Understanding the Physical Impact of Thoughts

Thoughts have a physical form. All those fancy scans (EEG, CAT Scan, PET Scan, fMRI, SPECT) have as a purpose to take a look inside our heads. The interesting part is that activity can be seen.

Studies show that whenever we’re thinking about something, some parts of our brain light up like Santa’s eyes when he sees a cookie. Therefore, our thoughts create electrical activity in our brains.

In this chapter, I described a very simplified view of how we are physically affected by the negative thoughts, but first I need to define what I mean by positive and negative thoughts and behaviors. With positive, I mean thoughts and behaviors that help the wellbeing of an individual, while with negative I refer to thoughts and behaviors that are more harmful in the long run.

For example, the thought “I suck” can be seen as positive if it motivates us to become better so we can suck a little less. However, the same thought can be seen as negative if it triggers some anxiety or depression that lowers the self-esteem, the self-confidence and it makes our life worse.

“Who cares? It’s not like the brain can make a physical difference between positive thoughts and negative thoughts!” Well, in his book Evolve Your Brain: The Science of Changing Your Mind (2007) Joe Dispenza talks about how do our brains make a difference between these two types of thoughts. Most of us have neurons, right? Between those neurons there is a small gap called synapse. That synapse is filled with some chemical things called neurotransmitters, which have as a purpose to pass the information from one neuron to another.

When we’re thinking about something nice, our brains release some good neurotransmitters like dopamine (the reward chemical) or serotonin (the happiness chemical) to fill that gap so the information can be passed to the next neuron. These two chemicals can make us feel good. When we’re thinking about things that can make us feel bad, our brains fill that gap with neuropeptides and then we feel bad (e.g. dynorphin, neuropeptide Y or corticotropin). Serotonin and dopamine make us feel good and because of this, we want for more. Since we are so smart, we found ways to do this. This is where addictions come into place. Drugs, alcohol, tobacco, movies, video games, chicken nuggets, taking a dump at home after we had to hold it for a few hours and so on, they all release dopamine.

This is a passage from my book Fighting The Inside Dragons (excepting the image). I discuss how different our thoughts are regarding its biological nature. This is explored in the chapter Our psycho-bio path. If you want to grab the full book and read more about it, click on the links below.