“Every thought you think impacts every one of the 75-100 trillion cells in your body at quantum speeds!” – Dr Caroline Leaf

I was going to stick to my series on thoughts over the next few days, but Dr Leafs social media gem today was so farcical and fanciful, I had to briefly comment on it.

Dr Caroline Leaf is a communication pathologist and self-titled cognitive neuroscientist. She is ‘flexible’ with the truth when she blogs or posts on social media. It’s never really quite clear exactly where the facts end and the generous ‘poetic licence’ begins. Of course, she never references any of her posts, so it’s anyone’s guess as to how she arrived at the statement in the first place.

Today’s offering is a typical example. It’s a breathless melding of some exaggerated statements, impressive sounding numbers, and a brief reference to a science which sounds catchy but that not even physicists fully understand. It is a master class in taking a concept that’s scientifically incorrect and making it sound like a Nobel Prize winning idea.

Lets breaking it down into its different components and analyse their validity separately:
“Every thought you think impacts … every cell in your body …”
“… every one of the 75-100 trillion cells in your body …”
“… at quantum speeds!”

1. “Every thought you think impacts … every cell in your body …”

This is the core part of Dr Leaf’s statement. Like most of Dr Leaf’s teaching on our thoughts, her definition of thoughts is incorrect, as is the place of thoughts in the neuro-informational processing schema. Our streams of thought are just slivers of information projected from the deeper regions of the brain into to a wider area of our cerebral cortex. The brain uses this process to analyse the information to a higher degree before acting on it or sending it into memory.

Our thoughts are nothing special. They’re just a small cog in a much larger machine. They do not have any influence beyond what the rest of the brain would allow [1].

Thoughts certainly don’t influence every cell in our body. They physically can’t. Cells are not connected to every other cell in the body

Even if they were connected, it doesn’t make sense that our thoughts influence every other cell. The hyperbole verges on the ridiculous. As if a random fibroblast in the tip of my 5th pinkie toe was significantly influenced by the thought that I had when I felt like chicken for dinner. Dr Leaf’s assertion that, “Every thought you think impacts … every cell in your body”, is a nonsense statement.

2. “… every one of the 75-100 trillion cells in your body …”

How many cells do you really have in your body? I’ve never really tried to count them all myself, but according to the Smithsonian in Washington, USA, there are only 37.2 trillion (http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/there-are-372-trillion-cells-in-your-body-4941473/?no-ist). The fact that Dr Leaf has so badly estimated, when all she needed to do was a one line Google search, suggests that she just made the number up. Out of respect to Dr Leaf, she really needs to reference her facts or she will continue to lose credibility,

3. “… at quantum speeds.”

Quantum physics remains largely mysterious even to those physicists who study it. So it’s a brave person who invokes the “quantum” word in any statement.

It appears that most scientists believe that the maximum quantum speed is the speed of light (http://www.wired.com/2012/01/quantum-information-speed/) so Dr Leaf believes that thought works at light speed. Interesting, because any communication between distant cells in the body is done through electrical transmission or signalling via hormones, which is certainly not at light speeds.

So thought doesn’t talk to our 37.2 trillion cells or even significantly impact them. It can’t. Thought doesn’t control our physiology or our actions, and our body does not work at light speed.

Dr Leaf seems to be largely basing her statement on theory that she has derived from a paper called “Local and nonlocal effects of coherent heart frequencies on conformational changes of DNA”, which suggested that deep love meditation changed some DNA’s ability to wind and unwind. They suggest that the same meditation can change DNA from 3 miles away. Except … that study is deeply flawed.   (see my blog on the subject )

So ultimately, Dr Leaf has just published a social media post which has no scientific basis whatsoever. I would suggest that her followers deserve something better than some flighty, exaggerated puff-piece.

References

1. Pitt, C.E., Hold That Thought: Reappraising the work of Dr Caroline Leaf, 2014 Pitt Medical Trust, Brisbane, Australia, URL http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/466848