By Pedro Gómez, in his blog Azarquiel's astrolabe
Really, the question would be: do our genes condition us or determine us? Certainly the question has its intricacies and is of enormous interest (it always has been since genetics left its infancy and entered a more mature age). That's why this past weekend I attended a wonderful course entitled "The biology of observer change"given by the chemist and coach Francisco Javier Junquera.
Structure of DNA in a eukaryotic cell. (Source: Wikipedia , Author: KES47)
It is common knowledge that negative thinking or a less than positive attitude towards life influences our mood. But science is now going one step further. There are powerful indications and some evidence that our thoughts and beliefs have a direct effect (both positive and negative) on our biology. We have all heard of someone who has gone through a trauma or a bad experience in life and soon after developed an illness or disease (what psychiatrists call a "bad experience"). somatization disorder).
These people will go from one doctor to another endlessly, trying to find the causes of their ailments, when the origin really lies in their own mind. All this brings us back to an old philosophical polemic that had its heyday in the 17th century with the rationalists: are the body and the mind united, are they the same thing represented to us in different ways?
There were two lines of thought on this issue: that of René Descartes, which sharply separated the body from the soul (he even determined that the soul resided in the body). pineal gland of the brain) and that of Baruch Spinoza, for whom the two entities were intimately linked, each influencing the other (in his famous phrase Deus sive Natura, The author identifies God and Nature as equivalent).
Portrait of René Descartes, by Frans Hals
Science is proving that, in this case, despite Descartes' genius, Spinoza was right, as the Portuguese neurologist says António Damásio. Our emotions transcend and express themselves directly in our biology. There we have, for example, the production of endorphins on the one hand (those endogenous opiates that are secreted from time to time by the pituitary gland and the hypothalamus and make us feel good) or that of adrenaline and cortisol (those hormones that make us feel stressed and accelerated, and therefore bad).
Portrait of Baruch Spinoza, anonymous author
This brings us to the crucial point that the environment influences not only the endogenous secretion of certain substances, but also genetics itself. This is what is being studied lately in the new discipline called
Epigenetics. Emotions, stress, nutrition, pollution, etc., can modify genes without altering their basic configuration. If these altered genes from the somatic line (in a word, the majority of cells in our body) eventually reach the germ line (our gametes), they could even be passed on to our future offspring.
This last statement is not without controversy, as there is not yet sufficient evidence that this is happening. This would be a new Lamarckism of environmentally-induced genetic changes, to which the scientific community is still somewhat reluctant.
Fortunately, science is something that is written in chapters and each new chapter can erase or modify the previous one. Therefore, the advance of Epigenetics is unstoppable. There are already studies indicating that the ailments of a significant number of cancer patients are due more to epigenetic alterations than to defective genes inherited from their ancestors. Among the most powerful epigenetic factors is the energy of our thoughts, which can activate or inhibit the production of proteins by constructive or destructive interference with DNA (e.g. by a biochemical process on the cytosine called methylation, which can cause certain genes not to be expressed or to be expressed in a different way). Everyone pay attention to what I said: the energy of our thoughts. This is the crux of the matter.
Our own thoughts can change the expression of our genes and this has a direct effect on our body!
Three-dimensional structure of the DNA double helix (Source: Wikipedia, Author: Richard Wheeler)
So can we change our biology with our thoughts? The answer is a resounding YES. To answer the question at the beginning, our genes condition us but do not determine us. We have some control and that means freedom of choice. We can choose to be better off, both emotionally and physically, by changing our view of what we care about. It is in our hands. This is what the biology of observer change means. We are facing a new scientific paradigm that complements traditional medicine (which must continue to exist, of course), and which is being joined by more and more scientists who are sensitive to the problem.
Attendees at the Biology of Observer Change course, with Kiko Junquera
For the philosopher and biochemist Ken Wilber, It is a matter of respecting what he calls the Great Chain of Being (Matter - Body - Mind - Soul and Spirit). Paraphrasing him, it is necessary to realise that "it is important to use a procedure congruent with the level at which the problem manifests itself.". And health coaches know this very well: they focus on the person and not on the illness.a
[Thank you Pedro Gómez for sharing your blog post with us. Azarquiel's astrolabe.]
