How far can mind over matter go? For instance, could thoughts actually create a wound? Well, a few people who had deeply meditated over and pondered the crucifixion of Christ developed wounds in their hands and feet — this condition even has been named as a “stigmata”. While extremely rare, and only happening to some monks, priests, and others who spent major portions of their lives in religious meditation, it has been reported in multiple cases over the centuries. Stigmata is an extreme example of the ability of the brain to control the body, but it opens up the possibility that the bounds of brain signaling are not as limited as we tend to think they are.
Stigmatas have been considered as miracles by those receiving them, considering them opportunities to share in Christ’s suffering to more fully understand it. But they had first been contemplating the crucifixion, and it is possible that their thoughts became reality because of the remarkable power of the brain. A much more common example of the effects of the brain on the body is the “placebo effect”, which can trigger the very reactions that those who take a fake medicine are expecting to happen. These reactions can be mild or dramatic, and sometimes they appear to be miraculous. One thing is certain: the power of the brain that has been engineered into it by our Designer is incredible and not to be underestimated.
Science itself does not deny that we have been designed: science is merely a mechanism to better understand the rules by which the designed operations occur. Miracles can jump outside the rules, but science can only look at repeatable phenomena. When we know the rules, we can use them to make our lives better. Our brains and bodies are designed to work in cooperation with our environment and to even have a level of mastery over that environment. We have built-in correctives for all sorts of conditions: cold, heat, food shortage, enemy threat, and toxins all trigger counteracting reactions in a living body. The second law of thermodynamics shows that the raw environment tends towards chaos, yet life bucks that trend. It is designed to build up, against the odds. The pinnacle of that design is the brain, which uses intelligence to make complex bodily changes to stay as healthy as possible, even when the environment is not accommodating. Much of this is done subconsciously, and you only are aware of the results.
Take a breather
Much of your metabolism is controlled at a primitive level. Breathing, for instance, is normally handled automatically. In the respiratory center of your brain located in the medulla oblongata, signals are received from chemoreceptors throughout your body that detect blood gas levels which your brain then uses to increase respiration if the levels are too low. But it also receives data from your cerebrum and hypothalamus. The hypothalamus monitors and sends signals to control many aspects of homeostasis, and the cerebrum is the center of higher thought. In a review study published in the Journal of Neurophysiology, researchers outline the interactions between conscious and subconscious portions of the brain during volitional (conscious) breathing control: “…during attention to breathing, we demonstrate increased coherence in the anterior cingulate, premotor, insular, and hippocampal cortices. Our findings suggest that breathing can act as an organizing hierarchical principle for neuronal oscillations throughout the brain…”(1)
Simple breathing control is not so simple. We can say the same about much of human metabolism. Your brain is very active in just keeping you alive and stable. While there are many parts to the brain, together they form a complex network which controls the rest of the body.
For your brain to control your body, it has to know your body. From birth your brain has a “map” of your body so it knows how to manage your body on a primitive level. But as you grow, that map is supplemented with learning: you learn how to move your voluntary muscles by sending test signals to see what happens. Soon you learn coordination of muscles so you can walk and talk. You also learn to interpret signals coming from your senses. And you even learn how to interact with primitive functions, so you can hold your breath or breathe deeply. Your higher thought integrates with the automatic functions. You might even learn how to adjust your pulse rate by thinking exciting or calming thoughts.
You might wonder how your brain can exercise precise control over a particular metabolic function or a specific portion of your body. While you don’t know consciously how to do either, your brain has mapped your body. It knows your body in great detail. So it knows how to send control signals to whatever portion or function of your body it wants, even if you have no idea how to do so. Those who reported receiving stigmata wounds did not set out to wound themselves, but they contemplated those wounds and their brains were capable of translating those thoughts into their hands and feet.
Programming never stops
Most of your thoughts are subconscious however. Those thoughts are nonetheless exerting great control over your metabolism and health. You might smell something and your heart rate and anxiety rises, seemingly for no reason, but actually the smell might be associated in your subconscious memory with a traumatic event you experienced as a young child. Your brain is constantly making associations and writing conscious and subconscious programs which can then run again and again. The trigger may be some event, something your senses convey, or even other thoughts running in sort of a chain reaction.
Do you find yourself playing songs in your head, usually coming to your mind unexpectedly? Perhaps you heard the song playing in the store you just visited, or maybe a single word someone says reminds you of the song. Or the song just seems to pop up randomly. It wasn’t really random, but the trigger may be so subtle or complex that you can’t figure it out. Hopefully you enjoy the song in your head, but if you don’t, you can try intentionally triggering a different song or listening to a new one — you can change the program. The point is that your thoughts are very complex, and your brain which enables those thoughts is extremely complex.
Here’s an interesting example. Published in Nature is a study conducted by researchers at Trinity College Dublin where they built a mental “program” in animals which they could then trigger later. In their study, the animals were trained to associate certain visual images with cold environments. Initially those images would only appear along with cold temperatures. Later, however, they showed the images without lowering the temperature.(2) What happened? The animals’ metabolisms triggered a higher level of thermogenesis, up-regulating their internal body temperature in expectation of colder external temperatures. They had built a program in their brains which triggered a primitive, subconscious response in the animals when the images appeared.
The study showed how deeply the brain can control the whole body. Thermal regulation should have been a function only of the room temperature that the animals experienced, which then would have caused their brains to up-regulate their internal heat generation if the room temperature was cold. But the images caused their brains to up-regulate at normal temperature. Subconscious programs drive the brain to act in ways which may make no sense from our perspective, yet the programs are real and powerful.
We are aware of some of the programs that develop in us. Have you ever eaten a certain food, then become significantly nauseous, even though nothing was wrong with the food? For days afterwards, the very sight of that same food made your stomach turn. In reality the food did not make you sick, but your mind still formed the association which created a program that, when triggered, caused a metabolic reaction. You probably told yourself the food was fine, the program was silly, and then you tried the food again. You retrained your brain with a different association, cancelling the previous program, and the food was no longer a nauseating trigger. You couldn’t simply self-talk your way into avoiding the reaction: seeing the food triggered it, but you could override it and then build a substitute program. In this case, the program was a conscious one. But you are unaware of most of your programs, and often surprised at your reactions. When you realize that these programs can influence all aspects of your metabolism, you realize that your brain is controlling your health even more than many environmental factors.
Disease control
Could your brain shut off a disease as severe as cancer? With the right brain programs, it is possible. Your brain might not be able to simply switch it off; in fact, the cancer cells may have already received “die” signals and ignored them. Cancer often stops responding to normal signals. But your brain can change the environment of the cancer, direct the immune system to attack, and send calming, non-inflammatory signals — in essence, it can press the cancer cells to “shape up or ship out.” It can remove the cause of the cancer formation and make the environment of the cells only appropriate for normal cell function. So at least in indirect ways it can shut down cancer.
If the brain can invoke metabolic diseases such as diabetes and obesity, it certainly can reverse them. These have a common root (insulin resistance) which is clearly a metabolic dysfunction, and the brain controls metabolism. Published in Diabetes Care, researchers show a strong statistical correlation between depression and the onset of type 2 diabetes. The researchers suggested various possible mechanisms by which the brain could cause diabetes, all of which involve brain signaling to the rest of the body.(3) Studies of heart disease, autoimmune disorders, and degenerative diseases also show some connection between their development and brain signaling. Usually the studies are looking at the negative impact of the brain signaling from mental conditions such as depression or anxiety, but the reverse is also true: when the brain is signaling health, disease risk drops and may completely reverse.
All this simply says one thing: your brain is in control. If you are suffering with disease, most likely your brain is involved — perhaps strongly involved. If you are running negative subconscious programs as almost all of us are, your health is being impacted. Fortunately, reprogramming them is possible, particularly thanks to brain scanning technology to determine what therapy is working. We don’t yet know how far the brain can go in preventing or reversing all disease, but we are underestimating its potential. Why not see how far your brain can go with healthful subconscious programs?
Dr. Nemec’s Review
What the Nature study showed is that programming controls physiology, pure and simple. This can be expanded at any level if we’re willing to look at all aspects of our being.
The brain rules the body.
The brain sends electromagnetic and biochemical signals to all the cells in the body to tell them what to do. Some of the fields in science recognize this as “psychoneuroimmunology.” As the title states, the mind controls the nervous system, which controls the immune system. However, we have just barely scratched the surface of how the mind can truly control the body.
Incomprehendable control
You can’t even conceive the millions of reactions that are going on in each cell of the hundred trillion cell human body continually, moment by moment. All these are in perfect harmony and balance, otherwise you would die quickly. We can’t even conceive the enormity and complexity of what is actually going on. The only possible way we can even come up with any conclusion is that the subconscious mind, via the brain body connection, must run all these reactions simultaneously without us even being aware of it. So we’re looking at the key to health, to life and longevity. It can only be found in one place: the subconscious mind, which runs over 95% of your physiology of your hundred trillion cell community.
Beyond the Placebo Effect
People have actually healed themselves from chronic disease diseases by believing the pill they were receiving was actually the cure. This is with the conscious mind believing that the pill was going to completely cure the problem — so with the conscious mind, the brain kicked on the immune system and the other systems of the body and the people were healed.
Can you imagine this is only 5% of the healing ability?
The other 95% of the healing ability resides in the subconscious programming. So the subconscious mind is the answer to every condition, presently and in the future.
Conscious belief versus subconscious programming
When we talking about conscious belief, we’re talking about what we’re consciously aware of, which is a very minimal amount of what’s going on in the hundred trillion cell community of you. Your body runs on autopilot: that autopilot is your subconscious mind, but what has never been addressed in any extensive way is how to control the subconscious programming to continually bring about the optimal outcome.
What is subconscious programming?
It is early life programming recorded from conception to age 6. During this period of time you were writing subconscious programs to survive in the early environment in which you were developing and growing. These programs were based on information coming into your brain and nervous system from the people around you: your mother, your father, siblings, relatives, etc. — so in essence we are a product of our environment subconsciously. We are not consciously aware of it, but we were programmed in the early moments of our lives for our entire lives.
How do I know how I was programmed?
There are clues when you look at yourself consciously:
- Are you easily stressed?
- Do you have certain fears or phobias?
- Do you feel insecure?
- Are you more hyperactive?
- Do you have a type A personality?
- Are you a perfectionist?
- Are you obsessive compulsive?
- Do you have a hard time resting?
- Do you have a hard time doing nothing?
These are just a very few of the indicators that your early environment was one of stress, and your system developed in that stress.
Is there anything that can be done to change this?
This is the work that’s ongoing, looking to unlock the keys of subconscious programming. The difficulty with this has been technology limitations: being able to measure the brain in unique ways that would give hints of what is going on subconsciously. Recently however there have been breakthroughs with various brain imaging techniques to evaluate mind-brain-body connections.
This is the future of our health, of our life, and absolutely of our longevity. This is a completely untapped horizon. This is why this has been our major focus at Revolution Health & Fitness for the past 40 years. This is why this is the integral part of our program that we offer members and patients to restore their health to the highest level.
Was the stigmata a miracle or the mind? Or is everything even more than what we thought?
Is there a spiritual dimension of our lives that we really haven’t connected to?
Is there a possibility that everything is connected — body, mind, brain, and spirit — and what we see in the body is just a reflection of all of these connections?
The words of Jesus speaking about what was to come:
“And if they drink deadly poison, it will not harm them..”
What is the final culmination of awareness of our true identity?
“There will be no more death, grieving, crying or pain, for the old thought has passed away.”
(1) Herrero JL, Khuvis S, Yeagle E, Cerf M, Mehta AD. Breathing above the brain stem: volitional control and attentional modulation in humans. J Neurophysiol. 2018 Jan 1;119(1):145-159. doi: 10.1152/jn.00551.2017. Epub 2017 Sep 27. PMID: 28954895; PMCID: PMC5866472. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5866472/
(2) Muñoz Zamora A, Douglas A, Conway PB, Urrieta E, Moniz T, O’Leary JD, Marks L, Denny CA, Ortega-de San Luis C, Lynch L, Ryan TJ. Cold memories control whole-body thermoregulatory responses. Nature. 2025 Apr 23. doi: 10.1038/s41586-025-08902-6. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 40269165. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40269165/
(3) Jared G. Maina; Zhanna Balkhiyarova; Arie Nouwen; Igor Pupko; Anna Ulrich; Mathilde Boissel; Amélie Bonnefond; Philippe Froguel; Amna Khamis; Inga Prokopenko; Marika Kaakinen, Bidirectional Mendelian Randomization and Multiphenotype GWAS Show Causality and Shared Pathophysiology Between Depression and Type 2 Diabetes, Diabetes Care 2023;46(9):1707–1714
https://doi.org/10.2337/dc22-2373, https://diabetesjournals.org/care/article/46/9/1707/153440/Bidirectional-Mendelian-Randomization-and
