Like it or not, thoughts run
continually through our heads. Even when we try not to think...
and when we’re asleep. And though we've been
pondering and researching it for over five thousand years, we
still don’t know how a thought arises and what exactly it is. “No matter how deeply you look into
a brain, you’ll never find a thought. You can’t touch or measure thought.” How can our brain make images
or a "voice in our heads"? “They have a lot of power, right? We created a whole history of 100
thousand years based on nothing, based on abstractions
coming out of our minds.” “There’s a renaissance in
recognizing these phenomena. We can now decode them
on a neuro-biological level.” The power of our
thoughts is so great that Chile has even had them
protected by law since 2021. “Thoughts are very powerful. However, we can control our thoughts,
which makes us very powerful.“ But how do we control our thoughts, especially when most
pass through unconsciously? How can we turn their
power to our advantage? It was a long, evolutionary
journey until our brain developed into what we know it as today
about 100 thousand years ago: With 86 billion cells and
over a trillion synapses, it’s the most complex
organ known to the world. How does this mix of water,
protein, fat, vitamins and cholesterol think up things like rockets, the
internet and artificial intelligence? “How the brain thinks is
the greatest riddle in science. There’s no good explanation
for exactly how it works.” Ancient Egyptians believed
the brain was just mass and that thoughts
came from the heart. Ancient Greeks assumed the brain
was a kind of blood cooling unit and that thoughts
came from glands. 200 years ago, as our world
was becoming more mechanized, the idea took shape that an inner
machine produced our thoughts. “In the last century, the
age of electronic circuits, people imagined that the brain
worked with electrical discharges - that thoughts were like an
electric flash of inspiration. Now, we live in the new millennium
with artificial intelligence. The idea is that, somehow, thoughts
come from our neural networks. While that's certainly not wrong,
neither is it correct enough to understand how a
brain actually thinks.” You can't see thought
when you look inside a head. It can't be touched or measured. It’s more a pattern of activity —
a fleeting state that comes and goes. Researchers worldwide still disagree
about whether it is material at all. “That thoughts cease to
flow when the brain dies is a strong argument that
thoughts are bound to matter. When nerve cells stop
communicating, thought stops, too.” But if our thoughts are
linked to our brain's matter, what if the reverse is also true? That our thoughts
affect our brain's matter? When we are born, our
brains consist only of pathways: simple neural interconnections
that expand over time. When we use a road more
often, we widen it, pave it, and eventually give it more lanes. Depending on what we think,
new "roads" are built or dismantled, so even our brain’s
volume itself changes. But until the mid-20th century, people assumed that the
brain had a fixed structure that only degraded after reaching
adulthood. That proved wrong. “Oh yeah, the greatest
lie in human history is that old dogs don't learn new tricks.
We learn until we die, because this orchestra - called
the brain - continuously adapts itself to what is happening around it.
And that's neuroplasticity.” But our thoughts don't
just change our brains. Their power affects our
whole body chemistry. “Different kinds of thoughts
use different messengers. Positive thoughts, for example,
use dopamine or serotonin, and negative thoughts or stress
use noradrenaline or adrenaline.” All these substances
affect how we feel. So, could thoughts be the key to
our own inner medicine cabinet? A stockpile of everything we
need to be healthy and happy? “A prime example of thought
power is the placebo effect.” “Hippocrates described
the power our thoughts and feelings have
over health processes. Yet these effects have been somewhat
neglected in recent centuries. From the moment we
were able to see them using non-invasive imaging techniques,
this research has exploded.” This was once called imagination. Since we’ve been able to
decode neuronal processes, it has become clear that our thoughts
really do cause changes in us. Whatever we believe about placebos tends to open up a
kind of inner pharmacy. “Our inner pharmacy holds a large
arsenal of messengers and medications. There are messengers
that act on pain, that affect our mood
and our motivation. Some affect our circulatory
system, how stressed we feel, even some that affect
the immune system. The placebo acts only on the symptom
and disease that I direct it to. But exactly what happens
in the brain and body, which drug from its inner
pharmacy is triggered, is not yet known for the
many placebo effects.” Our thoughts are
influenced by many things, from the lab coats to the right
props and even the color of pills: red ones work better than blue. Yellow ones are especially
good for depression; expensive brand-name products
better than no-names. Syringes are more
effective than pills. And if the doctors are nice,
the placebo’s twice as effective. “The more fuss is made over the
treatment, the more invasive it is, the better it works.
It’s no surprise that very strong placebo effects
occur from mock surgeries. In studies, the effects
from mock surgery, where only a small incision
was made in the knee, were just as great as in
the real treatment group.” Although the success of mock
surgery has so far only been proven in knee arthritis and
Parkinson's treatments, it’s still amazing that our
brain is so easily fooled. So, do we simply have
to think the right thing, and our heads will do the rest? “It’s not that simple. These are
complex brain-body interactions. Their impact varies depending on
the symptoms, the underlying disease, and from patient to patient. With pain and depression,
the effects are dramatic, but in other areas,
we don't know yet. And in still other areas, it
would be absolute madness to rely on thought power. If I have a
compound fracture in my lower leg, what can my thoughts do?” Even if the power of
our thoughts has its limits, we should not underestimate them. “I've been working on to a large
extent for people to appreciate that the placebo is probably
our strongest medication. And again, that means our thoughts
are the strongest medication.” “So, we did this fun thing.
We have people with diabetes who are going to sit at a
computer and play computer games. Next to the computer is a clock. We say to them, what we want you to
do is change the game you're playing every 15 minutes or so, and that's to
ensure that they'll look at the clock. Now for a third of the people,
we had the clock going twice as fast as real time, for
a third of the people we had the clock going half as fast as real time. And
for the last third, it was real time. And the question
we were asking was, did blood sugar level
follow real or perceived time? And the answer is perceived time.” But how can we make
sure that our thoughts only activate our inner
pharmacy's positive effects? Can it also work without deception?
Can we control it ourselves? “A Marburg study has shown that
patients survive heart surgery better and are still doing better
a year later, if beforehand they visualize, imagine
and plan for the treatment’s success and for activities
and travel afterwards.” In 2004, American researchers
at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation found that we can even build
muscle through thought power. From visualized training alone,
finger muscles grew by 35% and arm muscles by 13.5%. One question remains:
Why do we fall for it? We know exactly what is
real and what is made up. “The brain has a weak point: It cannot distinguish between
actual reality and imagined reality. At some point, what we
imagine becomes our reality. The same brain regions are
active as if it were a real memory, even if it’s only imagined.” This “weak point” can
make the impossible possible. Until May 1954 scientists
and sports experts agreed that a human could not run
a mile in under 4 minutes. But medical student Roger
Bannister practiced the run countless times in his head,
focusing on the goal, and broke the 4-minute barrier. Amazingly, hundreds
of other sprinters, even high school students,
have done it since. Visualization has long been
standard in professional sports. The ability to visualize complex
movements, physically and mentally, is especially crucial
to executing them. Stressful situations can
be imagined and played out, and the movements
stored in the brain to enable otherwise
impossible precision. But this technique can
rarely be used in daily life. Most of our thoughts flow
unconsciously and are hard to control. And our conscious thoughts
are not always positive. “It’s hard to measure.
There are no units of thought. But research shows that
about 2 thirds to 3 quarters or even more of our
thoughts are negative.” “Positive expectation improves the
effectiveness of many medications. Negative expectation weakens them
or can even lead to adverse effects.” “We fear that many of the
side effects are triggered by negative thoughts or expectations
and have nothing to do with the drug. They have far more to do with reading the side effects described
in the package leaflet.” Health would seem to be
a toy of our subconscious. But if our thoughts can make us ill,
shouldn't we try to control them, so our inner pharmacy
blends only the healthy drugs? “My response to how
to reduce the negativity is for people to
become more mindful. When you are mindless,
you're being controlled by primes, by previous thoughts, mindsets developed in the past
in a particular perspective and oblivious to the way
they're controlling you. Mindfulness, as I study it,
is the very simple process of actively noticing new things. When you're actively noticing
new things, the neurons are firing. And we found that it's literally
and figuratively enlivening.” Ellen Langer observed the effects
such a changed way of thinking can have on our bodies in
her most famous experiment with the suggestive
title "Counterclockwise”. In 1979, 8 retirement home
residents, all around 80 years old, were sent to a former monastery. Some walked bent over,
others with crutches. They were all participants
in an unusual experiment conducted by the then
34-year-old psychologist. Once in the monastery, they
found themselves in a different era. Everything was furnished
like in 1959: the furniture, the magazines, the
record collection, the TV shows. They had to carry their
suitcases up the stairs and cook and do the
dishes themselves. The control group were told
only to reminisce about that time, while the test group were supposed
to discuss the topics of the past in the present tense and behave
as if they were 20 years younger. “These people, at first, felt sick,
you know, they felt vulnerable. And after a short while, you could
feel a vigor that was absent before. Two of them stopped
using their cane. And interestingly,
both groups improved. However, the group that was immersed
and being their younger selves improved to a greater degree, and these findings are
statistically significant. That their hearing, their vision
and their memory improved, their strength improved, and
they looked noticeably younger.” Sadly, the effect was short-lived. Langer suspects
that the test subjects fell back into old,
negative thought patterns. Her study was criticized
for being too small and neither scientifically
repeated nor peer-reviewed. But for some years, studies have been
accumulating that confirm her theses. Alia Crum from Stanford
University, for example, showed that people who think they
are less physically active than others have a 71% higher risk of death.
And Becca Levy of Yale University showed that a positive
attitude towards aging extends life by an
average of 7.5 years and can cut the risk
of Alzheimer's in half — even if you’re
genetically predisposed. “The genome in our cells is
like a set of long shoelaces. Just as shoelaces have a protective
cap at the end, the aglets, so do our genes. These protective
caps are called telomeres. They shorten over
the course of our lives. What’s interesting is that positive
thoughts, even positive ideas about aging or less stress, affect
how short these telomeres get. In other words:
the more positive we are, the healthier we age,
the longer we stay young.” If our thoughts can even affect
our genes, what else is possible? Can our mental wizardry
be further maximized? Medical devices can help
our hearts pump better, purify our blood,
or aerate our bodies. Could machines help
us think better, too? And what does this
have to do with a rat? “This took us four years to perfect
the technique that was needed to implant electrodes like I'm
doing here in a metaphoric way.” “Implant electrodes
in the brains of rats and start recording electrical
signals as rats walk around. Well, once that was perfected,
we decided to link the outputs coming out of
this brain activity to a computer. But actually, this is more
difficult than the real experiment.” “Now, we could
analyze it in real time. So, we could extract from these
electrical brainstorms motor programs that were created by the rat’s brain to actually allow the
animal to move in space.” After recording
thousands of brain waves, he made a
groundbreaking discovery: The rat's brain signals
could be decoded, converted into digital commands
and passed on to a robotic arm, which then mimicked the rat. The BRAIN-MACHINE INTERFACE
had been invented. This rat was the first creature
that could move things with the power of thought. Of course,
it had no idea what it was doing. “A year later, we decided that we
needed to do a more complex study to prove the point that brain-machine
interfaces could really work, so... ...we did it with monkeys.” First Nicolelis fitted a monkey
named Aurora with 100 electrodes. Then, he had her
play a computer game. This time, he recorded
even more brain waves, converted them into
digital commands and sent them to a
robot in the next room, which then mimicked
Aurora's movements. “At that moment I said, let's
take the joystick out. Take it away. And let's see if she realizes
that if she keeps thinking, the robotic arm is going to control
the cursor and intercept the target as she was doing
with her own hand. And everybody looked at me,
saying: she'll never get it. It's a mental step that a
monkey will not be able to make it. Well, we took it away. And then she
focused again, looked at the screen, and all of a sudden, we
see the robotic arm going and making the cursor to the target, and we look at her body and
her body was totally immobile. At that second, we knew that
we had changed everything. A primate brain was
finally after millions of years, was finally liberated from
the physical limits of the body and was acting into the
world just by thinking. And that's when we realized that
paraplegic people or paralyzed people would be able to use a brain-machine
interface to walk again. They didn't need to move. They
just needed to think about moving.” In 2008, he had a monkey in
the U.S. control a robot in Japan. In 2014, he built his
first exoskeleton suit, called "Brazil Santos Dumont 1". In this suit, the paralyzed
Juliano Pinto kicked off at the 2014 World Cup in Sao
Paulo and even felt the ball. Now, we can use
brain-machine interfaces to control not only prosthetics,
but even drones and airplanes. That’s not all.
A few years ago, Nicolelis helped rats
gain a sixth sense: a brain chip let them sense
infrared light with their whiskers. In 2015, he connected the brains of 3
monkeys so that they could do things they couldn’t on their own.
This is now possible for humans. “In Brazil, two human beings
merged their brain activity to play a game together. Things move pretty quickly
in the last twenty years.” If development continues at
this pace and connecting brains to enhance human capabilities
is no longer that difficult, how will it affect us? Could this change not only our
abilities, but our entire species? “In theory, yes, you could augment
our regular human capabilities. The question is, what is the limit,
and should we cross certain limits? And certainly, I don't
have all the answers. I know what can be done
and what is just baloney, but I have concrete doubts
whether we should go that route, because at which point we
call us not human anymore?” And who might have the competence
to answer such a question? In 2021, Chile became the first
country to introduce neuro-rights, which protect thoughts like organs and make their trade and
manipulation punishable by law. In France, brain-altering
technologies can now be prohibited, and brain waves can only be recorded
for medical or scientific purposes. And in Halle, Germany, the "Cyber
Agency" has been working since 2021 to make our brains unhackable. “Hacking a brain is something
that I don't see happening soon. It's kind of very difficult. We have some copyright protection.
Because we compute with the tissue.” “Elon Musk's idea that you
can read a specific thought or put a chip in the brain to
stimulate intelligence, creativity or certain mental states is far
more fictional than real science. This will not be feasible in our
lifetime, nor in Musk's lifetime.” “It’s absolutely baloney that
this would make any sense, because the brain is
not a digital machine. You're never going to learn French
by plugging something in your brain and uploading French grammar.” So, our thoughts
cannot be hacked - yet. But in the U.S., devices
have been sold for some time that promise to
maximize our brain power, making us smarter or
more relaxed in our thinking. NATO assumes that our brains
cannot be "neurally enhanced" — at least not until 2050.
But in early 2022, the Pentagon was
already accusing China of devising offensive
brain control weapons. What lies in store for us? “My goal is...
strictly limited to medicine. However, for people like
myself who invented something, you certainly have
no control whatsoever. I never accepted the idea that some
people in America have, for instance, some scientists, who have no qualms
about using brain-machine interfaces to develop weapons. I don't
share that enthusiasm at all. Rather the opposite. I'm totally against the
militarization of the brain. A huge set of ethical issues
would have to be widely discussed. Who’ll have access to it?
Everybody? Or just an elite? What is going to be the difference
between a human that is augmented in terms of political
power, economic power versus those that
remain just human?” While we’re still learning what
our natural thought power can do and how to control it, others can
already technically manipulate it. The freedom of our thoughts
is not yet in doubt — but, if we hope to use that
power more and more for us, we’ll have to remain highly vigilant.
