Suggestible You by Erik Vance

I recently read a book with the unwieldy title: Suggestible You: The Curious Science of Your Brain’s Ability to Deceive, Transform, and Heal. Since I suffer from chronic pain, I’ve read several books about the structure and function of the brain. In spite of advances in neuroscience in the past decade, we still have gaps in our understanding.

The author has a delightful sense of humor and tries to decipher a lot of the technical language of science. He delves into consciousness, expectations, chemistry (drugs and hormones), electrical energy, pain, diet, emotions, beliefs, memories, the placebo effect, acupuncture, alternative medicine, hypnosis, meditation, our “stories,” faith healing, and brain waves. His definition of the title: “Suggestibility is a cocktail of genetics, personal beliefs, experience, and personality. Expectation is just a system of shortcuts our brains have developed to get through life without stopping every five seconds to figure things out.”

In other words, the brain is not just some wind-up computer that controls our bodily functions and emotions. The mind is far too complex for us to fully understand. “The smallest unit scientists can use to measure an indirect form of brain activity contains about 9.4 football stadiums’ worth of brain cells.”

He clarifies the misunderstanding of the phrase “the placebo effect.” “We know that placebo responses are real, measurable neurochemical events in the brain. But remember that much of the power of suggestion happens outside our conscious awareness. The whirligig of emotions and beliefs and memories that make up our consciousness is one of nature’s greatest creations.”

He was raised a Christian Scientist but became a skeptic. “If a sense of disease produces suffering and a sense of ease antidotes it, disease is mental. Hence the fact in Christian Science that the human mind alone suffers.” That sounds vaguely like Buddhism.

I will omit his discussion of some of the various parts and functions of the brain. I just get lost. To summarize, we are programmed to heal ourselves if we can understand the process of how that happens. But we get sidetracked into treating the symptoms that are separated into silos in the medical professions. We’ve learned how to treat diseases, injuries, and our physical nature, but we’ve not learned how to create and sustain good health.

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