And the Science Behind Why It Keeps Me Healthy

People ask me how I stay healthy. My answer surprises them: I take a placebo every day. Not a sugar pill — something far more powerful. Something that doesn’t just keep me running up and down mountains, but keeps my mind euphoric. When I say I take a placebo, I am managing my thoughts indirectly by managing my language and posture in life, and I achieve that by managing my gut, my light exposure, my emotional state, and the meaning I assign to my experience. And the science behind why this works is, depending on your perspective, either the most important thing medicine isn’t teaching you, or the oldest thing humanity has always known.

First, I forced myself to set everything else aside to make it a mission to connect the dots — from billion-year-old cellular biology to quantum physics to the ancient traditions that somehow got there first. It is written in plain language, but every claim here has a thread of serious science behind it. The citations are at the end. The experience is my own.

What Is a Placebo, Really?

The word placebo has become a polite way of saying ‘it’s all in your head’ — a dismissal, a consolation prize for people who got better without real medicine. But that framing gets it exactly backwards. The placebo effect is not evidence that nothing happened. It is evidence that something remarkable happened, and we don’t fully understand the mechanism.

Consider what placebos can actually do:

• Parkinson’s patients show measurable dopamine release from sugar pills

• Fake knee surgery (incision only, no repair) performed as well as real surgery in multiple controlled trials

• Placebo painkillers are partially blocked by naloxone — proving they trigger real endorphin release

• Open-label placebos work — people told ‘this is a sugar pill’ still improve

• More expensive placebos work better than cheap ones — meaning the meaning of the treatment is itself biologically active

The placebo effect is not the body being tricked. It is the body’s self-regulation system receiving the signal it needs to do what it already knows how to do. Meaning is the medicine. And meaning enters the body through a chain that runs from the most abstract level of human experience — thought, belief, language — all the way down to the quantum level of cellular biology.

“The placebo effect is real, neurobiological, and clinically meaningful. We are only beginning to understand its mechanisms.” — Ted Kaptchuk, Harvard Medical School, Programme in Placebo Studies

The Five Brains — And Why They All Need to Talk to Each Other

Modern medicine treats the brain as the singular seat of consciousness and command, sending instructions downward to a passive body. This model is increasingly obsolete. We now understand that the human body has not one but five distinct neural processing centers — each capable of independent intelligence, each in constant bidirectional communication with the others. Health, in this framework, is not the absence of disease. It is the coherent synchronization of all five.

1. The Cortical Brain — The Narrator

This is the part we identify as ‘us’ — the conscious, language-using, planning, analyzing mind. It generates the thoughts and meanings that initiate the cascade. But it is the newest layer, sitting on top of far older systems, and it takes its cues from them as much as it directs them. Its most powerful function in the context of health is the generation of meaning — which, as we will see, is a direct biological input.

2. The Limbic Brain — The Archivist

The emotional brain. It stores survival-relevant patterns, runs the stress response, and operates largely below conscious awareness. Crucially, it cannot distinguish between a real threat and a vividly imagined one. Chronic fear, unprocessed trauma, or sustained negative emotional states here will drive the immune system into a state of chronic inflammatory alert — which is now understood to underlie most modern chronic disease. Keeping this brain clean means processing emotion rather than suppressing it, and feeding it safety signals rather than threat signals.

3. The Gut Brain — The Commander

The enteric nervous system contains approximately 500 million neurons — more than the spinal cord. It produces around 90% of the body’s serotonin and significant quantities of dopamine and GABA. It communicates with the cortical brain via the vagus nerve, and approximately 80% of vagal fibers run upward — from gut to brain — meaning your gut is telling your brain what to think and feel more than your brain is telling your gut what to do.

I discovered this directly. For years I suffered migraines that doctors told me were incurable. They were right that they couldn’t cure them — because the cure was not a prescription. It was eliminating a candida yeast overgrowth, healing intestinal permeability (leaky gut), and restoring the gut lining. Once the gut lining healed, fewer inflammatory compounds entered the bloodstream. Fewer crossed the blood-brain barrier. The neuroinflammation that was producing my migraines resolved. My gut brain stopped sending distress signals. The migraines stopped.

“The gut-brain axis is bidirectional and plays a fundamental role in mood, cognition, and immune regulation.” — Emeran Mayer, The Mind-Gut Connection (2016)

4. The Heart Brain — The Broadcaster

The heart contains approximately 40,000 neurons and operates with significant autonomy. More importantly, it generates an electromagnetic field that extends several feet outside the body — measurably stronger than the brain’s field. The HeartMath Institute has documented that when this field is coherent — achieved through intentional positive emotional states — it measurably affects the nervous system, immune function, and hormonal regulation. People in close physical proximity show entrained heart rate variability — their rhythms begin to synchronize. Your internal emotional state is not internal. It is being broadcast continuously.

“The heart’s electromagnetic field is the most powerful rhythmic electromagnetic field produced by the body and can be detected several feet away.” — HeartMath Institute Research Center

5. The Cellular Brain — The Original Intelligence

Before nervous systems existed, before brains evolved, single-celled organisms needed to sense their environment and respond intelligently. The tools they used were microtubules — dynamic protein structures inside every cell — and flagella, the rotating sensory-propulsion systems of ancient microbes. These structures are billions of years old, and they are still inside you. Every cell in your body is waving a tiny antenna called the primary cilium — once considered vestigial, now understood to be a primary sensory receiver for mechanical, chemical, and electromagnetic signals from the cellular environment.

Neuroscientist and anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff, working with mathematician Roger Penrose, proposed that microtubules are the actual site of consciousness — that quantum computations inside them collapse into the moments of experience we call awareness. This is the Orchestrated Objective Reduction (Orch-OR) theory. It remains contested, but has not been disproven, and recent evidence of quantum coherence operating in warm biological systems — first demonstrated in photosynthesis — has kept it scientifically alive.

The implication is profound: your brainwaves, measurable by EEG, may be the tip of the iceberg — the large-scale output of something happening at a quantum level far below, in the microtubules of every neuron, and potentially every cell.

The Chain: How Meaning Becomes Biology

Here is the chain I believe I am working with every day, and which the science increasingly supports:

Meaning & Language  →  Neural Pattern  →  Quantum State Change  →  Gatekeeping Proteins  →  Nervous System  →  Neurochemical Cascade  →  Systemic State  →  Heart Field Broadcast  →  Environment

Every step in this chain has scientific support. Language shapes prediction and bodily state before sensory data even arrives — Lisa Feldman Barrett’s research on constructed emotion shows the brain uses conceptual categories to pre-configure physiological responses. Those neural patterns, in the Orch-OR model, correspond to quantum state changes in microtubules. Those quantum states cascade into epigenetic regulation — the gatekeeping proteins that determine which genes are expressed. Bruce Lipton’s cell biology research showed that membrane proteins act as receivers of environmental signals, including electromagnetic ones, and can override genetic defaults. The nervous system, via the vagus nerve, then distributes that new instruction throughout the body. The heart broadcasts the resulting state electromagnetically into the surrounding space.

This is not a metaphor. It is a proposed physical mechanism. And it means that the words you habitually use about yourself, the meanings you assign to your experience, and the emotional states you sustain are not decorative — they are direct biological programming instructions.

“Epigenetic changes can be driven by psychological states. Meditation practice alters gene expression in immune-related pathways within weeks.” — Kaliman et al., Psychoneuroendocrinology (2014)

Light as the Original Signal

Every living thing on Earth evolved under the same rhythmic signal: the predictable cycle of spectral change from dawn to dusk. Circadian clock genes — Period, Cryptochrome, CLOCK, BMAL1 — are found in virtually all life forms, from cyanobacteria to humans. They are so fundamental and so conserved across species that they appear to have emerged early in the history of life and never been replaced, because nothing worked better.

The cryptochromes in your circadian system are directly descended from photolyase enzymes in ancient bacteria that used light energy to repair DNA damage. The retinal molecule in your eye that catches single photons and converts them into neural signals is a modified version of bacteriorhodopsin found in microbes over a billion years old. You are a light-detection system that has been progressively complexifying for a billion years while never discarding its original tools.

Morning light — red and orange spectrum, low angle — sets the master clock in the suprachiasmatic nucleus and initiates a 12-16 hour countdown to melatonin production. Midday full-spectrum light drives vitamin D synthesis and serotonin production. Evening red light signals wind-down. Blue light at night from screens tells your ancient biological clock it is noon — which is why screen use before sleep is so profoundly disruptive to sleep architecture, immune regulation, and metabolic health.

Physicist Fritz-Albert Popp discovered that living cells emit ultra-weak coherent light — biophotons — that appear to function as a cellular communication system. If true, we are not merely receiving sunlight as energy. We are participating in a light-based information exchange at the cellular level that has been running since life began.

“Biophoton emission from living cells appears to be coherent and may represent a fundamental cellular signaling system.” — Fritz-Albert Popp, International Institute of Biophysics

The Ancients Got There First

Every major spiritual and religious tradition in human history — with no contact between them — independently reached for light as its central metaphor for consciousness, understanding, and divine encounter. Hindu Jyoti, Buddhist luminous mind, Christian transfiguration, Sufi Nur, Egyptian Ra, Plato’s emergence from the cave into light. These traditions were not being poetic. They were reporting something accurate about their internal experience and encoding it in the most precise language they had.

The theta brainwave state — 4 to 8 Hz, associated with deep meditation, prayer, psychedelic experience, and flow — is consistently described across traditions as accompanied by experiences of inner light, warmth, expansion, and unity. In this state, the brain’s default mode network quiets, sensory filtering loosens, and neuroplasticity peaks. It may be that in theta, the filtering that normally drowns out the deeper biophotonic signal relaxes enough that the light of cellular activity becomes directly perceptible. The meditator is not imagining the light. They may be perceiving their own biology from the inside.

Prayer and faith worked — and work — because they are delivery systems for exactly the kind of coherent, sustained, meaning-laden signal that the placebo chain requires. A person in genuine prayer is:

• Generating coherent language and meaning (cortical brain input)

• Inducing a theta or alpha brainwave state (limbic and cortical synchronization)

• Activating the parasympathetic nervous system (vagal tone increase)

• Generating positive emotional states (heart field coherence)

• Embedding meaning in the body through repetition (epigenetic reinforcement over time)

I believe the miracles recorded in ancient texts — spontaneous healing, extraordinary resilience, recovery from conditions considered fatal — are possible and real, extreme expressions of a biological capability that is still occurring even today, documented in modern medicine as spontaneous remission, and available to all of us to varying degrees, whether seeking joy, Jesus, or aligning your five-brain axis.

That is what the ancients called faith. The substance of things hoped for. The evidence of things not seen. A sustained meaningful signal, delivered to a body that knows how to respond to it.

What I Actually Do — The Practical Placebo

Keeping the axis between conscious mind, subconscious, brain, and gut clean and in sync produces, for me, a daily baseline of euphoria. Not the euphoria of stimulants or escapism — the euphoria of a well-running system. I experience it as evidence that my neuroplasticity is active, my mitochondria are producing energy efficiently, my hippocampus is generating new neurons, and my heart field is coherent and ordered.

The neuroscientist Ronald Duman at Yale established the neurogenesis hypothesis of depression — that the hippocampus of depressed individuals shows suppressed neuron birth, and that restoring neurogenesis is a primary mechanism by which any effective antidepressant works, not just serotonin adjustment. The things that most robustly stimulate hippocampal neurogenesis are: aerobic exercise, intermittent fasting, omega-3 fatty acids, sunlight, novel learning, deep sleep, meditation, and psychedelics. Every one of those is something humans in natural environments received automatically. Their absence in modern life may be the primary driver of the epidemic of depression — not a chemical imbalance, but a neurogenesis deficit caused by a lifestyle that removed all the natural stimuli that kept the system running.

My daily placebo is a collection of inputs to a five-brain axial star cluster:

For the Cortical Brain:

I feed it meaning, learning, and honest self-examination. I pay attention to the language I use about myself. I know that the words I habitually speak about my health, my capacity, and my experience are programming instructions, not neutral descriptions.

For the Limbic Brain:

I process emotion rather than suppress it. As a guy, this was the most challenging accomplishment, being always taught to ignore what’s going on inside, and put mission first. In doing so, I learned to take care of myself. I maintain practices — prayer/meditation, breath work, time in nature — that shift the nervous system toward parasympathetic dominance and out of the chronic low-grade threat state that modern life installs.

For the Gut Brain:

I keep the gut clean and populated with the right organisms. I eliminated the yeast overgrowth and healed the intestinal lining that was allowing inflammatory compounds into my bloodstream and across the blood-brain barrier. I keep the parasites at a minimum with fermented foods and cleansing. I treat the gut not as a digestive tube but as the intelligent system it is — one that produces most of my serotonin and talks to my brain continuously.

For the Heart Brain:

I focus on cultivating genuine coherent emotional states — not performed positivity, but actual appreciation, connection, and meaning. And because of how the people I come into contact react around me, when my pulse is strong enough to feel the surge, after exercise, skin glowing, I know these states very well produce an ordered electromagnetic field, with subtle skin tones of healthy indication, that bathes every cell in my body with nutrients, healing. I have often watch as this extends into the space around me, affecting the people I encounter. I bolster this field with intense exercise, working vo2 max with sprints, running up mountains and hiking long distances. As a result, my resting pulse is 41 and my lung capacity is about 4000ml. There’s a reason you look at a person with an inflated chest who breathes in an entire room as they walk in, differently than you look at somebody hunched over and can barely move. These are the signals.

For the Cellular Brain:

I get morning sunlight, move my body, fast periodically, sleep well, and minimize the artificial light (except cold dark winter nights in Alaska) and electromagnetic noise that disrupts cellular signaling. Then I stay aware of lifestyle. As the network of microtubules is thought of as a quasi-crystalline structure capable of resonance, it can be the most easily damaged or masked and difficult to repair. I think this is where psychoactive drugs shine. I don’t take them but I did have a near-death experience where I traveled the universe, experienced total recal and then was euphoric for weeks after recovery, in knowing the answer to many questions upon return.

So when I stop dreaming, I ask myself “am I getting enough sleep?” and “What’s going on in my life and consciousness?” “Why can’t I access my subconscious right now?” “Why am I not in tune with what’s going on around me?” Numbness in one sense usually bleeds into numbness to other senses. Usually something going on in life, like stress, inflammation, injury or overexertion are present. It’s enough to make me stop for a reset. I treat my cells as the ancient intelligent receivers they are, and try to give them the signals they have been tuned to receive for a billion years.

The Miracle Is the Mechanism

What the ancients called miracles, what scientists call placebo, what I call my daily practice — these are not different things. They are different vocabularies for the same underlying reality: that meaning, sustained and embodied across the five brain axis, produces measurable biological change through a chain that runs from the quantum level, all the way out to the electromagnetic field surrounding your body and affecting the ones I’m close to.

We are billion (maybe trillion-year-old light-detection and energy-seeking systems, built from tools that have never been discarded because they have never been bettered. Our capacity for language, meaning, and faith are not late additions to a mechanical body. They are the most recent and most powerful inputs into a self-organizing intelligence that has been healing itself since before it had a name for what it was doing.

The placebo is not a trick. It is a technology. And it has been available to every human being who ever lived.

The question is not whether it works. The question is whether we are willing to start taking it seriously.

Sources & Further Reading

Kaptchuk, T.J. et al. (2010). Placebos without Deception: A Randomized Controlled Trial in Irritable Bowel Syndrome. PLOS ONE.

Hameroff, S. & Penrose, R. (2014). Consciousness in the Universe: A Review of the ‘Orch OR’ Theory. Physics of Life Reviews, 11(1), 39-78.

Mayer, E. (2016). The Mind-Gut Connection. Harper Wave.

Lipton, B. (2005). The Biology of Belief. Mountain of Love Productions.

Duman, R.S. et al. (2016). Synaptic Plasticity and Depression: New Insights from Stress and Rapid-Acting Antidepressants. Nature Medicine, 22, 238-249.

Kaliman, P. et al. (2014). Rapid Changes in Histone Deacetylases and Inflammatory Gene Expression in Expert Meditators. Psychoneuroendocrinology, 40, 96-107.

McCraty, R. et al. (2009). The Coherent Heart: Heart-Brain Interactions, Psychophysiological Coherence, and the Emergence of System-Wide Order. HeartMath Institute.

Popp, F.A. (2003). Properties of Biophotons and Their Theoretical Implications. Indian Journal of Experimental Biology, 41, 391-402.

Barrett, L.F. (2017). How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Strassman, R. (2001). DMT: The Spirit Molecule. Park Street Press.

Foster, R.G. & Kreitzman, L. (2004). Rhythms of Life: The Biological Clocks that Control the Daily Lives of Every Living Thing. Yale University Press.

Wim Hof Method validation: Kox, M. et al. (2014). Voluntary Activation of the Sympathetic Nervous System and Attenuation of the Innate Immune Response in Humans. PNAS, 111(20), 7379-7384.

Tuszynski, J.A. (2010). The Bioelectrical and Bioenergetical Systems of the Cell. Springer.

Engel, G.S. et al. (2007). Evidence for Wavelike Energy Transfer Through Quantum Coherence in Photosynthetic Systems. Nature, 446, 782-786.

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