Religion and mysticism are nothing other than the placebo effect

We've all heard about placebos. You know, those inactive substances, such as sugar pills, that are used as controls in research designed to determine whether a genuine drug has positive bodily effects. 

Most of us also are familiar with the frequent finding that placebos turn out to be as effective as genuine drugs, or even surgical procedures. This is perplexing if we assume that the mind and body are separate entities.

But not at all perplexing given the obvious fact that the mind is the brain in action, and the brain is an organ of the body. So if someone believes that a placebo will benefit them in some physical way, that's one part of the body — the mind/brain — affecting another part of the body, such as pain receptors.

In her book, The Mindful Body, psychologist Ellen Langer speaks about the fallacy of mind-body dualism. That's been part of our worldview for thousands of years, in both Western (think Descartes) and Eastern (think Hinduism) forms.

Langer writes:

Any change is virtually simultaneously occurring in every cell of our bodies. If I lift my arm, there are differences in my brain from before I lifted it. If I have a thought about my dog, my brain has changed from before the thought. 

Rather than assume that while our minds are engaged, our physiology is inactive, or vice versa, seeing it as one implies that thought and bodily responses occur simultaneously. One might ask, "If I lose a limb or weight, does that mean I lose part of my mind?"

The argument is mind-body unity, not mind-body equality; your mind is certainly affected by your lost limb or change in weight, it's just not one-for one. One might also ask, "If my mind keeps changing, does that mean my body does so as well." The simple answer is yes. The body regenerates all the time.

So again, recognizing the truth of mind-body unity makes it easy to understand how placebos can be so effective. 

Whether people are given sugar pills, saline injections, or sham surgery, when someone believes the treatment will produce a cure, a cure often follows. Among the more striking examples is one in which the patient was told ipecac would stop vomiting and it did stop vomiting, even though ipecac is a medication that induces vomiting. 

Langer describes many other examples of placebo research conducted by her team at Harvard and other investigators. She notes that even when pills are labeled as a placebo, they still have a positive effect: "I believe this shows that as long as patients are induced to have positive expectations, an open-label placebo approach should work."

Reading about placebos in Langer's book this morning got me to thinking about how supposed supernatural experiences are almost certainly another manifestation of the placebo effect.

Of course, with rare exceptions religions and mystical practices don't openly say, "What we're offering doesn't have any proven ability to experience supernatural phenomena, but if you believe they do, there's a good chance you'll have that sort of experience."

In other words, as Langer said, there's plenty of research showing that positive expectations lead to the expected result, even if there's no direct causal connection between what someone is doing — like meditating — and a result — like seeing divine light, hearing divine sound, or otherwise experiencing the presence of a divine being such as God.

A Christian fervently believes that the Bible is true. Jesus is the Son of God sent by Heavenly Father to save souls and take them to heaven. That belief can easily lead the Christian to feel that Jesus is a living presence. They sense Jesus guiding them, loving them, protecting them. 

Jesus isn't actually there. But the benefit they derive from this religious placebo effect is as genuine as if Jesus truly was a force in their life. That's wonderful, even though in no way does it prove that God, heaven, and such are objectively real. They're simply subjective perceptions brought into being by fervent belief.

Or to offer another example from my own brand of religiosity, Eastern mysticism variety, that I embraced for thirty-five years: a guru is believed to be God in Human Form, a divine being who places his supernatural form in the consciousness of a disciple at the time of initiation. 

If this belief is strong enough, and persistent enough, a disciple of the guru may have a vision of the guru, either during meditation or at some other moment. This supernatural vision can seem absolutely real, in the same sense as a sham surgery can cause a patient's knee pain to go away just as a genuine surgery would have.

Placebos work because the human mind is a powerful force. It's absurd to discount placebos by saying, "They're just in the mind." Actually, everything is in the mind. Without a mind, without consciousness, we can't experience anything. 

So I'm not discounting the value of placebos, whether of a religious nature or otherwise. I use them all the time. A physical therapist told me recently that the SalonPas and Biofreeze patches I've been putting on my right leg and butt to relieve sciatica pain during sleep don't do very much, if anything, given the nature of nerve pain.

Okay. I accept that. And I still use the patches. I visualize them reducing pain. I expect they'll reduce pain. I realize that my belief may not be founded in actual fact. That doesn't matter to me. What matters is that I feel a benefit from the patches. 

That's the beauty of placebos. They work because we believe they will.