WTB: What would you say is the theme of your new book?

DISPENZA: The book is about what science and neuroscience offer as great promise and real hope for human change. So the book is first about changing the brain, changing the mind and then ultimately what effects those intentional changes have on the physical body. What is the relationship between the mind and the body, how they can interact with each other so that when we do change our thinking process the effects produced demonstrate chemical changes and neurological changes on a cellular level? And what this can do for people’s health?

WTB: So are you talking about creating health by eliminating negative thinking patterns?

DISPENZA: To some degree, but not entirely. Whether we are changing beliefs or perceptions, attitudes or habitual thought patterns, the brain seems to like to replace an old idea for a new idea. So there is an exchange of self-limiting thoughts and memories for new and improved thoughts. Eliminating negative thoughts is probably better said as interrupting the negative habitual thoughts by creating a new level of awareness which then allows room for more serving thoughts.

In the book I talk about the direct change of physical health conditions, physical manifestations of disease. When I studied people those people that had spontaneous remissions from physical ailments or had changes in the level of their health from health conditions, there were some things in common amongst every person that had a physical change.

First thing is, they accepted that there was a greater order, a greater intelligence running their body. Nothing mystical about the order, it’s the same intelligence that’s keeping your heart beating and digesting your food. They reasoned that they had separated themselves from this mind and in order to improve their health condition they had to make contact with this intelligence so that it could do the healing for them.

The second thing was that they all accepted that they had to become responsible for the fact that they’d created their disease by their unhealthy reactions and thought processes over the years that ultimately brought the body to a state of imbalance. That imbalance then became ultimately their normal state of balance. So they asked themselves, “If I change my thinking, will it change my physical body?” And of course we understand from neuroscience that every thought that we have produces a chemical in the body. The problem is after 10 or 15 years of making the same chemicals and thinking the same way, not only do we hard-wire the brain neurologically, but we also create a very strong connection between the brain chemically and the physical body.

The third thing is they said is that they had to reinvent themselves. They had to start thinking in new ways, and become different people. They started asking themselves difficult questions, like “What would it be like to be happy? What would I have to change about myself? What people do I know from history were great that I admire, and what were their qualities and characteristics?” So they started changing their mind and changing the way their brain worked. According to neuroscience the principal is that nerve cells that “fire together, wire together.” If we can cause the brain to fire in new sequences, patterns and combinations, then the mind is changing. If we can recreate the same level of mind everyday, we will cause more permanent neurological changes in our brain. The more we use the same new neurological frame by producing the same mind, the more the same neurons gang up together to build stronger connections.

WTB: What if someone pictured themselves exercising rather than actually doing it physically?

DISPENZA: [Some research was done] with a group of people. And the researchers said, “Ok, we want you to practice moving your ring finger against this spring-loaded device an hour a day for four weeks.” The results were that their finger got 30% stronger because they were practicing pulling against the spring. Then they took another group of people and said, “Sit down and imagine yourself pulling against the spring but never touch the spring.” And they practiced an hour a day for four weeks. At the end of the four weeks those people had a 22% increase in finger strength and never touched the spring.

What does that say about our brains? That in the process of rehearsal, if we can become so involved in what we’re doing, the brain can’t distinguish between the actual external experience and the internal experience. And what it does is, it maps and tracks the experience so that the nerve cell connections become stronger and, at the same time, the nerve cells’ connections become more enriched. And that enriched synaptic process where they become more refined and intricate is what can actually create the strength in the finger. In effect, those that mentally rehearsed the activity had stronger minds that created greater strength in their finger. The same is true when we mentally rehearse being a different person.

WTB: What if you have a relatively healthy person, but they go to the doctor and he tells them they don’t process sugar correctly. But it’s not anything they have thought themselves into with negative thinking. Can that person think themselves out of that? Can they decide that they do process sugar and can they change their brain patterns until they can eat sugar and have a normal reaction to it?

DISPENZA: That’s a great question and the answer is yes and no. The first step is that we have to acknowledge that certain people are born genetically with certain predispositions. What we are given genetically is the starting point in our life. But that’s not the end all because there’s a dramatic exchange between genetics and environment, nature and nurture in that we’re literally changed by the thoughts we think and the experiences we have. Both of those elements are encoded neurologically in our brain. To change from being sugar intolerant to being able to process sugars properly is not a process that happens over night.

First of all, the genetics of what you’re given is something that usually is connected to an emotion or some attitude. So you may say well I don’t have any negative thinking and maybe you’re right about that. But there are also self-limited thoughts we all need to change. And so if we don’t consistently make an effort to become greater than we presently are, if we never make that effort, we never change the chemical continuity of how we live in normal states. For example, the person who can’t process sugar because of their genetic predisposition, the question should be; if they changed and became a different person, self liberated, happy, generous, lived in gratitude, and expressed joy, would it produce different effects in their physical body? The answer is yes. The same is true for a person who has created their sugar sensitivity by living in reactive stressful states of mind or reliving destructive emotions on a daily basis. Both scenarios can be shifted by a change in the way we process our thoughts and reactions.