do not lead to dissonance.

Let me give you some examples.

There are lots of schemes and con-artists trying to get your money these days. Almost every day I receive dozens of e-mails from people like Abada Muzoola from Nigeria, who just happened to get my e-mail address and wants me to help him transfer 70-million dollars to my bank in return for a 10 percent commission. Wow, I could use 7-million dollars! All he needs is my bank account number and pin-code. He is even willing to transfer the total amount to my account because he trusts me so much.

I continue to receive variations of this scheme every day. Why? Because they work. Somewhere in the world is a victim who will have cognitive dissonance.

On a more sophisticated scale, Bernie Madoff [ right] bilked hundreds of wealthy people out of an estimated 50-billion dollars by manipulating the same mental process (and would have continued doing so had he not bragged to his sons, who turned him in).

So how is it that people are able to convince others to give them access to their funds or to willingly give them their cash? First, one more example:

You’re walking down a busy street deep in your own private thoughts. All of a sudden a smiling woman jumps out of somewhere, stands in front of you, and puts a flower in your hand. “Hello dear… isn’t it a wonderful day today? I want you to have this flower!,” she says.Now you have a beautiful flower in your hand. It’s a nice gift and she seems friendly. She begins to walk with you, telling you that you have nice, kind eyes. She says she noticed right away that you were special and so wanted to meet you. You forget your previous thoughts about work, bills or your own life. Suddenly you feel good… appreciated… uplifted.

Then, in the same friendly voice and bright smile, she says, “I know you are a good person and you can help me by giving me a something for the beautiful flower — right?”

What happens inside your head at that moment is cognitive dissonance.

The dissonance or dis-harmony comes from two conflicting ideas or decision paths. One path tells you that you should just say “No thanks!” and keep on walking; maybe return the flower and feel insulted even if it means she will become disappointed with you. The other path tells you that she has made you feel good and has earned your friendship and a couple of bucks. She has been friendly and you don’t want to ruin the brief relationship you have formed. Heck, you should probably even give her back the flower so she can use it on the next victim.

Which decision will cause the least damage to your ego?

In cognitive dissonance theory the outcome of these opposing thought paths will be the one that requires the least emotional stress. Most victims will pay up rather than feel they are being cruel or disrespectful to someone who has made them feel so good.

In the case of the Nigerian philanthropist, Abada Muzoola, it is often less stressful to believe that you are the lucky “chosen” beneficiary than to believe you are one of the thousands of e-mails he has sent this offer to.

Later, after their bank account has been cleaned out, most people realize that they should have known better and are puzzled by their own vulnerability. Many feel so embarassed that they don’t report the crime to the authorities.

Psychologists refer to this vulnerability as the “willful suspension of disbelief,” where one can easily see the potential manipulations and evil motives of ther perpetrator, but, because they have already made some prior committment to go along with this, it is easier to continue than to back out.

The investors of Mr. Madoff knew that a 10% to 12% annual return on an investment, especially in the current bear market, was impossible. Something dishonest or illegal had to be going on. But because they had been made to work so hard to let him take their money — often begging him to please allow them to invest millions of dollars — they had made the psychological investment that “locks in” the cognitive dissonance. After that, it was more stressful to admit that this was a ponzy scheme than to just avoid worrying about it.

In Festinger and Carlsmith’s classic 1959 experiment, students were asked to perform boring and tedious tasks (e.g. turning pegs a quarter turn, over and over again). The tasks were designed to generate a strong, negative attitude. After an hour of working on the tasks, participants were asked to persuade another subject (who was actually a confederate) that the dull, boring tasks the subject had just completed were actually interesting and engaging. Some participants were paid $20 for the favor, another group was paid $1, and a control group was not asked to perform the favor.

When asked to rate the boring tasks at the conclusion of the study, those in the $1 group rated them more positively than those in the $20 and control groups. This was explained by Festinger and Carlsmith as evidence for cognitive dissonance. The researchers theorized that people experienced dissonance between the conflicting cognitions, “I told someone that the task was interesting”, and “I actually found it boring.” When paid only $1, students were forced to internalize the attitude they were induced to express, because they had no other justification. Those in the $20 condition, however, had an obvious external justification for their behavior, and thus experienced less dissonance.

Are you beginning to understand how this works now?

In for a dime, in for a dollar

Cognitive dissonance has been used to control larger groups and populations also. In World War II there was a famous campaign where citizens were asked to donate all their old pots and pans, supposedly to be melted down to make tanks, munitions and war planes. The collection was highly effective and the psychological “investment” initiated solidarity and nationalism for the war effort. Of course, all those pots and pans ended up buried in landfills.

Here’s a modern day example: When the US invaded Afghanistan, ex-President Bush came on the television asking families to donate whatever they could to help the school children in Afghanistan who needed paper and pencils. Thousands of school kids collected coins in classrooms across the nation and sent the donations to the White House. The funds ended up being put in to some vague account that never did what it was donated to do. But the “investment” was enough to gain support for a far-away war in an obscure land for vague reasons.

Sometimes, as with the tragic collapse of the World Trade towers on 9-11, the “investment” is made for us. In this way an entire nation can be made to feel that they have already sacrificed something and that they should choose the path of war over peace forgetting about the Iraqi civilian casualties — or even that Iraq was not responsible.

I once belonged to an Episcopal church in New Mexico that collected oil for M-16s to send to the troops in Iraq! They also invested the church funds with Raytheon and Haliburton.

Cognitive Dissonance in Advertising and Marketing

In advertising there is a theory that a consumer may use a particular product because he or she believes the advertising for that product, which claims that the product is the most effective of its kind in the job that it does.

Then the consumer may see a competitor’s advertisement that seems to prove conclusively that this competitive product is better. This creates dissonance. The consumer must now relieve the uncomfortable feeling that the dissonance brings about and will often do so by switching products. The theory acts as a double-edged sword, though, because while advertisers want to create dissonance for nonusers of their product, they do not want to create it for those who do use their product.

This is why advertisers use their logos on things like NASCAR and sports arenas. They want you to become loyal to their brand. This will create distrust when you see the same product — even an apparently better product — with a different and unfamiliar brand.

Cognitive dissonance most often occurs after the purchase of an expensive item such as an automobile. A consumer who is experiencing cognitive dissonance after his or her purchase may attempt to return the product or may seek positive information about it to justify the choice. If the buyer is unable to justify the purchase, he or she will also be less likely to purchase that brand again. Advertisers of high-priced durable goods say that half of their advertising is done to reassure consumers that in purchasing their product the right choice was made.

Some good uses of cognitive dissonance

Congitive therapists use this technique to change bad behavior and decisions. The technique is called a “yes set.”

Getting a patient to agree to treatment for addiction or to initiate some beneficial behavior is difficult. There is often a fundamental “batting of heads” between the patient and people trying to help. The breakthrough is achieved when the therapist purposely initiates a series of statements to which the patient can agree. After repeatedly agreeing with the therapist on a multitude of minor decisions, the patient begins to feel good and the therapist allows the patient to “invest” in this positive relationship. Then, with skill, the therapist introduces the crucial decision. “So don’t you think it’s really time for you go to rehab?” Faced with the option of agreeing or offending the therapist, the patient often continues the “yes” response.

The example above is highly effective because the patient not only agrees to change the bad behavior but is immediately rewarded by the continuation of their positive self-esteem and good feeling.

Cognitive dissonance requires some skill to work

The concept doesn’t always work. Especially if it’s poorly executed.

I was once shopping for a car and, after selecting a possible make and model, found myself sitting in the little room with the salesman, haggling about the price. At one point he asked me for my driver’s license or credit card and told me it was a “gesture” so that I would trust him. At the time, I just said “No way,” and split.

For many customers, this simple act would be enough to form a psychological “investment” with the dealer, who could then use this to manipulate and close the sale. It might be more difficult for the customer to demand his lecense or credit card and storm out of the office than to sit there and be intimidated until they signed the sales contract.

Eliminating Cognitive Dissonance

(from www.beyondintractability.org)

There are several key ways in which people attempt to overcome, or do away with, cognitive dissonance. One is by ignoring or eliminating the dissonant cognitions. By pretending that ice cream is not bad for me, I can have my cake and eat it too, so to speak. Ignoring the dissonant cognition allows us to do things we might otherwise view as wrong or inappropriate.

Another way to overcome cognitive dissonance is to alter the importance (or lack thereof) of certain cognitions. By either deciding that ice cream is extremely good (I can’t do without it) or that losing weight isn’t that important (I look good anyway), the problem of dissonance can be lessened. If one of the dissonant cognitions outweighs the other in importance, the mind has less difficulty dealing with the dissonance — and the result means that I can eat my ice cream and not feel bad about it.

Yet another way that people react to cognitive dissonance is by adding or creating new cognitions. By creating or emphasizing new cognitions, I can overwhelm the fact that I know ice cream is bad for my weight loss. For instance, I can emphasize new cognitions such as “I exercise three times a week” or “I need calcium and dairy products” or “I had a small dinner,” etc. These new cognitions allow for the lessening of dissonance, as I now have multiple cognitions that say ice cream is okay, and only one, which says I shouldn’t eat it.

Finally, perhaps the most important way people deal with cognitive dissonance is to prevent it in the first place. If someone is presented with information that is dissonant from what they already know, the easiest way to deal with this new information is to ignore it, refuse to accept it, or simply avoid that type of information in general. Thus, a new study that says ice cream is more fattening than originally thought would be easily dealt with by ignoring it. Further, future problems can be prevented by simply avoiding that type of information — simply refusing to read studies on ice cream, health magazines, etc.

Cognitive dissonance is all around us. We live in a world full of contradictions. Children are killed in Gaza in the name of peace. Feminists wear makeup, short skirts and high heels. Conservationists like Al Gore fly around in private, fuel guzzling jets. Anti-gay Christians tap their feet in public bathroom stalls… these opposing ideologies are all resolved somehow, somewhere, deep in our human psyche with cognitive disonnance.

Musicians’ brainwaves synchronize during performances, research shows

Musicians’ brains keep time–With one another

3.16.09 / Jordan Lite / Scientific American

Ever wonder how musicians manage to play in unison? Credit their brain waves: they synchronize before and while musicians play a composition, according to new research.

German scientists report in BMC Neuroscience that they measured the brain waves of eight pairs of guitarists using electroencephalography (EEG) while they played a modern jazz piece called “Fusion #1″ (by Alexander Buck). The researchers found that the guitarists’ brain waves were aligned most during three pivotal times: when they were syncing up with a metronome, when they began playing the piece and at points during the composition that demanded the most synchrony.

The synchrony was most prominent in the frontal and central parts of the brain that regulate motor function. “Whenever synchrony of behavior was high, synchrony of brain waves were also high,” Ulman Lindenberger, a director the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, tells ScientificAmerican.com. But, “we can’t assign a causal role to that synchronizing.”

While brain synchrony during a duet seems like a given, it’s a mystery how it happens, says Lindenberger, a psychologist. “One could speculate that this may be related to mirror neurons, the capacity of primates and humans to imagine the action of the other person while performing actions yourself,” he says. “The mirror neuron system could be active during synchronized guitar playing.”

Lindenberger says that inter-brain synchrony may also help explain humans’ ability to engage in a host of other activities and behaviors that involve couples or teams, such as dancing, boxing, tennis and mother–child bonding. “People have an extraordinary capacity to synchronize their actions,” he says. “When two people concentrate on the same thing, gestures and head movements are highly coordinated and supported by brain synchronicity. We think what we are getting through music has wider implications and social bonding behaviors are part of those wider implications.”

Ex US Army colonel admits in Maxim that a government psychic spy program existed

There, of course, are also mind controlled people with alters that can utlize what is known as psychic abilities. I would call them nothing sacred or something you have to be a saint to access on your own but merely another computer program that, if you know how they work, are a snap to utilize. And manipulate. Even technologically.

The True Story Behind Push

You think government-trained psychic spies are a bunch of hooey? Col. John Alexander would like to politely disagree.

Eric Alt / Maxim

In the movie Push, civilians with psychic powers—people who can manipulate thoughts, see the future, or toss objects with their minds—find themselves on the run from a shadowy government agency intent on using their beautiful minds for military purposes. Pure Hollywood hokum, right? Slow down. Retired Army Colonel John Alexander—once a Special Forces commander in Vietnam—knows differently. You see, he was once one of the key members of Stargate—a U.S. intelligence agency designed to prove that psychics could be more effective Cold War weapons than spy satellites or wire taps. The most unsettling part? He was right…

First of all, can you explain a little bit about, well, just what the hell you were involved with on behalf of the Army?
We were watching what the Soviets were doing—we’re talking late-’70s, early-’80s—and had reason to believe they were taking the whole “Psi” area very seriously. We had what was then a classified program going. Part of it was an R&D program in “remote viewing” that became actually operational, meaning that it was being used to target a wide range of things—initially Soviet, later on drug smugglers and things of that nature. Psychokinesis, mind over matter kinds of things. I was conducting… well, beyond “experiments” because the colloquial press likes to make light of that. But the metal-bending effect was absolutely real.

You mean like Uri Geller or the kid in The Matrix who could bend spoons with their minds?
Uri Gellar happens to be a personal friend, but it’s not folks like Uri. It was average, everyday kinds of, in our case, senior officers. So we were concerned because of the implications of what you could do. People would say, “What are you going to do? Bend tank barrels?” And you say, “No. We’re just going to move electrons. Make computers either not work, or render them unreliable.” This was right at the beginning of the Information Age, of course. That this worked is 100 percent real.


Were you a believer from the start, or were you skeptical at first?
Well, I considered myself the quintessential skeptic, as opposed to a debunker. Now, when you deal with Psy-cops and those kinds of organizations, they’re not skeptical—they’re debunkers. Meaning “it can’t be, therefore it isn’t.” As opposed to us, because we’ve had enough incidents happen with folks right in front of us. The problem was, they didn’t happen 100 percent of the time. And control was a significant issue, as were the theoretical models. Are you familiar with the “white crow” saying?

No…
The saying goes that it takes only one white crow to prove all crows aren’t black. We saw absolutely certain kinds of things occur under pretty good observational conditions. We weren’t being faked. These were, as I say, everyday people. In fact, there was something called the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Laboratory (PEARL) at Princeton. It was run by Bob Jahn, a supreme astrophysicist and dean of engineering at Princeton, and because of the things that they saw, they set up their laboratory. But if you came in and said, “I’m a psychic, I’d like to be tested,” they’d say, “Thank you very much. We won’t do that.” The only people they would test were normal people. What they didn’t want was somebody to come in and run some tests and put on their business card, “As tested by Princeton.”

Do you remember the first thing you saw that made you a believer?
I had what we call a PK (psychokinesis) party at my house. We had a guy by the name of Jack Houck, who had invented a process whereby we could teach these techniques to large numbers of people. My boss, who was a three-star general, and a bunch of others were there. But we had a woman hold a folk by the bottom and this thing just dropped a full 90 degrees with no physical contact.

Wow.
That’s what we said, “Wow.” It was like, “somebody needs to look at this.” And then I learned the process and was able to do it again, teaching hundreds to thousands of people over time, many of them pretty senior officials. And we protected who they were because this is not career-enhancing stuff in most cases. The final codename for the operation was Stargate. But it lasted over 20 years and had a number of different names: Grillflame, Centerlane, Sunstreak. Over time we changed the names just to protect the program. But the results are pretty spectacular. The ability to gain information at a distance? Absolutely undeniable.

So…can you do these things?
Well, I’m not sure how to answer that. I come from a school that says everybody has capabilities, and psi-ability is like physical capability. As fast as I train, as hard as I run, I’m never going to break a four-minute mile. But there are people that do that routinely today. I think the same thing is true with these phenomena, that everybody has some capabilities. There are those that have more than others. By the way, the thesis in the movie Push is you have people trying to get away from the government. My take was the complete opposite: the government is trying to make them go away. Because we have all these people—particularly self-proclaimed psychics—who jump up and try to intrude. I said, “You’ve got this backwards,” but it makes for a better movie.

Now, I heard that one of the U.S. Psi agents was able to “remote view” the location of a Russian submarine without any prior knowledge of where it was or what it looked like. Is that true?
That was Joe McMoneagle, who has written several books on this. We recommend him because he’s known for being the best of the best. In this case, they gave him just some coordinates and he came back and described a building. Then they showed him the building and said, “What’s inside?” and he described the submarine. But the information he provided was considerably different from anything we knew from our human sources. One of the key issues was that he described the torpedo launching tubes as being forward of the sail. At that point, every nuclear submarine in the world had the torpedo tubes behind the sail. So they gave this information to our boat builders, they looked at it, and said, “Well you can’t do that.” They dismissed it and said, “You build a submarine that big, when it goes to depth it will crush.” Well, guess what? We were looking at the first Typhoon class submarine and didn’t even know it. Once the satellites came on and we saw it, we said, “Holy shit. There’s the submarine.” We originally ignored the information because our sciences said you can’t do that. And Soviets proved, yes, you could. So that was a really solid example of an operational capability.

Is it true there were psychic spies brought in during the Iran hostage crisis?
There were. They were trying to find out where the people were. We couldn’t locate them. Particularly after the rescue attempt, because they scattered and moved in a different location. But we did not have good data on where the people were located. You know, the overhead only sees what you can see from the outside, but they were able to come up with some pretty specific information. One of the most important bits was they knew of an individual, a senior official, who it turned out was pretty sick. They were able to a) spot that, and b) actually determine when he was going to be released. And, like I said, they had a fair amount of information on it, but unfortunately once Desert One (the launch point for President Jimmy Carter’s failed rescue mission) happened and the hostages got split up, it became more difficult. It made a single rescue attempt pretty much impossible.

There have also been stories of certain KGB agents who were able to cause physical harm with only their minds. Is that just a Cold War ghost story, or was there real evidence to support it?
Well, I’ll tell you the story. When you say, “Was there evidence?” I’ve got to say I wouldn’t call it evidence. But there was a guy by the name of Nikolai Kokolov. He’d been a major in the KGB who defected. The problem here is that the information all becomes second-hand. He was not involved in these experiments but he did talk about getting reports from people who were. And the report included the ability to do spinal fractures (using psychokinesis) but, like I say, we don’t have a lot of evidence on that.

In the movie, the psychics are broken up into different categories based on their abilities. There are “Pushers” who can inject their thoughts into others, there are “Movers” who can manipulate objects—is this based on anything from your own experience?
I would say that there are some very fundamental truths, but they’ve been greatly extrapolated. I mean, I saw in the movie people being thrown around through the air and stuff like that. This past summer, though, we spent a couple of weeks in the Peruvian Amazon at a Shamanic conference and the things that happen there are truly remarkable, but they come from a totally different construct of reality. [In Western culture], we talk esoterically about a spirit world and a real world. Some people believe. Some don’t. But we tend to see those as separate locations. The shaman move seamlessly. In fact, I’ve done interviews where I’ve had to stop them and say, “Well, wait a minute. Are you talking about physical reality as we know it? Or are you talking about some other world?” We assume that our construct of reality is the only one that must be real and they don’t necessarily accept that.

When you talk to people about this stuff are they sort of dismissive of it, like they are of stories about Area 51?
Well, Area 51 is a real place. There just aren’t any aliens out there. Like I said, we spent decades working with some very senior folks that had direct experience. That was the reason that we did this, so people would have direct experience and couldn’t say, “Oh, that was a trick.” If you do it yourself, then you’ve got to explain it. In the world in general there are enough people that have had direct experiences with psychic phenomena—this is where the public and the scientific communities differ dramatically. One of the problems that people have is when scientists say, “Oh no, this couldn’t possibly be,” and they say, “But here’s what happened to me.” UFOs are a good example. Only seven percent of the adult population believes that they’ve seen them. When you get into near-death experiences, you have tens of millions who have had such experience. The catch-22 is when they say, “How do you do that?” And you go, “Well, we haven’t got good theories.” But the experience says we ought to be looking.

Anger and stress linked to heart problems, new study finds

Anger, stress may be linked to heart problems

2.24.09 / Elizabeth Landau / CNN

(CNN) — When you get angry, the stress isn’t restricted to your head. New research shows that anger actually triggers electrical changes in the heart, which can predict future arrhythmias in some patients.

Anger management may be key for patients with heart problems, researchers say.

The study, published in the March 3 issue of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, may demonstrate a link between mental stress and sudden cardiac arrest, which causes more than 400,000 deaths every year.

Arrhythmias, which are heart rhythm problems, happen because of a malfunction in the electrical impulses in your heart that coordinate heart beats, according to the Mayo Clinic. The result is that your heart beats too fast, too slow or irregularly.

Some arrhythmias may increase a person’s risk of stroke or congestive heart problems.

This study is relevant to people who have heart disease already, said study author Dr. Rachel Lampert, associate professor at Yale University School of Medicine.

“Perhaps if we treat them with something like stress management or anger management, we may decrease the likelihood of arrhythmias,” she said.

Previous research has shown that the rate of sudden cardiac death increases when the population is collectively stressed, such as during an earthquake or war, Lampert said.

Other studies have also shown that if you ask patients about what happened before a heart attack, they’ll most frequently say they were angry, said Dr. Charles Raison, psychiatrist and director of the Mind/Body Institute at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.

“It is just indisputable that negative emotionality — especially anger and misery, depression — are terrible for your heart,” he said.

Researchers looked at 62 patients with implantable cardioverter-defibrillators, devices that monitor heart rhythms and emit painful shocks in response to dangerous rhythms.

The patients were asked to describe a time in the previous couple weeks when they felt angry or aggravated, and were prompted with questions to describe the moment vividly. Researchers looked at the heart’s electrical stability through a measure called T-wave alternans.

“Overall in the group, when we did the anger recall protocol, the group as a whole showed an increase in electrical instability,” Lampert said.

Researchers then compared the top 25 percent of people — those who showed the most instability — with the others in the group and found that the the ones with the highest instability in the lab were 10 times more likely to experience an arrhythmia sometime in the next three years.

The idea could be used as a predictive test for people who are unable to take an exercise-induced electrical stability test, Lampert said.

More study is needed to see how the mental stress test relates to traditional exercise testing, said Dr. Eric Rashba, professor of medicine at Stony Brook University Medical Center in Stony Brook, New York. Rashba was not involved in the study. The new test may be useful in combination with the exercise test, he said.

While this is an early study with a small sample size, it is the first time this type of anger or emotional stress testing has been shown to correlate with future arrhythmias, he said.

Exercise elevates heart rate much more than mental stress does, meaning the effects of mental stress on the heart may be caused by adrenaline impacting the heart cells, the study authors said.

In a follow-up study, Lampert and colleagues are taking patients with implantable defibrillators and giving them stress management therapy to see if the likelihood of arrhythmias decreases.

Anger management has two major components: behavioral and pharmacological, Raison said.

Within the behavioral approach, one strategy is to help people understand the reasons behind their anger, including the anger that they had in childhood, which may carry over to adulthood. After going through this therapy, people have a better sense of what happened to them in their lives and stop associating everything with upsetting events from the past.

“They stop looking at the present constantly through the eyeglasses of the past, and when that happens, the things in the present don’t anger them that much,” he said.

Another strategy involves exploring ways to more constructively deal with anger. The Mayo Clinic offers these anger management tips, which include taking a “time out,” working with the person who made you angry, forgiving others and keeping an anger log to identify circumstances that make you angry.

Meditating and exercise are other ways to reduce anger, Raison said.

There is also evidence that certain drugs that work for depression, called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, make people who don’t have depression less irritable, Raison said.

Still, more work needs to be done to demonstrate an underlying causal relation between heart problems and anger, or, alternatively, if there is a third factor that causes both — for example, inflammation plays roles in both cardiac disease and anger, he said.

Thousands of Brits have the so-called Charles Bonnet Syndrome – seeing apparitions and small people

Ghostly faces and visions of ‘little people’: The eye disorder that leaves thousands of Britons fearing they’ve lost their senses

2.3.09 / Morag Preston / Daily Mail

Following his wife’s death six years ago, David Stannard has become accustomed to spending quiet evenings alone at his home in Walton-on-Thames, Surrey.

So it came as a surprise to the 73-year-old when he looked up from his television one evening to discover he was sharing his living room with two RAF pilots and a schoolboy.

‘The pilots were standing next to the TV, watching it as if they were in the wings of a theatre,’ he says.

An estimated 100,000 people in Britain have Charles Bonnet Syndrome (CBS), which leads to hallucinations. These can include visions of miniature people

‘The little boy was in a grey, Fifties-style school uniform. He just stood there in the hearth looking puzzled. He was 18 inches high at most.’

Mr Stannard’s guests never said a word and vanished after 15 minutes. That night, he says, the walls of his house, which had always been white, looked as though they had been redecorated in patterned wallpaper with a brickwork effect.

The next morning he was caught off-guard again when he found a fair-haired girl standing on his sofa. She also appeared to be from the Fifties, but was life-size, wearing a short skirt and pink cardigan, with chubby knees, white ankle socks and ribbons in her hair.

‘I watched her for a while,’ he says. ‘She didn’t move much. Then she was gone.’

It would be easy to dismiss Mr Stannard’s story as the bizarre imaginings of an elderly mind. Fortunately, he knew he wasn’t losing his mind; neither was his house haunted.

A few weeks earlier he had been registered blind, though he was still able to watch television if he sat at a certain angle. He’d been warned that as his eyesight deteriorated, he might experience visual hallucinations in the form of Charles Bonnet Syndrome (CBS).

‘I was lucky enough to know what it was,’ he says, ‘otherwise I would have thought I was going bonkers.’

An estimated 100,000 people in the UK have CBS, but many won’t realise it because the condition remains something of a mystery.

Lord Dacre of Glanton jokingly referred to his ‘phantasmagoria’

The real number is probably higher because sufferers are often too ashamed to talk about what they have seen for fear of being considered crazy.

The late historian Lord Dacre of Glanton, formerly Hugh Trevor-Roper, was unusual among CBS patients in that he talked openly about what he jokingly referred to as his ‘phantasmagoria’.

He would see horses and bicycles racing, and whole landscapes whizzing by as if he were on a train. On one occasion, he found himself trapped in an apparently endless tunnel.

Hallucinations tend to have common themes: simple geometric patterns, disembodied faces with jumbled features, landscapes, groups of people, musical notes, vehicles and miniature figures in Victorian or Edwardian costume. They can be in black and white or colour, moving or still, but they are always silent.

The condition was named after Charles Bonnet, an 18th-century Swiss natural philosopher whose grandfather had seen people, patterns and vehicles that were not really there. Bonnet was the first person to identify that you could have visual hallucinations and still be mentally sound.

The condition can affect anybody at any age with diminishing eyesight. Even people with normal vision can develop it if they blindfold themselves for long enough.

But most people who have CBS have it as a side-effect of age-related macular degeneration  -  the most common cause of blindness in the UK. It is thought that up to 60 per cent of patients with severe vision loss develop CBS.

Crucially, CBS is caused by lack of visual stimulation rather than mental dysfunction.

Usually, on opening our eyes, the nerve cells in the retina send a constant stream of impulses to the visual parts of the brain. If the retina is damaged, the stream of impulses reduces, but  -  rather than lie dormant  -  other parts of the brain become hyperactive.

So when the brain isn’t receiving as many pictures as it is used to, it builds its own artificial images instead from the areas we use every day to process faces, objects, landscapes and colours.

What you hallucinate depends on which part of the brain these increases are located. But why only a proportion of patients with macular degeneration experience hallucinations is still unknown, or why younger patients with macular degeneration are less likely to have CBS than older ones.

Dr Dominic ffytche, a senior lecturer at the Institute of Psychiatry, is a leading expert on CBS. He has been at the forefront of a campaign led by the Royal College of Ophthalmologists and The Macular Disease Society calling for eye doctors to warn patients with macular degeneration that they may develop CBS.

It is thought that stimulating the fingertips, for example by feeling a dice with dimples, can help sufferers of CBS stop experiencing hallucinations

He says: ‘In our experience, forewarning and knowledge of the possibility of hallucinations helps patients cope when they occur. It allows them to realise this indicates a functional problem with their sight and not a problem with their mind.’

In 2003, Sandra Jones, 54, a former TV producer, thought she was losing her mind when she started seeing faces looming towards her out of nowhere.

Having visited various massacre sites, including Rwanda, as part of her job, she assumed it was a form of post-traumatic stress disorder.

‘Part of me thought this was payback time,’ she says.

The faces would swirl off the pages of the book she was reading, or appear in front of her computer screen. It would happen three or four times a day, usually when she was feeling relaxed or trying to get to sleep.

‘Some nights I couldn’t lose them and I would only get an hour’s sleep,’ she says. ‘Closing my eyes wouldn’t help, so I’d get up and clean my house just to keep moving. I got the feeling that if I was tired, it would help me fall asleep, which would then free up my mind.’

She didn’t dare tell friends or anyone at work for fear of jeopardising her job, and found out about CBS only after researching her symptoms online. Earlier that year she had been diagnosed with Sorsby’s fundus dystrophy, a rare genetic eye condition which causes early onset macular degeneration, but nobody had warned her that hallucinations might be a side-effect.

If the retina is damaged, the stream of impulses reduces and other parts of the brain become hyperactive (file photo)

‘The unpleasant feeling was of not being in control,’ she says. ‘Once they are identified, they are not a problem.’

Hallucinations can last from only a few seconds to several hours. In a minority of unlucky cases, they are continuous throughout the day. Patients usually have several daily before they taper off to once a week, then once a month.

For 60 per cent of patients, they will stop entirely after 18 months. There has not yet been a long-term study, but some patients report having them for at least three years.

Part of Dr ffytche’s research involves looking into ways patients can stop the hallucinations. ‘There won’t be a single recipe for everyone,’ he says. ‘But hallucinations tend to occur when you are in a state of drowsy wakefulness, so you want to rouse yourself.’

As the condition is caused by a lack of stimulation in the visual part of the brain, one of the techniques he is investigating is stimulating the fingertips.

This is based on the fact that studies of brain scans of sight-impaired people reading Braille show increased activity in that area. The theory is that even feeling a dice with dimples could bring visions to a halt.

Other techniques include holding your breath; turning on a light if it is off, or vice-versa; standing up if you are sitting down; and moving your eyes. In extreme cases, medication is used. But the drugs can have side-effects such as tremors, drowsiness, sickness and diarrhoea.

Dr Winfried Amoaku, chairman of the Scientific Committee of the Royal College of Ophthalmologists and a specialist in macular degeneration, says when they come to visit him, patients do two things: first, they request that nobody else is in the room before mentioning the hallucinations, then afterwards they breathe a sigh of relief.

For Mary Orr, 84, from West Kilbride, the final straw was seeing the walls of her house covered in white fur. In desperation, she started to claw at them. ‘It was then I thought: “I can’t live like this,” ‘ she says.

After months assuming she had dementia, she was referred to a psychiatrist who recognised the signs of CBS straight away and told her to see an eye doctor.

It explains why she still sees pink squares and snakes rising out of the pavement, but Mary is resolute that the worst is behind her. As she says: ‘It’s the fear of not knowing what’s happening that you can’t live with.’

US Department of Defense using meditation for “Strategic Stress Management”

A proven enlightened counter-measure

10.26.08 / Dr. David Leffer / Al Jazeera Magazine

The Department of Defense is obligated to examine realistic methods for ending war and terrorism.

By Dr. David Leffler

* Attention: Secretary Gates

“Enlightened counter-measures we take today will bolster the internal strength of vulnerable states so they will not harbor violent networks seeking to launch the next attack,” DoD Secretary Gates said during a speech at the U.S. Institute of Peace. Gates is right. However, rather than start from scratch during these dangerous times a proven scientifically validated counter-measure is needed.

Despite its advanced technology and valiant efforts, the DoD and its allies struggle to eliminate violent extremism. Violent extremism is a human problem requiring human solutions. The underlying cause of extremist social violence is accumulated social stress.

Therefore, to eliminate such social problems, the DoD and its allies need to reduce collective societal stress.

Extensive scientific research indicates that the best way to reduce collective societal stress, eliminate extremism and thereby snuff out war and terrorism, is to adopt an ancient strategy. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi has revived the ancient Vedic technology of Invincible Defense Technology (IDT) in a non-religious manner. It has been quietly and successfully used by members of many faiths to eliminate conflict in the past.

Prevention Wings of the Military consisting of 3% of the military could ideally achieve this goal. These special units would be trained in the Transcendental Meditation (TM) and TM-Sidhi programs. They would practice them in large groups, twice a day in the vulnerable states.

Extensive research shows that the group size needed to reduce social stress depends on population size. It needs to be at least the square root of 1% of the population.

To calculate this number, multiply the population size by 0.01, and then take the square root of this number. For instance, the U.S. population is approximately 305 million. 305,200,000 x 0.01 = 3,052,000. The square root of 3,052,000 is approximately 1,747, so a group of at least 1,747 IDT experts is needed. The group size needed globally is currently about 8,126. Studies show that when these thresholds are crossed, the “Maharishi Effect” (ME) takes place.

Crime goes down, quality of life indices go up, war and terrorism abate. For instance, an ME intervention was studied in the U.S. capital in 1993. Predictions were lodged in advance with government leaders and newspapers. An independent Project Review Board approved the research protocol. Crime fell 23 percent below the predicted level when the group size reached its maximum. Temperature, weekend effects, or previous trends in the data failed to account for changes. Social Indicators Research published the results.

Over 50 studies have shown that IDT works. The causal mechanism for IDT is not completely understood. However, a Journal of Social Behavior and Personality study offers a proposed explanation of causality of IDT in biological terms. Research conducted on the powerful neurotransmitter serotonin shows that it produces feelings of contentment, happiness and even euphoria. Low levels of serotonin, according to research, correlate with violence, aggression, and poor emotional moods.

The IDT study showed that higher numbers of IDT experts correlated with other community members having a marked increase in serotonin production. These results were statistically significant and followed the attendance figures. This offers a plausible neurophysiologic mechanism to explain reduced hostility and aggression in society at large.

The ME has also been documented world-wide in a study published in the Journal of Offender Rehabilitation using data provided by the Rand Corporation. When large assemblies of IDT experts exceeded the ME threshold for the world during the years 1983-1985, deaths due to terrorism globally decreased 72%, international conflict decreased 33%, and violence was reduced in other nations without intrusion by other governments.

The military in Mozambique used IDT to end its civil war in the 1990s. Today, Holland, Bolivia, Colombia, Trinidad, and Peru have enough practitioners of the TM-Sidhi program to create the ME. The U.S. is close to achieving the requisite number of IDT experts through the Invincible America Assembly in Fairfield, IA. And India is working on a global project. These are all civilian groups. The pilot project in Mozambique dissolved after the UN broke up the military as part of the civil war treaty.

High school students, who will graduate and move on, make up the bulk of the practitioners in Colombia. Limited economic opportunities in Iowa have hindered the development of the U.S. group. Long term civilian groups may not be reliable.

The DoD is responsible for protecting the U.S., and is obligated to thoroughly examine realistic, scientifically-proven methods for ending war and terrorism.

Since the DoD is funded and its personnel are paid to perform their duties, it is not subject to the fluctuations of donors, jobs, graduations, and optional activities. Military members are paid to protect the nation. Ultimately, it is the DoD’s duty to build a Prevention Wing of the Military.

A paradigm shift is taking place in the U.S. military. According to the 2007 strategy announced by the Navy, Marine Corps and Coast Guard: “We believe that preventing wars is as important as winning wars.” This is the biggest revision of naval strategy in 25 years, focusing more on humanitarian missions and improving international cooperation. From the Army side, COL Brian Rees authored an IDT research paper entitled “The Applications of Strategic Stress Management [SSM] in Winning the Peace.”

The U.S. Army War College paper concluded “SSM has demonstrated efficacy when addressing the nefarious activities of criminals and terrorists, as well as the legal violence of combatants.” COL Rees has given presentations to the Proteus Management Group at the Army War College and Association of Military Surgeons of the U.S. about how IDT could prevent the collective stress responsible for war and terrorism.

How the Illuminati try to keep their power and control the public, using “it’s gonna happen, it’s gonna happen” tricknology-hypnosis

by Stefan Fobes

Colin Powell, Joe Biden and others have been going around saying there’s some crisis in the works, it’s secret, we can’t tell you what it is. Folks, there’s no crisis happening. What is happening is a simple, but highly effective on someone who lacks the knowledge of it, trick.

The subconscious mind is always recording and listening to whatever is out there, and it exists in an open state, and without a firewall in its default mode It can also be programmed externally by immoral individuals in government, private tax exempt foundations, etc, who hold this knowledge. What is done, when people are told by said immoral individuals that so called terrorist attacks are gonna happen, gonna happen, gonna happen in six months or whatever, often specifically and intentionally spoken in an alarming and/or slow tone to bring up and maximize people’s fears, whether they be conscious or subconscious.  If someone knows about the presence of a certain fear, say an overly high, pervasive fear of impending death, they can take that and use it to exercise control over another. At one level, for example, someone who is afraid of dying and someone who doesn’t like them very much is trying to kill them bloodlessly. They might roll on up outside the door when someone is showering and say, “Are you in there? I hope you didn’t fall and hit your head!” Terror explodes across that person’s mind as the thought takes on a life of its own and goes spiraling off into scenarios, such as the mind-program that we’re all born with tends to do. If someone is susceptible enough by being in a weakened mental and emotional state due to insanity, extreme financial hardship, loneliness, extreme emotional/physical trauma, drug/alcohol abuse, then they have a much higher rate of being susceptible to this than someone who isn’t. These are also the criteria used to select victims for gang stalking, and for subjects for the secret government projects like the covert electromagnetic weapons tests. The Illuminati understand this principle well and that’s why they have all those institutes like Tavistock and the like to study the mind (and break it) like it’s a 12 year old boy with his first copy of Playboy. At another level they know that through the subconscious, we create our reality, and this is how the experiences of nations and planets are birthed. This is already understood to a small extent via hypnosis, where a stage hypnotist can take a table and make you see a hippo. Mainstream science is inching toward this slowly but surely with their inroads into the placebo effect and the area of quantum physics.

This computer that I type on right now is why I believe that I create and can control my experience. When I get extremely stressed and am using it….bam! It freezes right up and I can get nothing done. But when I relax and calm down it’s like someone pressed the play button on Existence’s DVD player and everything starts right up again. Don’t know what anyone else’s experiences are on the subject, so I can only speak for myself. And on the last level of this, since the Illuminati know that at their root, all experiences are about cooperation and noncooperation, this again is another example of asking for consent to cooperate with creating a desired reality for the Illuminati. And that is whatever our fears will let the Illuminati do if they’re stoked up enough by being told there’s a crisis on the horizon and being vague about it or refusing to tell what it is. Because there is a certain democracy-like line where if a person has fear-based thoughts as the majority of their thoughts, their fear dives down to the subconscious for experiential manifestation. This answers the question that some, if they ask questions, have on why some people have fear but don’t manifest it in their experience, while others go over the cliff. But the (good?) thing is in my view that these people have succeeded so wildly in their efforts to mind control the population that the public has become so apathetic to issues that really matter due to the bombardment of everyone with irrelevant fluff  like movies and TV shows that insult the logical mind and have no resemblance whatsoever to everyday life, ball games, and other things, that apathy and decadence is the response to the prospect of potential self-annihilation. If it’s not some tabloidy juicy whitey scandal or racist comment, well, it doesn’t even register. It’s funny, but it’s true. That’s what all those research dollars are spent for.

Alex Jones’s Terrorstorm documentary shows this beautifully with the guy in London who couldn’t see the cameras in front of where he worked even though they were about seven feet away.

But we can take back control of our minds and therefore our experiences by standing up and overwriting fear with calm, hard resolve. People are saying we have to take back our currency to take back our lives. But to really change things, we can’t do the same old thing in a different context. This is the central pillar of puppet Barack Obama’s campaign. To really change things, this requires us to totally turn ourselves inside out, and to create a whole new system of exchanges. I’m not sure what it’ll be, possibly involving some sort of barter system and locally made and distributed goods independent from the big corporations as is already done to a degree in rural areas, but, if humanity continues to use the same system that coralled it for so long, it will soon force us to make the decisions that we could have made under more gentle circumstances.

How and why we lie to ourselves: Cognitive Dissonance

Jeremy Dean’s PsyBlog

[Photo by Darwin Bell]

A classic 1959 social psychology experiment demonstrates how and why we lie to ourselves. Understanding this experiment sheds a brilliant light on the dark world of our inner motivations.

The ground-breaking social psychological experiment of Festinger and Carlsmith (1959) provides a central insight into the stories we tell ourselves about why we think and behave the way we do. The experiment is filled with ingenious deception so the best way to understand it is to imagine you are taking part. So sit back, relax and travel back. The time is 1959 and you are an undergraduate student at Stanford University…

As part of your course you agree to take part in an experiment on ‘measures of performance’. You are told the experiment will take two hours. As you are required to act as an experimental subject for a certain number of hours in a year – this will be two more of them out of the way.

Little do you know, the experiment will actually become a classic in social psychology. And what will seem to you like accidents by the experimenters are all part of a carefully controlled deception. For now though, you are innocent.

The set-up

Once in the lab you are told the experiment is about how your expectations affect the actual experience of a task. Apparently there are two groups and in the other group they have been given a particular expectation about the study. To instil the expectation subtly, the participants in the other groups are informally briefed by a student who has apparently just completed the task. In your group, though, you’ll do the task with no expectations.

Perhaps you wonder why you’re being told all this, but nevertheless it makes it seem a bit more exciting now that you know some of the mechanics behind the experiment.

So you settle down to the first task you are given, and quickly realise it is extremely boring. You are asked to move some spools around in a box for half an hour, then for the next half an hour you move pegs around a board. Frankly, watching paint dry would have been preferable.

At the end of the tasks the experimenter thanks you for taking part, then tells you that many other people find the task pretty interesting. This is a little confusing – the task was very boring. Whatever. You let it pass.

Experimental slip-up

Then the experimenter looks a little embarrassed and starts to explain haltingly that there’s been a cock-up. He says they need your help. The participant coming in after you is in the other condition they mentioned before you did the task – the condition in which they have an expectation before carrying out the task. This expectation is that the task is actually really interesting. Unfortunately the person who usually sets up their expectation hasn’t turned up.

So, they ask if you wouldn’t mind doing it. Not only that but they offer to pay you $1. Because it’s 1959 and you’re a student this is not completely insignificant for only a few minutes work. And, they tell you that they can use you again in the future. It sounds like easy money so you agree to take part. This is great – what started out as a simple fulfilment of a course component has unearthed a little ready cash for you.

You are quickly introduced to the next participant who is about to do the same task you just completed. As instructed you tell her that the task she’s about to do is really interesting. She smiles, thanks you and disappears off into the test room. You feel a pang of regret for getting her hopes up. Then the experimenter returns, thanks you again, and once again tells you that many people enjoy the task and hopes you found it interesting.

Then you are ushered through to another room where you are interviewed about the experiment you’ve just done. One of the questions asks you about how interesting the task was that you were given to do. This makes you pause for a minute and think.

Now it seems to you that the task wasn’t as boring as you first thought. You start to see how even the repetitive movements of the spools and pegs had a certain symmetrical beauty. And it was all in the name of science after all. This was a worthwhile endeavour and you hope the experimenters get some interesting results out of it.

The task still couldn’t be classified as great fun, but perhaps it wasn’t that bad. You figure that, on reflection, it wasn’t as bad as you first thought. You rate it moderately interesting.

After the experiment you go and talk to your friend who was also doing the experiment. Comparing notes you found that your experiences were almost identical except for one vital difference. She was offered way more than you to brief the next student: $20! This is when it first occurs to you that there’s been some trickery at work here.

You ask her about the task with the spools and pegs:

“Oh,” she replies. “That was sooooo boring, I gave it the lowest rating possible.”

“No,” you insist. “It wasn’t that bad. Actually when you think about it, it was pretty interesting.”

She looks at you incredulously.

What the hell is going on?

Cognitive dissonance

What you’ve just experienced is the power of cognitive dissonance. Social psychologists studying cognitive dissonance are interested in the way we deal with two thoughts that contradict each other – and how we deal with this contradiction.

In this case: you thought the task was boring to start off with then you were paid to tell someone else the task was interesting. But, you’re not the kind of person to casually go around lying to people. So how can you resolve your view of yourself as an honest person with lying to the next participant? The amount of money you were paid hardly salves your conscience – it was nice but not that nice.

Your mind resolves this conundrum by deciding that actually the study was pretty interesting after all. You are helped to this conclusion by the experimenter who tells you other people also thought the study was pretty interesting.

Your friend, meanwhile, has no need of these mental machinations. She merely thinks to herself: I’ve been paid $20 to lie, that’s a small fortune for a student like me, and more than justifies my fibbing. The task was boring and still is boring whatever the experimenter tells me.

A beautiful theory

Since this experiment numerous studies of cognitive dissonance have been carried out and the effect is well-established. Its beauty is that it explains so many of our everyday behaviours. Here are some examples provided by Morton Hunt in his classic work ‘The Story of Psychology‘:

• When trying to join a group, the harder they make the barriers to entry, the more you value your membership. To resolve the dissonance between the hoops you were forced to jump through, and the reality of what turns out to be a pretty average club, we convince ourselves the club is, in fact, fantastic.
• People will interpret the same information in radically different ways to support their own views of the world. When deciding our view on a contentious point, we conveniently forget what jars with our own theory and remember everything that fits.
• People quickly adjust their values to fit their behaviour, even when it is clearly immoral. Those stealing from their employer will claim that “Everyone does it” so they would be losing out if they didn’t, or alternatively that “I’m underpaid so I deserve a little extra on the side.”

Once you start to think about it, the list of situations in which people resolve cognitive dissonance through rationalisations becomes ever longer and longer. If you’re honest with yourself, I’m sure you can think of many times when you’ve done it yourself. I know I can.

Being aware of this can help us avoid falling foul of the most dangerous consequences of cognitive dissonance: believing our own lies.

» You can read Festinger and Carlsmith’s entire report at Classics in the History of Psychology.