Well, at least we were being convincing.
Dr. Tanbyrn still doesn’t seem sure of himself with his cane as he leads me and his impressively sideburned graduate research assistant 120 feet down the hall, to the room where I’ll be watching for Charlene’s face to appear on a video screen.
I don’t want him to lose his balance again, so I stay close as we travel down the hall.
We enter the room and I look for transmitting devices, video cameras, anything the researchers might be using to alter or fake their findings. While I do, I make sure that I surreptitiously turn in a full circle so that the button camera gets a 360-degree view of the room.
Obviously, Dr. Tanbyrn could simply have programmed his computer to print out fake results — that was something we would need to check on before we went on air with our show, but for now I wanted to eliminate as many other factors as I could.
I see the window, the reclining chair, a desk, a few office chairs, the same view as the photo in the center’s brochure.
Nothing out of the ordinary.
Positioned in front of the reclining chair is a widescreen, hi-def television, blank now, but I anticipate that it’s where the video of Charlene sitting in the chamber will appear once we get started.
Dr. Tanbyrn picks up a tablet computer from the desk and finger-scrolls across the face of it. The TV in front of me flickers on and a video starts, but it’s not Charlene in the chamber; it’s a nature special about how birds fly in flocks, simultaneously changing direction as if they have a collective consciousness.
A collective consciousness.
Well, that made sense, considering the doctor’s area of interest.
Philip stands quietly by the door. “We’ve found that leaving people alone helps them to not be distracted or nervous.” He smiles, but for some reason it makes him seem less trustworthy. His teeth are just too straight, too white. A televangelist’s grin.
I decide I’d rather keep an eye on the two of them during the test to make sure they don’t alter any of the test conditions. “Thank you, Philip. But feel free to stay. You won’t be distracting me. I assure you.” I indicate toward the two chairs near the window. “There’s plenty of room.”
His momentary hesitation is a red flag to me, and I begin to not trust the graduate student from Berkeley.
Dr. Tanbyrn gives Philip a glance, then tells me, “Of course, Mr. Berlin. Whatever will help you relax.”
“Wonderful.”
Somewhat reluctantly, Philip takes a seat, and Dr. Tanbyrn dials the Venetian blinds down so they shut out the meager light that’s seeping in from the fog-drenched day outside.
So now, relax.
When you’re doing water escapes, especially cold-water escapes, if you don’t learn to lower your heart rate at least a little, you end up using your oxygen too quickly, and it dramatically decreases your chances of escaping in time, so all escape artists learn to control their heart rate, at least to some degree.
In the days when I was performing my stage show, I not only had to learn to hold my breath for up to three and a half minutes, but I had to learn to relax enough to lower my heart rate to fewer than thirty beats per minute. Now that I haven’t done it in over a year, it seems pretty impressive. Back then it was just me going to work, doing my job.
Right now I figure I’ll relax as much as I can, try to stick as closely as possible to the test procedures. After all, we were making our own recordings of Charlene’s physiological state, so we would know if their test results were faked or in some way falsified.
I lean back in the reclining chair and lay my hands across my stomach, not just so that I can relax, but so I’ll be able to tap the lap timer button on my stopwatch every time Charlene’s image appears. This way we’ll have an accurate record of the instances when her image was being transmitted onto the screen, and we’ll be able to compare it to changes that might appear in the printed record of her physiological states.
Dr. Tanbyrn dims the lights and takes a seat while I watch the birds flock across the screen in unison and wait for the video of Charlene to appear.
The Placebo Effect
It was the middle of the afternoon, and Riah had spent most of the day so far reviewing the journal articles written by Dr. Tanbyrn and his team at the Lawson Research Center in Pine Lake, Oregon.
Some of the material, particularly the unconscious communication between two lovers, she found unbelievable, but yet surprisingly well-supported by the center’s detailed documentation.
And she did agree with a few things.
She knew that the mind is a powerful thing, that it’s possible to alter your own physiology through your thoughts, a puzzling fact that physicians and scientific researchers have known since the 1780s.
The placebo effect.
Just give people a harmless pill, a sugar pill, an aspirin, whatever, tell them it’s the latest pain medication or a drug to treat a severe medical condition they have, and depending on the ailment, 30 to 95 percent of them will be helped, at least to some degree — more than those in a control group that isn’t receiving any treatment.
Of course, the effectiveness of the placebo isn’t the same with every illness or injury or with every patient, but in some cases the placebo group actually experiences more of a positive effect than the people taking the drug that’s being researched.
Yes, at times the brain can heal the body even better than medicine can.
And astonishingly, according to a 2011 study, patients even benefited if they took a placebo and were told it was a placebo.
Honestly, no one really had a clue how that worked.
And the placebo effect was far-reaching.
Placebos hadn’t been used just to control pain, but people taking them had been healed of cancer, had controlled their schizophrenia, and even, in a few isolated cases, had been cured of Parkinson’s disease. Body builders who thought they were taking the newest anabolic steroids gained muscle mass as fast as those who were taking steroids — and even suffered the negative side effects they would’ve if they were actually taking the steroids.
How is it possible that our thoughts alone can cause us to feel less pain — even allow patients to feel no pain during amputations? How can our thoughts cure us of cancer, or manage the symptoms of schizophrenia or Parkinson’s, or help us build muscle mass?
All of that? Just by our thoughts?
It was a medical mystery.
Riah also knew that thoughts can do more than heal, they can have a negative effect as well — sometimes called the nocebo effect.
In her research into humanity, she’d read the aptly titled book Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, a Jewish psychiatrist who was a survivor of the Nazi death camps in World War II.
In the book he tells the story of another prisoner who’d had a dream that the war would end on March 30, 1945. But as the day approached and the men heard reports of the battles, it seemed less and less likely that the fighting would end on that date. On March 29 the man became ill. On March 30, when the war didn’t end, he became delirious. On March 31 he died.
In his case, he hadn’t died from any diagnosable medical condition, he had died from lack of hope.
His thoughts had ended up being fatal.
Undeniably, thoughts can heal and they can kill.
And as far as affecting another person’s physiology, we do that all the time. All you have to do is kiss someone or aim a gun at his head or slap him in the face. He may get aroused or afraid or angry, but in every case his heart rate, breathing, and galvanic skin response will change. In fact, when two people are alone and in close proximity, their heart rate and respiration begin to emulate each other’s and they begin to breathe in sync with each other.