Thinking about mind over matter

June 20th, 2023

Written by: Stephen Wisser

Most of us have heard of and are probably familiar with the saying “mind over matter.” Imagine someone completes a race against all odds when they haven’t properly trained for it, or someone fails a test on material they know because they convince themself they are going to fail. These are common examples of the mind over matter principle: the idea that someone can use the power of thought to control events to their benefit or harm. The idea of merely thinking to change something has been around for a while. As early as 19BC Virgil wrote a poem, called The Aeneid about a Greek hero in which “the mind drives the mass”¹ through his adventures. Modern neuroscience has shown us that at the end of the day, these “thoughts” are simply a series of electrical and chemical signals in the brain. So, what is happening within the brain to cause mere thought to have a large impact on a variety of outcomes? And can our thoughts shape a disease to get better or worse?

From Thoughts to Changing Brains

            Thinking is a complex topic that involves many parts of the brain and is hard to directly measure, but scientists have a few tools they can use to study how people think. One important tool is cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT, which is a therapy that changes the way people think about events in their life² and is most often used to overcome a phobia or mental health condition. A second important tool is a brain scan, specifically, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). fMRI allows scientists to measure brain activity as someone lies in a scanner. The combination of cognitive behavioral therapy with brain scans provides an opportunity to study thought patterns. If you can scan the brain, give a patient therapy like CBT that changes the way they think, and then scan their brain again, you can likely conclude that changes you see between the 2 scans are due to different thinking patterns. As a result, the changes scientists see in fMRI scans from patients undergoing CBT provide a critical window into studying thinking.

In a study of 12 women with a fear of spiders, neuroscientists did exactly this to investigate how the “mind” might be able to overcome the “matter” of spider phobia. Before undergoing CBT, the scientists scanned the women’s brains while they watched videos of spiders to get a picture of what their brain activity looked like without intervention. After, they participated in a CBT program aimed at changing their thoughts to reduce their fear of spiders, and then had their brains scanned again. During this second scan, the researchers found that activity in brain regions known to be involved in fear regulation and memory were reduced compared to the first scan³. This suggests that the change in the women’s thoughts following CBT was able to change the brain circuitry and “rewire the brain”³.

Another group of neuroscientists concluded something similar when studying people with social phobia. In that experiment, people with social phobia were asked to give a 2.5 minute speech to 6-8 people in a room while their brain was scanned. After a CBT session, they gave a speech and had their brains scanned again. Like the spider study, the CBT patients had reduced activity in regions involved in fear and memory⁴. Both this and the spider experiment suggest that changing one’s thoughts can cause a change in brain activity, which begins to illustrate the brain changes that give rise to “mind over matter”.

Beyond Brain Changes: The Positive

            The examples above show that changing one’s thoughts can change how the brain reacts to fearful things and help people overcome phobias, but a phobia is a problem largely created within the brain itself. What about diseases that start somewhere outside the brain? Can thinking solve those problems too?

This question can best be answered from research about the placebo effect, the phenomenon by which people benefit from taking a medicine even if an actual drug isn’t given. Placebo in the context of pain is explored nicely in this previous post, which explains how placebo-based pain relief releases the brain’s natural painkillers without the use of any drugs. The mere expectation that someone is going to receive a treatment even if they don’t get it is enough to increase pain tolerance and decrease the unpleasantness of pain caused by heat⁶. Like the phobia experiments, pain relief from placebo is associated with a decrease in brain activity on fMRI scans in regions associated with pain⁷ indicating that thoughts literally changed the way pain was perceived. So, it appears that thinking in the form of expectation from a drug (placebo) is in fact enough to overcome a problem that originated outside the brain, such as acute pain.

Beyond Brain Changes: The Negative

            So far we have discussed experiments that implicate thinking in changing disease or conditions in a way that is beneficial, but what about the opposite? Can thinking make conditions that originate outside the brain worse? Research suggests it can, and a recent groundbreaking study highlights the negative influence conscious thought can have on an aggressive disease: brain cancer.

To study thinking and brain tumors, researchers chose to use a simple speaking task, since the brain regions required for this task are well known. They then recorded brain activity throughout the brain while patients with brain cancer described pictures of common objects and animals they saw on a screen. As expected, when the patients spoke, the researchers observed activity in brain areas responsible for speech⁸, which were already known. But shockingly, they also saw activity in other brain areas that are not normally needed for speaking⁸ and typically wouldn’t be active in a speaking task like this. This would be like turning on a light switch in one room and seeing lights turn on in that room as expected, but also in the room upstairs. Interestingly, these “other” brain regions had tumors growing in them. Since these other regions were not expected to be active in the speech task, the scientists think that means the tumors growing in them rewired the neurons so they became active during speech. Importantly, tumors get energy to grow from brain activity⁹, so by rewiring the brain to make more regions active during the thought process of speaking, the tumor gets additional energy to grow whenever speech related thinking occurs. Thus, in this experiment, thinking literally gave tumors more energy to grow, allowing the cancer to get worse and decrease the chance of survival.

Final Thoughts

When most people think about mind over matter, they likely think of scenarios where thinking can overcome some obstacle and make life better. However as we’ve seen in examples throughout this post, mind controls matter in both directions, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. It is clear that changing thinking through CBT reorganizes brain activity in areas that control fear and memory, which likely explain the benefit these sort of therapies offer. Similarly, thinking in the form of expectations or placebo can have a positive outcome on conditions that start outside of the brain, such as in acute pain. But as this last cancer example shows, sometimes conscious thought can make diseases worse. While researchers have some idea of how thought can shape disease, there is clearly more work to do to really understand mind over matter and how we can take advantage of conscious thought to heal us.

References

1. Katch, V. (2014, October 17). The mind drives the mass. Michigan Today. https://michigantoday.umich.edu/2014/10/17/mind-trip/

2. Porto, P. R., Oliveira, L., Mari, J., Volchan, E., Figueira, I., & Ventura, P. (2009). Does cognitive behavioral therapy change the brain? A systematic review of neuroimaging in anxiety disorders. The Journal of neuropsychiatry and clinical neurosciences, 21(2), 114-125.

3. Paquette, V., Lévesque, J., Mensour, B., Leroux, J. M., Beaudoin, G., Bourgouin, P., & Beauregard, M. (2003). “Change the mind and you change the brain”: effects of cognitive-behavioral therapy on the neural correlates of spider phobia. Neuroimage, 18(2), 401-409.

4. Furmark, T., Tillfors, M., Marteinsdottir, I., Fischer, H., Pissiota, A., Långström, B., & Fredrikson, M. (2002). Common changes in cerebral blood flow in patients with social phobia treated with citalopram or cognitive-behavioral therapy. Archives of general psychiatry, 59(5), 425-433.

5. Ashar, Y. K., Gordon, A., Schubiner, H., Uipi, C., Knight, K., Anderson, Z., … & Wager, T. D. (2022). Effect of pain reprocessing therapy vs placebo and usual care for patients with chronic back pain: a randomized clinical trial. JAMA psychiatry, 79(1), 13-23.

6. Davies, J. N., Sharpe, L., Day, M. A., & Colagiuri, B. (2022). How do placebo effects contribute to mindfulness-based analgesia? Probing acute pain effects and interactions using a randomized balanced placebo design. Pain, 163(10), 1967-1977.

7. Wager, T. D., Rilling, J. K., Smith, E. E., Sokolik, A., Casey, K. L., Davidson, R. J., … & Cohen, J. D. (2004). Placebo-induced changes in FMRI in the anticipation and experience of pain. Science, 303(5661), 1162-1167.

8. Krishna, S., Choudhury, A., Keough, M. B., Seo, K., Ni, L., Kakaizada, S., … & Hervey-Jumper, S. L. (2023). Glioblastoma remodelling of human neural circuits decreases survival. Nature, 1-9.

9. Venkatesh, H. S., Morishita, W., Geraghty, A. C., Silverbush, D., Gillespie, S. M., Arzt, M., … & Monje, M. (2019). Electrical and synaptic integration of glioma into neural circuits. Nature, 573(7775), 539-545.

Cover Photo by Mohamed Hassan from Pixabay