Andrew Huberman· PhD
What her laboratory has shown is that motivational state and mindset has a powerful impact on various aspects of the immune system that were thought to be independent of the brain, and mind, and thinking. They explored the well-established psychological phenomenon that when cancer patients or very ill people or people who are suffering from very debilitating injuries, when people had or reported a sense of hope, their rates of recovery were much higher, right? Sounds very subjective, but what is a sense of hope? A sense of hope is a sense of the future. A sense of the future is tightly associated with the dopamine system. And so what they've discovered and through other studies from other groups have discovered, is that stimulation of the dopamine pathway either simply by thinking about a future, ideally a positive future, but thinking about a positive future leads to activation of the so-called mesolimbic reward pathway and could reduce the size of tumors, could accelerate wound healing, could greatly accelerate the passage from a state of illness to a state of health and wellbeing.