The Biology of Belief - Bruce H. Lipton [58]
Our responses to environmental stimuli are indeed controlled by perceptions, but not all of our learned perceptions are accurate. Not all snakes are dangerous! Yes, perception “controls” biology, but as we’ve seen, these perceptions can be true or false. Therefore, we would be more accurate to refer to these controlling perceptions as beliefs.
Beliefs control biology!
Ponder the significance of this information. We have the capacity to consciously evaluate our responses to environmental stimuli and change old responses any time we desire … once we deal with the powerful subconscious mind, which I discuss in more depth in Chapter 7. We are not stuck with our genes or our self-defeating behaviors!
How the Mind Controls the Body
My insights into how beliefs control biology are grounded in my studies of cloned endothelial cells, the cells that line the blood vessels. The endothelial cells I grew in culture monitor their world closely and change their behavior based on information they pick up from the environment. When I provided nutrients, the cells would gravitate toward those nutrients with the cellular equivalent of open arms. When I created a toxic environment, the cultured cells would retreat from the stimulus in an effort to wall themselves off from the noxious agents. My research focused on the membrane perception switches that controlled the shift from one behavior to the other.
The primary switch I was studying has a protein receptor that responds to histamine, a molecule that the body uses in a way that is equivalent to a local emergency alarm. I found that there are two varieties of switches, H1 and H2, that respond to the same histamine signal. When activated, switches with H1 histamine receptors evoke a protection response, the type of behavior revealed by cells in toxin-containing culture dishes. Switches containing H2 histamine receptors evoke a growth response to histamine, similar to the behavior of cells cultured in the presence of nutrients.
I subsequently learned that the body’s system-wide emergency response signal, adrenaline, also has switches sporting two different adrenaline-sensing receptors, called alpha and beta. The adrenaline receptors provoked the exact same cell behaviors as those elicited by histamine. When the adrenal alpha-receptor is part of an IMP switch, it provokes a protection response when adrenaline is perceived. When the beta-receptor is part of the switch, the same adrenaline signal activates a growth response. (Lipton, et al, 1992)
All that was interesting, but the most exciting finding was when I simultaneously introduced both histamine and adrenaline into my tissue cultures. I found that adrenaline signals, released by the central nervous system, override the influence of histamine signals that are produced locally. This is where the politics of the community described earlier come in to play. Suppose you’re working in a bank. The branch manager gives you an order. The CEO walks in and gives you the opposite order. Which order would you follow? If you want to keep your job you’ll snap to the CEO’s order. There is a similar priority built into our biology, which requires cells to follow instructions from the head honcho nervous system, even if those signals are in conflict with local stimuli.
I was excited by my experiments because I believed that they revealed on the single-cell level a truth for multicellular organisms—that the mind (acting via the central nervous system’s adrenaline) overrides the body (acting via the local histamine signal). I wanted to spell out the implications of my experiments in my research paper, but my colleagues almost died from apoplexy at the notion of injecting the body-mind connection into a paper about cell biology. So I put in a cryptic comment about understanding the significance of the study, but I couldn’t say what the significance was. My colleagues did not want me to include these implications of my research because the mind is not an acceptable biological concept. Bioscientists are conventional Newtonians