What the Bleep's Dr. Joe Dispenza is on tour in Australia this month! This chiropractor is best known for his comments on the brain, emotional addictions and how he creates his day. His new book is called Evolve Your Brain - The Science of Changing Your Mind. In the leadup to Dr. Dispenza's Australian seminar and workshop tour in September, he discusses the research in his book, the brain, our ability to change and the mind-body connection.

What inspired you to write this book?

An experience I had 20 years ago inspired me to investigate the power of the brain to alter our life. As I describe in the book, much of my spine was crushed in a bike accident, and four surgeons said my only option to avoid paralysis was a type of surgery that would have left me with a permanent disability and possibly, lifelong pain. I had to make the toughest decision of my life, but I turned down the surgery and turned instead to the innate intelligence that constantly gives life to every one of us. Ten weeks later, without surgery, I was back at work, completely healed and pain-free. I give credit in the book to many factors that contributed to my healing.

Because of that experience, I promised myself to spend a major portion of my life studying the phenomenon of mind over matter and spontaneous healing, meaning how the body repairs itself or rids itself of disease without traditional medical interventions such as surgery or drugs. And so I've spent many years studying about human potential, about our ability to transcend or be greater than our personal limitations, and about the interconnectedness of the brain, the mind, the body, and consciousness.

Until just a few decades ago, science had led us to believe that we were doomed by genetics, hobbled by conditioning, and should resign ourselves to the proverbial thinking about old dogs not being able to learn new tricks. However, what I've discovered in studying the brain and its effects on behavior for the last 20 years has made me enormously hopeful about human beings and our ability to change. We have just needed to know how to change, and today, neuroscience has a very solid explanation for how mind over matter works; it's no longer a pie-in-the-sky concept. The science of changing our mind is now available, and I wrote Evolve Your Brain to help make this science accessible to everyone.

Many of us learned in school that once we become adults, the brain is static and rigid. How much potential do we have to change our brain?

Those of us who went to school 20 or 30 years ago were taught that the brain is hardwired, meaning that by the time we're adults, we have a certain number of brain cells that are arranged in fixed patterns or neural circuits, and that as we get older, we lose some of those circuits. We thought that we would inevitably turn out like our parents in many ways, because we could only use the same neural patterns that we genetically inherited from them.

Neuroscientists now say that was a mistake. The great news is, each of us is a work in progress, throughout our life. Every time we have a thought, different areas of our brain surge with electrical current and release a mob of neurochemicals that are too numerous to name. Thanks to functional brain scanning technology, we can now see that our every thought and experience causes our brain cells, or neurons, to connect and disconnect in ever-changing patterns and sequences. In fact, we have a natural ability called neuroplasticity, which means that if we learn new knowledge and have new experiences, we can develop new networks or circuits of neurons, and literally change our mind.

So, why is it hard for us to change?

In my practice as well as my personal life, I have seen that change isn't easy.

When people want to commit to a goal, they start out with good intentions and ideas, but quite often they go back to their unwanted habits. The concept of change means that we are going to do something differently within the same environment; we're not going to respond to our environment with our customary thoughts and reactions. That, however, is easier said than done. Many of us tend to think the same thoughts, have the same feelings, and follow the same routines in our life. The rub is, this causes us to keep using the same patterns and combinations of neural circuits in our brain, and they tend to become hardwired.

This is how we create habits of thinking, feeling, and doing. Don't get me wrong, hardwiring isn't a bad thing. Thanks to hardwiring, when we learn a new skill such as driving a car, the more we practice, the more we hardwire what we learn into our brain's circuits, and eventually we can operate a car automatically. But if we want to change something in our life, we have to cause the brain to no longer fire in the same old sequences and combinations. We have to create a new level of mind by disconnecting the old neural circuits and rewiring our brain in new patterns of nerve cell connections.

The good news we're learning from the latest brain research is that we can change the brain and thus change ourselves, if we take just a few simple steps. Evolve Your Brain will take the reader step by step through the knowledge and "how-to" steps needed to change any area of our life.

Can you explain the mind/body connection? What is the relationship between thoughts and the physical body?

An emerging scientific field called psychoneuroimmunology is demonstrating the connection between the mind and the body, and is beginning to help us understand the link between how we think and how we feel. We now know that our every thought produces a biochemical reaction in the brain. The brain then releases chemical signals that are transmitted to the body, where they act as messengers of the thought. In this way, the thoughts that produce these chemicals in the brain allow our body to feel exactly the way we were just thinking.

Essentially, when we have happy, inspiring, or positive thoughts, our brain manufactures chemicals that make us feel joyful, inspired, or uplifted. For example, when we look forward to a pleasurable experience, the brain immediately makes a chemical neurotransmitter called dopamine, which turns the brain and body on in anticipation of that experience, and we feel excited. If we have thoughts of hate, anger, or insecurity, the brain produces chemicals that the body responds to in a comparable way, and we feel hateful, angry, or unworthy. Another chemical that our brain makes, called ACTH, signals the body to produce chemical secretions from the adrenal glands that make us feel threatened or aggressive.

When the body responds to a thought by having a feeling, the brain, which constantly monitors the status of the body, notices that the body is feeling a certain way. In response to that bodily feeling, the brain generates thoughts that produce corresponding chemical messengers, so that we begin to think the way we are feeling. Thinking creates feeling, and then feeling creates thinking, in a continuous biological feedback loop. This cycle eventually creates a particular state in the body—what we call a state of being—that determines the general nature of how we feel and behave.

For example, say a person lives much of her life in a repeating cycle of thoughts and feelings related to unworthiness. The moment she thinks about not being good enough or smart enough or enough of anything, her brain releases chemicals that produce a bodily feeling of unworthiness. Now she is feeling the way she was just thinking. Her brain notices that, and she begins to have thoughts of insecurity that match the way she was just feeling. Her body is now causing her to think. If her thoughts and feelings continue, year after year, to generate the same feedback loop between her brain and her body, she will exist in a state of being that is called "unworthy." These repeated chemical signals cause the cells of the body to function in undesirable ways, making us sick.

This starts to explain how the mind can physically modify the body. In the book I talk about a man I called Tom, who developed one digestive ailment after another. This finally led him to examine his life, and he realized he had been suppressing feelings of anger and desperation over being in a job that made him miserable. Tom's mind and body were in a feedback loop of thinking and feeling that amounted to toxic attitudes that his body just "couldn't stomach." He had been living in a state of being revolving around victimization. His healing finally began when he paid attention to his habitual thoughts and realized that his unconscious attitudes were the basis for the person he had become.

There is significant scientific evidence suggesting that the mind has a direct effect on the body, both for better and for worse. Research demonstrates that we can cause our bodies to be sick just by the anticipation of a future event or the memory of a past experience. In both cases, it is our thoughts that are creating powerful chemicals of stress to alter most of the systems in our body. So what we think about and the intensity of these thoughts directly influences our health, the choices we make, and our quality of life.

Dr Joe Dispenza will be touring Australia from 14-23 September 2007 to present a series of Evolve Your Brain seminars and workshops in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth. For details, visit www.nibbana.com.au or call +61 2 9337 6167. Dr Joe's website is www.drjoedispenza.com