The Will to Believe

Thinking doesn’t make it so, except maybe in a narrow sense it can. In an article in yesterday’s online New York Times, Johns Hopkins neuroscientist David Linden postulates a physical means in which consciously directed brain activity may be able to affect cancer progression — he himself has cancer of the heart wall, yet he has outlived his predicted life continuance limit.

Linden admits that his theory is speculative, but he says that it could be testable. In any case, your mental state affects the efficacy of your immune system. In certain circumstances it may pay off to the have “the will to believe.”