"This program was made possible by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you." "DR. ESTHER STERNBERG:" "This is where they came, traveling for days, over mountains and across the Mediterranean." "In pain, weak, sometimes unable to walk." "They came for relief, for quiet, to sleep, dream and heal." "Could the Ancients, followers of Asclepius, the Greek god of healing, have known something about the body that we are just beginning to understand today?" "(beeping)" "What is healing, and what roles do our emotions and brains play in the process?" "Have we lost our balance?" "Can we get it back with "The Science of Healing"?" "I'm Dr. Esther Sternberg." "As a neuroimmunologist, I was working extremely long hours, almost never seeing the sun, fighting to convince my colleagues that stress could affect the immune system." "And my mother was dying of breast cancer." "I became a child of science because my father was one of a small group of scientists who developed the field of nuclear medicine." "My sister and I used to play in my father's lab, and there was a spiral staircase connecting my father's lab to the labs of Hans Selye, who coined the word "stress"." "The idea that stress could cause illness was really ahead of its time." "(car horns honking)" "Can our emotions make us sick?" "Stress has become an unrelenting factor in our lives." "The American Psychological Association estimates that one-third of Americans are living with extreme stress." "Ancient civilizations from China, India and Greece embrace the premise that emotions and health were one." "Worry could make you sick and belief could make you well." "But centuries later, that link began to unravel when visible proof became the foundation of the scientific method." "The connection between emotions and health could not be seen and was abandoned." "Today, innovative scientists, using the latest technologies, are reconnecting us to the wisdom of the ages and the brain's ability to help us heal." "I was under extreme stress." "I had moved into a new house." "In fact, the day I moved, I got the phone call to fly up to Montreal immediately, and that ended up being the last three weeks of my mother's life." "I was on the flight back to Washington, and one of my knees swelled up on the plane, and I thought that," ""well, maybe I bumped my knee, maybe I tripped."" "I couldn't really remember having done anything, but -- but I just dismissed it as having injured myself." "And then, after a few days and a few weeks, my other knee swelled up." "And then my elbows and my shoulders started to ache." "And here I was, a rheumatologist, an arthritis specialist, and I realized that I had inflammatory arthritis." "My mother had just died and I had come back to Washington, and I felt at that point that the last thing that I could deal with was hospital." "And I was writing the beginning of my first book, and the doorbell rang, and it was my new neighbors," "Dean and Taria Papavassiliou." "When I first met Esther, she actually had moved next to our house here in downtown D.C., and we decided, my wife and I, to go there to welcome her and bring her some Greek food." "STERNBERG:" "Tzatziki, moussaka, dolmades." "They saw me writing on the computer and they said," ""Oh, are you a writer?"" "And I didn't really think of myself as a writer at that time." "So I said, "Well, I don't know, why do you ask?"" "And they said, "Well, because we've always wanted a writer to stay at our cottage in Crete."" "So I said, "I'm a writer."" "(traditional Cretan music playing)" "The island of Crete lies about 60 miles south of the Greek mainland." "The Papavassilious picked me up in the main city of Heraklion and we began our two-hour trek." "We drove over two mountain ranges and through the valley from the north to the south coast of Crete." "The roads were hairpin turns, they were narrow, some of them were dirt roads, and we finally got to the second mountain range, and they said, "There it is."" "And I looked over this beautiful, blue" "Mediterranean Sea and a mountain jutting out into the sea, and far, far below was this little village in the bay up against the mountain, and that was Lentas." "The Papavassilious' cottage was the tiniest little cottage." "Two rooms with a courtyard in between, with a wonderful orange tree." "The village was not more than about ten streets, and the stucco houses marching up the hill, so in order to get to the sea, you had to walk down a fairly steep path." "I was still wobbly on my feet." "I was afraid to fall because I had fallen when my knees were particularly bad." "(man speaking Greek)" "As I started to adjust to the rhythm of the village," "I could feel the sensitivity in my joints gradually beginning to ease." "And all I'd done was take in the light and colors around me." "As a scientist, I began to wonder, could looking at a pleasing view actually reduce pain?" "This is a living brain." "In fact, it's my brain." "And here at the University of Southern California's" "Brain Imaging Center..." "IRVING BIEDERMAN:" "You'll see sequences that will only have faces." "STERNBERG:" "...Dr. Irving Biederman's ground-breaking work on vision is opening new doors." "BIEDERMAN:" "My main area of study is trying to understand a visual experience -- a scene, a face or an object that we've never experienced before." "Subjects lie in the magnet and look at scenes." "STERNBERG:" "WhatdoIdo?" "WOMAN:" "All you have to do is just stand still." "BIEDERMAN:" "You have four buttons." "You'll be pressing the right-most button for the scenes you like the best, the left-most button for the scenes you like looking at least." "STERNBERG:" "Using powerful electromagnets," "Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, or fMRI, reveals 3-D images of the living brain." "As the subjects view images of nature, junk cars, faces, and city streets, the magnets scan the brain for activity." "BIEDERMAN:" "What we find is that when people are looking at scenes that they rate as being pleasurable, we see a high density of the opioid receptors -- neurotransmitters that are popularly referred to as endorphins -- that are associated with pain relief" "and in general, pleasurable experience -- listening to music, viewing a great scene." "The more we have of it, the more pleasure that we experience." "STERNBERG:" "Dr. Biederman's team is using the most advanced imaging technology, but the first serious study investigating the impact of visual stimuli on pain began in 1984 at Paoli Hospital in Pennsylvania." "Environmental psychologist Dr. Roger Ulrich compared two groups of patients receiving identical care." "The only difference -- one group's hospital rooms looked out on a brick wall and the other at a natural wooded scene." "The results showed the natural-scene group needed half the pain medication and were discharged a day early." "This was the first scientific proof that a visually stimulating view was good for you." "BIEDERMAN:" "So, Esther, this is your brain on MRI." "STERNBERG:" "That's amazing." "What we can do is take a voyage, a fantastic voyage, from -- we can go, let's say, in this case here, from the top of your brain all the way down into your neck." "So, here we go, take it slowly, we can get into people's heads, and see not only the structure but, more important, the functioning of the brain." "Can you see my hypothalamus?" "The hypothalamus is going to be right around there." "So that's my stress center." "Now we're going down into my neck." "That is so cool." "You can see your teeth." "(laughs) I think you have a cavity." "(laughs)" "BIEDERMAN:" "We much prefer looking at an interesting vista than a blank wall." "The blank wall will give us almost no neural activity." "Something that's richly interpreted will give us a lot of activity." "When Esther had that experience in Crete where she was surrounded by beauty and captivated by what vision could afford her and she noticed a reduction in arthritic symptoms, how might that come about?" "One of the things is pleasurable opioid activity on perhaps the immune system that may lead to wellness." "STERNBERG:" "So this is what would be lighting up when I was looking at a beautiful view in Greece?" "Yes." "In the same way?" "In the same way." "That's amazing." "And if you looked at some boring scene or something else, you'd see less activity." "So this could really explain why" "I enjoyed looking at that view and why it made me feel peaceful." "Is that right?" "Yes." "That is so cool." "Dr. Biederman's study suggests that pleasing views could reduce stress and thus support the immune system." "So, when you're not feeling well, search for the sights that please you, sights that can be part of your healing routine." "Hospitals are meant to be healing places, but their sterile atmospheres, colorless walls and overall monotony can be both depressing and stressful." "At the University of California, San Diego's high-tech virtual reality lab, dubbed "the CAVE"" "for its total immersion environment, scientists are studying the effects of building design on the brain and the stress response." "EVE EDELSTEIN:" "There's great consequence if you can't navigate through a hospital and find your way." "There's certainly a great deal of time and money wasted." "We can create buildings that serve the staff under stress and the patients under stress." "Built environments can support our health and our immune responses." "We're starting the navigation protocol now." "Your goal will be the classroom." "EDELSTEIN:" "So you can see what we did here was create an environment where it's absent of visual cues to explore how the brain responds when a person has a sensation of feeling lost or isn't able to use any cues to navigation." "EDUARDO MACAGNO:" "One of our purposes with this kind of experiment is to try to understand what works." "How do we design a building such that the maximum number of people do not get lost?" "We're using a new technology called high-definition electroencephalography, or high-definition EEG." "This consists of a cap that has 256 electrodes." "STERNBERG:" "The electrodes allow the researchers to monitor changes in the brain as the subject moves through the virtual building in real time." "Are they stressed at feeling lost?" "And what visual cues work best in helping them find their way?" "The impact of our built surroundings on our state of mind can also impact our ability to resist disease and our immune responses." "STERNBERG:" "I had to try this virtual reality ride." "(laughing) That's crazy." "I look gorgeous." "(laughs)" "Imagine walking through every room of a hospital or nursing home before a single brick is laid." "EDELSTEIN:" "Esther, let me show you what we can do in this cave." "This is a 3-D structure that we created to demonstrate how one can get a sensation of movement and scale inside of a building." "STERNBERG:" "Wow, feels like I'm moving." "So what we did was create a geometric structure that's actually a Mobius strip floating over Los Angeles, and our goal was to show how the openings of the space and geometries give you a sensation of movement," "so here we go disappearing over the edge of the Mobius." "This feels like you're going down a roller coaster." "We are going down the virtual roller coaster right now." "By looking at the brain's response, we hope to understand which cues are most effective in forming a knowledge of where you are in an environment and how we might design to help people to better navigate through space." "We've navigated to the auditorium, which exists in this building that we're actually standing in." "We modeled the exact building." "And then as we move through the auditorium, we move into the corridor at the front, which, as you'll see, we created to be rich with cues." "We want to understand the emotional response to a place, so we want to look at those aspects of architecture that inspire awe, that inspire a sense of being connected with the environment, knowing where you are." "One of the really interesting things we discovered as we were testing subjects going through this environment was that one of the cues they were using was light and shadow." "Much of my research has focused on the influence of light on health and the relaxing nature of different qualities of light." "So it begs us to look beyond the simple lighting that we use in buildings, to ask what lighting does in nature and how it affects our health." "STERNBERG:" "At the Rady Children's Hospital in San Diego... (birds chirping)" "(baby crying) ...new open designs are giving their young patients a place to live..." "Say, "Hi." Hi." "STERNBERG:" "...as they heal." "I love this garden, Jeanie." "Can you tell me about how it came about?" "JEANIE SPIES:" "This is Carly's Garden." "Carly was a patient of mine who had leukemia, and she loved to be outside." "She loved nature, she loved bugs." "Unfortunately, she was in the hospital for a month or two at a time." "And her parents built this garden as a tribute to her." "They wanted other children to know the joy and the healing that Carly felt when she was outside." "And what a magical tribute." "At Rady Hospital, an understanding of how we heal helps to create an environment that lowers stress for patients and staff and gives the immune system the best chance to do its job." "That fits right with the famous" "Roger Ulrich study of healing faster and needing less pain medication..." "Exactly." "when you look out at a beautiful view." "The patients can come out with their moms, their dads, sometimes they'll bring their brothers and sisters out." "So they can be children, so they can play." "Exactly." "That's what children do." "With sunlight streaming into every room and a place for the kids to play and take a break from their pain, facilities like Rady are moving us beyond curing, to the mind and body awareness of healing." "As I walked through the peaceful Cretan village of Lentas, taking in the wonderful colors and vibrant scenes around me," "I began to feel rested and at home." "Each day began with a wonderful bouquet of eucalyptus, sage and orange blossoms." "When the seaside tavernas began preparing lunch, the aroma of simmering peppers, eggplants and fresh seafood filled the air." "The arthritic pain I had when I arrived only a few days before was continuing to lessen, and I felt like the fresh aromatic breezes were lifting my spirits." "And I wondered, could aromas affect how we feel?" "At Philadelphia's Monell Chemical Senses Center, a team of researchers are studying the effects of smell on the emotions." "Esther, if you would put your face up to the box," "I'm going to ask Chris to turn on the first odor." "You're going to begin smelling an odor in the box." "I'd like you to look at that scene and imagine you're standing on the hill right overlooking that village, take a deep breath of the air, and just think about how the smell that you're smelling and what you're seeing" "causes you to feel." "It smells wonderful." "Good." "Do you feel refreshed or energized or relaxed?" "Refreshed." "I mean, just looking at that scene," "I felt refreshed, so I was kind of expecting a refreshing -- a clean -- it was a clean smell." "A smell that you would associate with healthy mountain air." "When an individual is in the presence of an odor that they have associated with a positive experience, they'll often report feeling very relaxed." "Their breathing, their heart rate will show the changes." "And we think under those circumstances that they actually may be in a better state of health." "Chris will change the odor in the box, and he will also change the scene." "What I'd like you to do is just think about yourself standing right where this picture was being taken from and imagining how you feel about that smell and how it's making you feel health-wise." "Are you breathing slowly?" "Are you breathing fast?" "Are you trying not to smell it?" "Think of all the things that you might experience and how this odor seems to you." "It smells terrible;" "it smells like burning rubber." "In general, that looks like a scene you might want to get away from." "Right." "And how did that odor make you feel?" "Different from the mountain scene?" "It made me feel different." "The mountain scene I felt relaxed." "Just before the odor came on," "I felt relaxed just looking at it." "Right." "It even reminded me of my experience in Crete, looking out over the beautiful mountains." "This one I was braced for expecting a pollutant kind of odor." "Right." "So the smell felt more pungent, kind of." "And what's interesting is that it's the exact same odor that you smelled when you were looking at the smokestacks." "(laughing):" "I know it's the same, and I was bracing myself to try to override that, but you can't." "One of the really interesting things about the sense of smell is how tightly it's associated with memories, particularly memories that have a strong emotional component." "Odors that are associated with your mother's cooking, smells that are associated with baking in your mother's house or your grandmother's house can bring back that sort of warm, nurturing feeling that you felt as a child." "Make a rating of how intense the odor in the room is right now by using the mouse on your right-hand side." "GARY BEAUCHAMP:" "We have about 350 receptors in our nose to detect tens of thousands, maybe even more, different odors." "Nobody knows how many odors we can detect." "And because of the way the olfactory system is connected, it goes directly to the parts of the brain that are emotional." "When I travel, I always have a very small vial of a fragrance that I work with here in the laboratory which I happen to really love." "It's sort of a citrus rose scent, and it probably reminds me of being at work, which is a very comfortable thing, but also I use it at home, and when I travel," "I tend to put a little drop on my pillowcase before I go to sleep in an unfamiliar hotel, and I find that just the scent of that when I close my eyes relaxes me and makes me feel like I'm in a safe environment" "and probably helps me rest a little better." "STERNBERG:" "With a greater understanding of how odors, views and memory combine to lower the stress response, we can create healing places that use aroma to calm and reassure us." "Esther's response to the odors and the scents that she experienced on Crete could have come from learned or familiar responses to odors." "Some of the odors associated with the Mediterranean cooking were ones that she recognized from childhood." "Those would have served the purpose of bringing back that sense of comfort and nurturing and stress reduction." "STERNBERG:" "A study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine found that the Mediterranean diet can strengthen our ability to resist a variety of ailments, including cancer and heart disease, and a European study found that the diet lowers asthma rates in children." "Using fresh and local ingredients, the diet includes small portions of meat, generous amounts of fruits and vegetables, nuts that are low in saturated fat, and fish which are high in cholesterol-lowering Omega 3." "Traditional Cretan dish, tomato -- on the bottom is bread, and on top it's feta cheese, that's also sliced or what you say, and olive oil, of course, on top." "Food without olive oil is not food." "STERNBERG:" "Is not food, right." "STERNBERG:" "This extra virgin olive oil is delicious, but could it have played a role in reducing my pain?" "BEAUCHAMP:" "We had been working on the taste of ibuprofen." "Ibuprofen is an anti-inflammatory drug." "But when you swallow it, you get a tremendous burn right here in your throat." "And that was really interesting, because other things that burn, like hot peppers, they burn your mouth, they burn your eyes, they burn your throat, they burn all the way through." "But ibuprofen, for some reason, burned only right here." "I was then at a meeting, and one of the organizers, a physicist from Palermo, brought up his freshly pressed olive oil from his own olive trees." "I swallowed it, and lo and behold," "I had exactly the same burn in my throat." "And so I had this light bulb go off, and I say to myself," ""Well, we know that olive oil is associated" ""with the Mediterranean diet." ""We know the Mediterranean diet is extremely healthy." ""People who consume the Mediterranean diet" ""have lower levels of heart disease, some forms of cancer," ""Alzheimer's disease." ""We know all of those things" ""are also associated to some degree" ""with anti-inflammatory -- they're inflammatory diseases." ""Maybe there's something in olive oil" ""that is an anti-inflammatory, just like ibuprofen, because it has the same sensory properties."" "So we proceeded then to do a study where we first isolated the material, we identified it, we synthesized it, and then we showed that indeed it is an anti-inflammatory compound." "(laughter)" "Can we toast?" "How do you say?" "What do you say?" "Yamas." "Yamas." "ALL:" "Yamas!" "Greetings." "Welcome to Crete." "ALL:" "Yamas!" "STERNBERG:" "As my legs began to feel stronger," "I decided to follow a path up the hill behind the village, and was astounded at what I found -- the ruins of a sanctuary to Asclepius, the Greek god of healing." "For 2,400 years, this marble and stone, one of 400 healing centers scattered throughout the Mediterranean, has stood facing the sea, announcing a refuge for the sick and afflicted." "According to Homer, Asclepius, who began as a mortal with infallible medical knowledge, became revered for his healing ability and was then worshiped as a god." "When I first came upon this mosaic," "I was completely amazed." "I was not expecting anything like this." "It looked just like a pile of rocks." "And then I saw this mosaic of the winged horse Pegasus from the ancient myths." "It turns out this was the treasury where valuables were stored in the temple." "To understand more about this ancient approach to healing," "I've come 150 miles west of Athens to Epidaurus, one of the earliest and most elaborate Asclepians, to meet physician and medical historian" "Professor Stephanos Geroulanos." "We walk now up to the Temple of Asclepius." "The important thing in the gates that was written was that you have to leave all your dirty thinking, all your dirt outside." "Here you should come only with your soul clean and clear." "You can imagine how impressive it would be for the patient coming up the hill, without seeing anything, just nature and hearing the nature, and suddenly you see this huge temple." "It must have been a unique feeling." "Really a sense of awe." "It is unbelievable." "What an impression would have done to the patient." "We are in the theater of the Asclepian of Epidaurus, one of the most beautiful theaters in the world." "It can house approximately 14,000 spectators." "When a patient comes into performance in such a surrounding, the...his soul changes completely." "His attitude to the illness changes completely." "He gets out of his emotion..." "He gets into his emotions, out of his body." "And he forgets the illness." "He is together with his friends, with the family, and they sit here, they clap, they shout, and suddenly this change, especially if they have mental illnesses or chronic illnesses." "Being together, changing your mentality, thinking not of your illness but of something else." "Humor and getting into the act." "What is important is that if you are ill and you are going into the theater, you make a group that will help you afterwards also when you are at home, because you are reminded of what you have seen in Epidaurus" "and then you will discuss it with others, et cetera." "You remember how happy you felt, how much you enjoyed the show." "So it really was paying attention to the emotions, not just the physical body." "A lot, a lot, yeah." "STERNBERG:" "Hippocrates, considered the father of modern medicine, whose oath to do no harm is still followed by doctors, developed many of his techniques at an Asclepian." "GEROULANOS:" "Hippocrates described 60 different ways of living." "60." "60." "He calls them "diets," but there is -- a diet for him is not just the different food, but it's the different way of exercising, of living, of sleeping, when to repose, and what to do." "Walking -- extremely important, as it is today, training, running, et cetera, this is in the therapy." "So we've rediscovered what Hippocrates knew so many hundreds of years ago, that gentle walking," "30 minutes of walking a day, with exercise, with diet, can help reverse the negative effects of stress on the body, can help heal, improve mood." "No doubt." "FLESHNER:" "My name is Moni Fleshner." "I am a professor in the department of Integrated Physiology in the Center of Neuroscience here at the University of Colorado at Boulder." "I ride my bike to work every morning." "It makes an enormous difference in my ability to be able to cope." "When I get to work," "I feel energized and relaxed." "I also do an incredible amount of great thinking during that time." "We've been studying the impact that stress has on the immune system for many years, and we understand a great deal about the effects." "Unbeknownst to most people, activation of the acute stress response is actually very beneficial for the immune system." "It helps ready the immune system, so if you think about it in an evolutionary perspective, if you were that gazelle running across the savannah, being chased by the lion, you'd turn on the stress response" "so that you could pump more blood to your muscles, you could open your pupils and dilate and see what's happening around you." "But you also primed certain cells of the immune system so that if you were wounded or injured during that escape response, you were better able to survive." "And that's the acute stress response, that's the good stuff." "The bad stuff is where we never get a chance to shut it off or we never allow ourselves to shut it off." "Our response is exaggerated, it persists, and that's when all those powerful hormones become damaging." "PATTY DEUSTER:" "Exercise is very important to me." "I was a long-distance runner, and I loved it." "STERNBERG:" "Exercise physiologist Dr. Patty Deuster is working with the military to understand depression, posttraumatic stress disorder and chronic fatigue syndrome." "DEUSTER:" "You're looking good." "You feeling okay?" "Pretty soon, you're going to have to let go with your arms, because you have to walk normally." "If you maintain a regular exercise program as a soldier, then you're going to have a better mood, you're going to be more resilient to the stressors that you encounter during your -- either your daily life or during deployment." "Maintaining top physical condition is important because it helps them cope with the different stressors that they encounter." "If you are highly conditioned, you can respond better to psychological stressors in terms of the physiology and the hormonal response than somebody who does not exercise on a regular basis." "FLESHNER:" "How do you ask the scientific question of," ""What impact does stress have on the immune system?"" "That's not that simple of a question to actually answer, because it's the hormones and the neurotransmitters that are released that interact with those cells of the immune system to change their function." "When we first began these experiments," "I was simply amazed." "All we did is -- for our laboratory rats, all we did was make one small change in their environment." "In one instance, they were able to live in their home cages with a running wheel, and in the other group, the animals did not get a mobile running wheel." "And the animals who get to run on these wheels -- and they choose to do it every night, they find it a pleasurable experience -- were much better able to resist the negative impact that stress has on the immune system," "on the brain." "When we look in the brains of the rats, we can actually measure detectable changes, both in the expression of receptors, the expression of transporters for specific neurotransmitters, and activation, neural activation markers." "And when you examine the whole circuitry in total, what that tells us is that the brains of these animals have been structurally changed." "After completing our series of animal studies, we were able to establish that, indeed, physically fit people are also better able to maintain healthy immune responses." "So, I'm very impressed with your heart rate today, the results of your heart rate, because they're much better than they were the last time you were here." "That's good." "That's great." "Ever since I went to Greece," "I really have made an effort to exercise, a conscious effort to exercise, and what I do mostly is swim." "And I swim up to, sometimes, five days a week, sometimes every day, it depends on the season, but I swim about three to five days a week, and no matter how I feel before," "I feel better." "My mood is better." "I'd say after about 20 minutes..." "I swim for half an hour, 30-40 minutes, and after about 20 minutes, whatever was bothering me before just goes away, it melts in the water, and then I feel more energy." "It doesn't feel like work, because it's relaxing." "When Esther was in Crete and she started exercising, that was something new to her, because she was previously sedentary." "And that regular physical activity did wonders for her." "She was swimming in the ocean, she was walking." "She was doing activities that are so good for the body and, really, for the mind." "And as the American College of Medicine says," ""Exercise is medicine."" "If you take exercise as medicine, it can actually start the healing process." "FLESHNER:" "I think everybody should try to maintain regular daily physical activity." "There's no doubt in my mind that maintaining some level of regular physical activity helps both mentally as well as physically." "I think it's irrefutable." "Esther's arthritis is a disease that does involve disregulation of the immune system." "Her exercise -- her daily walks and swims -- had a double-whammy impact on her disease process." "Not only did it potentially facilitate her overall health so she could better respond to the disease process, but it could have also changed her ability to cope with the stress of the situation, and, in turn, that helped to quiet" "her inflammatory process." "STERNBERG:" "I'm Dr. Esther Sternberg." "My very active life as a scientist was challenged by living day to day with painful inflammatory arthritis, as well as dealing with my mother's death." "It was an unexpected invitation to visit Crete that gave me the chance to slow down and think about how I was living." "With each day in Lentas, site of a sanctuary to Asclepius, the Greek god of healing, the arthritic pain in my knees was subsiding." "The therapeutic effects of exercise, visually stimulating surroundings and the Mediterranean diet was helping me heal." "(rhythmic clapping)" "I joined in a favorite village activity -- listening and dancing to music." "It didn't seem to matter if I was tired, hot or hungry." "I could listen for hours." "I wondered, "Why did music make me feel so good?"" "Bravo, bravo!" "(sustained electronic tone)" "JULIAN THAYER:" "Music can serve as a stress buffer." "It can relieve stress." "It can take you out of your stressful day-to-day life and transport you to a dream world, so to speak, where life is beautiful, and it's, I think, an extremely healthy phenomenon." "STERNBERG:" "Julian Thayer did not start out as a psychophysiologist." "He started out as a musician." "And he began to wonder why it is that music had such a profound effect on his emotions and on the emotions of people who listen to his music." "THAYER:" "Music is a very powerful force in our lives." "It has endured and is in every culture, everywhere, used in all kinds of situations." "When I was in music school, I was a composition major, and I was told by my music composition teachers," ""If you write music this way, people will feel a certain emotion."" "But the music that Scott and myself were playing broke all the rules of Western music." "So the question for me became," ""What are people actually responding to?"" "What I discovered was that the same parameters of sound that produced mood effects in music were present in paralinguistic speech and what's called "mother-ese," talking to babies, and in animal communications." "So the same exact parameters produced the same emotions across species." "STERNBERG:" "Dr. Thayer uses changes in heart-rate variability to track how the listener is responding to music." "Heart rate is the number of beats per minute, while heart-rate variability is how the rate changes over time." "THAYER:" "When you inhale, your heart rate increases, and when you exhale, it decreases." "And this is due to both the neural and mechanical gating of the nerve called the vagus nerve." "And this vagus nerve controls the heart, among other things." "Sensory information from all of your body is sent via this nerve to the brain, and it senses wounds and other invaders and signals immune information to the brain." "(playing mellow jazz tune)" "The main purpose of the heart is to pump blood to various places where it's needed to support the production of the sound." "From a listener's perspective, heart-rate variability tracks in part the mood effects of music." "(playing mellow jazz tune)" "Esther, while you were listening to Scott playing, your heart rate was very low." "Yeah, I can see a dip." "Yes." "I can see it, that's amazing." "Yes, exactly." "That is really cool." "So he's playing a very relaxing piece of music." "And now look at how high it is." "(laughing) That's right." "You're stressing me out." "(horns honking)" "THAYER:" "When you become sick, physically or mentally, your heart-rate variability tends to go down." "Heart-rate variability says a lot about the state of the organism." "And in safe, non-threatening environments, heart-rate variability is relatively high, indicating that the organism is open to new experiences and enjoyment." "High heart-rate variability is associated with health." "When you become sick, physically or mentally, your heart-rate variability tends to go down, and when you get better, it tends to go back up again." "And, in fact, the decrease in heart-rate variability may precede the onset of clinical signs of illness." "There's a lot of work in music therapy." "You can see the effects on people's levels of depression, on their blood pressure." "The fact that it has endured really speaks to the fact that music is a very powerful force in our lives." "STERNBERG:" "Music's effect on the rhythms of the heart is one pathway into healing, but what role do thoughts and beliefs have on the process?" "On this patch of skin, this is the Lidocaine cream." "This is a highly effective pain reliever." "The purpose of today's test is to understand how this is going to affect your brain's responses to pain." "STERNBERG:" "A placebo is an inactive substance used as a control in a test or study to help determine the effectiveness of a drug." "Rate the pain that you feel on the one-to-eight scale that we talked about." "Okay." "TOR WAGER:" "The placebo has this connotation of a fraudulent or sham treatment." "Placebo effects have nothing to do with being fooled." "They have to do with your brain's memory for particular cues, particular treatments, particular sensory experiences, sights, smells, tastes, and the therapeutic effect." "A four." "Four." "STERNBERG:" "Dr. Wager administers a manageable shock to the subject and gets a baseline reading." "This is the Lidocaine cream." "The subject is then given a cream and told it will lessen the pain." "The MRI scans the brain as the same shock is given again." "Steve, what's your overall experience of the pain so far?" "STEVE:" "I 'vefeltverylittle painsofar." "OthertimesIdidn'tfeel  anythingatall." "STERNBERG:" "The MRI shows changes in the brain's opioid pathways, which alter pain perception based on what the subject believes." "It has been said that about 30 to 50, or even more, percent of the effect of any biological cure is related to the placebo effect." "A drug that has the ability to heal of about 30% to 50% would be a very powerful drug." "So the placebo effect really is a very powerful effect." "And what it is is the brain's own healing mechanism." "It's not just the "placebo effect."" "It is a real effect." "It is the result of changes in the brain that allow the body to heal." "Belief was essential upon entering the Asclepian temples." "Those who did expected to be cured, surrendering to ritual through purification, animal sacrifice, prayer and eventual sleep." "Priests offered intense suggestions to the pilgrims, for when they awoke, they believed they had seen a god in their dreams who had cured them." "Deeply surrendering to the god's healing powers may have accounted for the many successful outcomes." "At the end of one of my walks, I came to the top of this hill and found this tiny chapel built on the top of the ruins of a temple to Asclepius, the Greek god of healing." "And I would sit in the doorway of the chapel and quietly contemplate, look at the sea and listen to the sounds of the wind and the goats and the sheep." "RICHARD DAVIDSON:" "I've been meditating for more than 30 years." "I feel it's been a very important part of my life." "It has helped me preserve a modicum of equanimity in the face of leading a very active and challenging life as a very engaged scientist." "STERNBERG:" "In his groundbreaking research with Tibetan monks," "Dr. Richie Davidson studied the effects of meditation on the brain." "We're really entering a new era now, and it represents, I think, the first rigorous effort to systematically investigate the neuro-scientific underpinnings of meditation." "These are individuals who can be considered the Olympic athletes of meditation." "They are people who have devoted tens of thousands of hours to this practice." "We're investigating the changes in the brain that occur during different kinds of meditation practices and how those changes modulate things like pain perception, attention, the regulation of emotion." "There are many different kinds of meditation practices that do not involve any Sanskrit word, that can be as simple as," ""Pay attention to the sensations of breathing," ""either in your abdomen or around the tip of your nostril, and just pay attention with each inhalation and exhalation."" "Paying attention to the breath in some sense is difficult because we are distracted a lot." "Noticing each distraction is actually a wonderful opportunity to bring the mind back to the breath." "STERNBERG:" "To test for discernable physical evidence of the immune system's reaction to meditation," "Dr. Davidson's team tracked two groups receiving flu shots." "One group meditated 30 minutes a day for two months, while the other did not." "DAVIDSON:" "By looking at the antibody titers that are mounted in response to the vaccine, one of the things that we noticed is that after just two months of training compared to a control group, the antibody titers to the flu vaccine" "were boosted significantly." "The magnitude of change in the immune response, the magnitude of the boost, was predicted by how much the brain changed by meditation." "I think everyone can do this for ten minutes a day most days." "It's just a question of making this more of a priority." "STERNBERG:" "At the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., a timeless tradition continues." "Walking a labyrinth is a beautiful moving meditation that combines the beneficial elements of gentle exercise and deep breathing, which introduce calming endorphins into the nervous system and directs attention away from the stressors of the day." "When I walk labyrinths, I just feel more centered." "It's a time of focused attention, not only physical quiet, but an emotional, spiritual quiet." "STERNBERG:" "Dr. Ann Berger, a pioneer in pain and palliative care, brings a holistic approach to her work with life-threatening and chronic illness." "I have had the experience of feeling healed." "I myself at the age of 40 had breast cancer, and actually two years ago had major heart surgery." "Three days after developing breast cancer, I had back pain." "So I went for acupuncture, never felt better in my life." "Before my heart surgery," "I went for acupuncture again to get my mind, body and spirit connected." "(playing flute)" "Healing is what we do in palliative care, with healing being a sense of wholeness." "We hear people many times with life-threatening illness or chronic illness saying that they still have their illness, but they've actually grown from the experience." "They feel healed." "STERNBERG:" "Watching the fishermen going out in their wooden boats, how they wake up with the sun and they go out and they work hard and they exercise and they come back and they eat heartily and they live according to the rhythms of the day" "and the rhythms of the seasons, and I realized that I had not been living that way." "I couldn't remember having seen the sun or stopping to breathe or stopping to inhale the scent of flowers on the night air the way I did when I was in Greece." "I had, of course, been treated for my arthritis with anti-inflammatory medication back in Washington, but my arthritis wasn't really getting better." "It only started to get better when I was in Crete." "And I became convinced that it wasn't a coincidence that I got arthritis when I was going through a period of stress, and it wasn't a coincidence that it started getting better when I finally allowed myself to heal." "I decided to change my life." "I decided, "I can do this when I get home." ""I can swim every day." ""I can walk a little bit every day." "I can eat this wonderful Mediterranean food."" "I didn't have to be in Greece." "But what Greece did for me is, it showed me the way." "It showed me that I could change my life and that if I did change my life, I would feel better." "With science's ability to more fully understand the workings of the brain and the mind-body connection, the wisdom of the ages is proving to be an important part of our ability to reduce stress, strengthen the immune system" "and heal."