The Science Behind Miracles
How our minds push our bodies to defy expectations, beliefs, and even our own biology—in short, to make miracles.
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Imagine a man who could endure near-freezing water for 45 minutes at a
stretch. Imagine if that same man could run a barefoot marathon in the
Arctic or swim 50 meters under the ice of a frozen lake. Imagine that
man said the secret to his abilities not only allows him to climb
Himalayan mountains wearing shorts, but also eases everything from
chronic pain to Crohn’s disease and even Parkinson’s. What would you
call that man? A savant? Guru? Prophet of God, maybe?
That’s the character Scott Carney describes in his book,
What Doesn’t Kill Us, about legendary survivalist and icy-water swimmer
Wim Hof.
The 57-year-old Dutchman, often referred to as the Iceman, has devised a
series of breathing techniques and conditioning exercises—mostly
various types of hyperventilation and other ways to purge the body of
CO2—that he credits as being the key to his extraordinary abilities.
Hof, for his part, sees the whole thing in a much more spiritual
light—getting back to a purer, more primitive version of ourselves.
The book is a fun read because, at first glance, Hof does seem
superhuman. He claims that by slowly conditioning oneself to low-oxygen
states (through breathing exercises) or extreme cold (through full-body
muscle-clenching exercises), one can channel their spiritual energy and
tap into all kinds of hidden powers. Carney is at his best when he tries
to explain Hof’s abilities through science. For instance, he suggests
that Hof has tapped into a specific type of fat cell called brown
adipose tissue that is found in human babies but mostly disappears in
adulthood; through his body training, it’s possible that Hof has
encouraged this vestigial fat to play an increased role in trapping
heat. But the tone of
What Doesn’t Kill Us occasionally implies that we should worship the guy. And honestly, it’s hard not to.
Hof is one of those extraordinary characters who pops up occasionally
throughout human history seeming to be nothing short of miraculous. For
thousands of years, humanity has occasionally glimpsed man’s capacity to
do the seemingly impossible or the miraculous using only force of will:
walking on burning coals, healing the sick, enduring lethal
temperatures for hours. And for all that time, we have been left to our
own devices in guessing how such things are possible.
But today, modern science has revealed a number of fascinating
mechanisms for how the brain influences the rest of the body, forming a
string of enticing bread crumbs leading toward a more satisfying
understanding of some of the limits of the human body—and how people
like Hof cheat them.
Take one fascinating lead: the effect certain expectations have on
bodily functions. The mind has a propensity to make predictions, and
then ensure those predictions come to pass through internal “pharmacies”
that, when lumped together, are also called placebo effects.
In my book,
Suggestible You,
I talked to scientists around the world who investigate placebos,
internal pharmacies, hypnosis, and the power of belief on the body and
mind. One of my favorite quotes came from Alia Crum, a psychologist at
Stanford. “I don’t think the power of mind is limitless,” she said. “But
I do think we don’t yet know where those limits are.”
In his book, Carney points to Wof’s ability to heal things like
Parkinson’s, asthma, chronic pain, and digestive problems, giving us the
impression that the mind can do anything it wants. As it happens, all
of these diseases are also highly susceptible to the influence of
placebo. Contrary to popular belief, not all placebo effects are the
same, and not all conditions respond to them equally. That’s because a
big part of placebo effects are chemical, employing things like
dopamine, endogenous opioids, serotonin, and an untold number of other
chemicals your brain idly keeps on hand in case it needs to adjust
what’s happening in the body.
That’s what’s at the center of almost every “miracle” I’ve
encountered: chemicals that have incredible effects but still follow the
rules of biochemistry, even if we don’t yet fully understand what those
rules and mechanisms are. Hof claims that one of the secrets to
superhuman strength and healing is specialized breathing techniques.
Fair enough. But I can introduce him to a healer in Beijing who says
it’s about balancing spiritual heat with cold or a witch doctor in
Mexico who says it’s about channeling spirits. What do they all share?
The chemistry of expectation and belief—which, writ wide, is the world
of placebo. A better definition for placebo might be to call it a
measurement of the effect of one’s belief on their body.
Belief and placebos don’t just affect disease. They also boost
athletic performance, as Hof demonstrates when he swam under 50 yards of
ice. This is where scientists have begun asking some really interesting
questions.
Placebo effects have long been studied in medicine, but Christopher
Beedie, a sports psychologist at the Canterbury Christ Church University
in England, is among the few scientists who study it in athletics. His
work often examines how elite athletes perform under intense fatigue
when they think they have some kind of performance enhancement. The
interesting question for Beedie isn’t what can the human body do, but
rather, what more can the human mind add to that?
“I don’t think there’s anything surprising about people who exist at
the end of continua,” says Beedie. “[Hof] is an extension of the classic
example of a unique athlete optimized on nearly all variables who’s
also probably learned to capitalize on every component of placebo
responding he can.”
One of the most studied mechanisms of placebo in medicine is that of
pain relief. Scientists have documented an extensive network of
self-medicating pathways in the brain involving internal opioid stores
that kick into gear when our bodies expect a treatment—from aspirin to
acupuncture—and don’t get one. And there’s a lot of overlap between pain
and athletic performance. Because what is intense exercise but extended
pain resistance? In fact, pain relievers like morphine are strictly
regulated in athletics for their performance-enhancing powers.
In addition to painkillers, there may be a whole network of internal
chemicals our bodies can dip into for increased performance. In one
mind-boggling study
from 2008, legendary Italian placebo scientist Fabricio Benedetti told
weightlifters that they were getting performance-enhancing drugs when
they were actually getting placebos and, secretly, lighter weights to
lift. Once they believed the drugs were working, as perceived by the
lighter weights, the loads were surreptitiously returned to their normal
weight. The force the athletes were able to produce with their muscles
increased while perceived fatigue stayed the same.
Beedie has done a lot of similar placebo performance
experiments—consistently demonstrating their ability to give an
impressive edge to cyclists, runners, and many other athletes—to the
point where the athletes at his school don't always believe what he
says. He claims belief taps into “headroom” that every athlete has in
their potential—or the idea that that athletes can push themselves to
operate between their perceived maximum execution and the maximum that
physics and their bodies will allow. By either removing energy-wasting
anxiety or tapping into chemicals like opioids or as-yet-undiscovered
internal performance drugs through one’s expectations, the brain can
coax the body into that magical zone.
In fact, Beedie is convinced this headroom is the same space filled by performance-enhancing drugs. (Indeed
it’s not even clear that some banned drugs,
like erythropoietin,
can outperform placebos.) He’s just finished the largest (not yet
published) placebo study ever done in athletics—600 subjects in all—and
found that the people most likely to respond to placebo were the ones
experienced using supplements. Perhaps the previous supplements the
athletes had taken primed them to have a placebo response. Perhaps
people who naturally respond to a sports placebo are also likely to have
taken performance enhancers. Either way, it suggests that artificial
boosted performance and boosted performance from expectation produce
similar effects.
“This [whole idea of expectation-based bodily responses] is an evolved
mechanism that allows us to capitalize on untapped resources at
critical points in our existence,” Beedie says. Belief is belief, so
it’s possible that drugs—real or placebo—fill the same space that
superstitious baseball pitchers fill by wearing mismatched socks or
dirty underwear and the same space filled by Hof and his breathing
methods. None of this is to say Hof isn’t incredible. His feats of
endurance are astounding and perhaps even scientifically significant,
like his ability to control his body temperature so well. But he’s not
magic, and we should be careful about trusting important health
decisions to any belief-based technique—even one that allows a person to
swim under ice.
Perhaps the most interesting question is what can people like Hof
really tell us about the effect of our mind on our bodies? Scientists
already know that Parkinson’s disease, pain, and depression all respond
very well to all kinds of beliefs, whether through special breathing,
secret pills, or magic crystals. But could that same belief fuel
unprecedented feats of athleticism? Beedie says that, especially for
elite athletes, there’s a limit to the benefits of both psychological
and pharmacological performance enhancers, so why not just use belief in
place of drugs?
“We’re trying to educate athletes into the idea that the headroom is
there to be filled, and drugs are not necessarily the only way of
filling that headroom,” he says. “Confidence is the drug of champions.”
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