When I first came to America, I came to do my internship as a doctor in a small hospital

in New Jersey.

I worked in the ER, the emergency room, and saw all kinds of terrible things.

I saw people at their most scared, scared to death.

But one experience in particular changed the entire way I thought about medicine, about

how I saw the relationship between our bodies and our minds.

It happened that I had a patient come to see me, and I picked up the chart, and on this

chart it said, this patient has cancer.

So I told him, I said, I'm sorry, but you have cancer.

It only took seconds to see his body react.

I could see his face change, I could feel his blood pressure go up.

He became in one word, sicker before my eyes.

Two minutes later I realized I had made a terrible mistake.

I had picked up the wrong chart.

So I said, I'm so sorry, it isn't you, you don't have cancer.

And in that split second his biology changed again before my eyes.

And it really was from that era, one of the low points of my career as a physician, that

I started to ask the question, what is the power of this mind of ours that can not only

conceive of the big bang, but can also affect our very own bodies at a cellular and molecular

level, and really have never stopped asking this question.

I think we're increasingly capable of showing when we manipulate the brain in certain ways

that we can change thoughts, we can change this experience in some ways.

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