Attitude for the scholar in you

Thoughts are like tools. We can use them to build ourselves up or tear ourselves down. Picture yourself as a builder and your thoughts as your tools. Using your mental hammers, screwdrivers, and saws, you construct yourself and your experience of the world. By thinking in different ways, you can construct the way you see the world, how you feel, the decisions you make, and the way you act. In this view, thoughts are powerful. They matter. Thoughts, however, like hammers can be unwieldy for the inexperienced builder. They can be dangerous, used for self-destruction. To understand the impact of our thoughts, take a groundbreaking study conducted in a Stanford lab that examined whether people could voluntarily control their brain responses and pain experience with their thoughts. The new technology used was developed by Christopher deCharms, featured in the video below.

In the study, participants were trained to increase or decrease their own brain activity in a specific area that is reactive to pain, the rostral anterior cingulate cortex (rACC). They were given specific mental strategies to turn down or up brain activity in this area such as, “Attempt to perceive the stimulus as neutral (turn down) or tissue-damaging (turn up)” or “Attempt to perceive the stimulus as either low intensity (turn down) vs. high intensity (turn up).” In the fMRI scanner, they received painful heat stimulation to one arm while viewing a screen, which displayed a streaming video of a virtual fire (see below). The size of the fire corresponded to the amount of activity in their rACC, serving as real-time performance feedback. With practice, participants were able to reliably turn down and up activity in this region, making the fire smaller or larger. And they accomplished this just by thinking differently about the pain.

Using their thoughts, they were able to change their brain reactivity to painful stimuli and also turn up and down their subjective pain experience as evidenced by their pain ratings. In contrast, a control group of participants who received inaccurate feedback or no feedback were significantly less successful, if at all, at controlling their brain responses or pain experience. Moreover, chronic pain patients who underwent the same training replicated these findings and felt a stronger sense of control over their pain from the beginning to the end of training.

The scientists who headed the study wrote, “We all consciously and unconsciously control our brain for every activity we initiate, every thought we have, and every emotion or sensation we experience.” These findings suggest that we are able change the way our brains react to the environment by changing the way we think. And by changing our brains’ reactions, we change our experience. Most importantly this study shows that with practice and accurate feedback, we can master constructive thinking strategies and learn to wield our mental tools to build ourselves up instead of tearing ourselves down.

by Kevin Bickart

e: kbickart@goibelieve.com

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Kevin is an MD/PhD student at Boston University studying the Neurobiology of Belief