The Power of Belief

The Dark Side of the Placebo Effect: When Intense Belief Kills

There is a lot of New Age emphasis on thinking positively and believing in things to make them real. While a lot of this moves into the realm of visualizing yourself as rich and famous there seems to be a darker side to belief. Whether we think of it as a mystical technique or simple biology there is little argument that what we believe can affect us on a physical level. The placebo effect is a popular example of belief affecting biology. What about when placebo goes bad?

Depending on the specifics and the depth of belief, the nocebo effect can actually be deadly as is argued in the book discussed in the link above. As little as we understand the placebo effect we understand nocebo even less. Obviously there are ethical problems when it comes to testing the nocebo effect so it may be a long time before we get much understanding of it. I don't think we need to know the specifics to utilize the effect though.

Jumping back to the mystical side now, if we can cause bodily changes with our beliefs then this seems like a very useful ability worth cultivating. I think that anyone that has experimented with the vaguely-named practice of energy work can understand how a belief in an action can produce a physical sensation. This seems most useful in the form of the placebo rather than the nocebo, but these are just two sides of the same coin. If we can actively affect how our biology works with our belief then could we affect other aspects of the physical world? It might be something worth experimenting with.

What you could take away from the above article as well as this article is that what we believe has real consequences. Regardless of how superstitious or illogical a belief may be it can still have an effect on us. I have a feeling this applies to less superstitious and more logical beliefs as well in the sense that they could limit our potential in mystical or spiritual pursuits.