How of Happiness

Apply the same theory to Oprah's darling "A New Earth."

I've actually found a site where you can buy placebos (sugar pills) online - branded *as placebos* - www.placebo.com.au. Maybe the act of exchanging money for inert sugar pills triggers the placebo effect? Or do you actually have to take the pill? Perhaps just looking at the image of the pills online is sufficient ...?

The secret is such a sad scam. Ooh, yeah, let's all sit around and REALLY focus on all the stuff we DON'T have! THAT'll make us happy!

Try practicing gratitude instead of greed, that might actually do you some good.

I believe that the "Placebo Effect" is the sham - Sugar pills DO cure! People need to take seriously the mysterious healing powers of sugar. For example, my kids have gone from sad and lethargic to euphoric and energetic within minutes of eating a Snickers candy bar - I strongly believe the sugar gets the credit!

We need to start giving sugar pills the credit they deserve. It is this type of "out-of-the-box" thinking that accounts for the success of "The Secret."

James P. Esq.

Uhh yeah right dude!

You are believing snickers will work on your kids, so thats wat you think. Did you know snickers has *sugar* which causes your kids to be happy and energetic..?

Sounds like a great idea for a study! I hope we'll hear more about it sometime soon.

While evidence-based research may well confirm the placebo theory, i think there is an even simpler explanation. Neuroscience has long held that the senses are capable of receiving much more information than the conscious brain can process - hence the unconscious brain filters out most sensory information. When we focus our conscious brain on particular things - either positive or negative - external events which match that focus are allowed through to the conscious mind. Hence, when we buy a blue car, we see blue cars everywhere: but they were there in equal numbers before we bought ours, we are just recognising them now. This is what I think is behind the gratitude exercise - we focus on good things, so we notice more of them each day, and so it feels like more good things are happening, so we feel happier.
It is very human to want to ascribe other mechanisms to this - in particular religious ones - wherein we declare that "god" has given me with good things because I'm a good person, or because I do good things.
Bunkum - it's not "blessings", it's not karma, it's not even a secret - it's nothing but the human brain in action.

I believe the applying the Law of Attraction can have a real effect over just mindlessly living, because at least it sets people to think about what they want. They also might become more open to new opportunities, and more receptive to some signals.

If you actively search for something, the chances that you find it are obviously higher.

So it's not merely placebo. I think The Secret helps some people develop develop a better a mindset then they had before, increasing their effectiveness. I believe it's not a particular good book for developing a good mindset, but I do think it's better then nothing.

I think the most troublesome part of The Secret is that it tries to explain any positive effects in metaphysical terms, while the positive effects can be readily explained without.

In your experiment, you should absolutely make sure that your alternate "treatment" contains no good advice whatsoever at all. Otherwise, you might be comparing good advice with good advice. If you're not careful you're alternate will probably even contain better advice than the Law of Attraction.

I do think it would be interesting to make comparison between the effect of reading "The Secret" and reading "The 7 habits of highly effective people". I'm betting on the last one to work better.

One of my psychology professors (Professor Lee Kronenberg) once stated:

"If it works because it works, it works. If it works because you think it works, it still works."

That, succinctly, is precisely what the placebo effect is.

This can be applied from the latest top seller "The Secret" all the way down to the mystical powers of the hypnotherapist. Monks in China have been proving mind-over-body or "mind-over-mind" for more than three centuries. I think that if people were to appreciate the powers and capacity of the human mind, they would be quicker to meditate and introspect that they would to buy dime novels in hopes for a get-rich-quick scheme or a cure-all self-help book. Happiness breeds happiness. Sadness breeds sadness. Emotions are mere a state of mind where the body interprets the signals to help convey the emotion. Perhaps people should study the human body and mind more than placebo books. They might find that they don't need to spend money on literature to make them happy.

I suppose I could write a book to compete with "The Secret" and call it "Secrets of the Mind."

My tag line would be "There are more functions in terms of the brain than there are particles in the universe." (Which is true, by the way. The number of elementary particles in the universe is estimated at a miserly 10^87, whereas the number of distinct brain states is 1E^140.)

Thoughtful,
Kris

I have mixed feelings about "The Secret" having read the book and viewed the DVD. I do believe that we have nothing to lose and everything to gain by practicing gratitude and focusing our energy and attention on what we want in life, rather than complaining about what we don't have.
I am very interested in finding out if the man who called into the Law of Attraction on XM, Oprah & Friends will get the $12,000,000 he is hoping for by using the principles of the book. He's been trying since Oct, 2007 and so far no one has, "Shown him the money!"

Much of the success can be attributable to Self-Fulfilling Prophecy. I'm surprised she didn't mention it and am curious as to what her thoughts might be about it in relation to The Secret and other similar phenomena...

I appreciate many of the comments here and agree with them. I enjoyed The Secret, but I felt there was so much missing. I am excited to report that the folks from The Secret have returned and made a better movie. It is called The Opus. I just saw it yesterday and I was very excited to see the answers that were missing from The Secret the first time around. You may want to check out www.TheOpusMovie.com The film also takes a new approach in teaching how to get to the success we all dream about as the teachers shares their comments along side a wonderfully crafted story. It was so engaging and entertaining. I noticed as I googled The Opus Movie this morning that some blogs are calling it the "best personal development movie ever made" I haven't seen alot of movies like this so far, but from what I have seen I would also agree.

I also especially liked how much more in depth the Secret teachers went this time around. It just made far more sense like time around. Two thumbs up and 10 stars.

At the risk of being negative, you're kind of a jerk. Someone opens up about the loss of his marriage due to the emptiness contained in "The Secret" and you blame his negativity? Nevermind. I'm sure James Ray has even more "wonderful anecdotes" at this point in time. I sure hope he chokes on the pill that he has to swallow.

Cheers.

I'm surprised that a psychological scientist would have to conduct an experiment on this half-baked, poorly explained "secret" when she is most likely familiar with Gestalt therapy and the like.

This Byrne is a hack who is being sued by a fellow Aussie who cited over 100 incidents of plagiarism and is re-releasing her book showing all of these plagiarisms. Byrne's marketing technique though, is top-notch, incorporating tried and true persuasive techniques of reciprocation (thought-karma), scarcity (it's a secret), authority (Einstein, Da Vinci, and others supposedly used it), consensus, consistency (claims that it works everytime) and "like attracts like."

Oprah Winfrey is the queen of New Age crap like this (go visit her website), yet she is constantly on a self-loathing, diet roller coaster and gives away expensive gifts to her audience because deep-down, she doesn't believe that anyone could love her otherwise.

Premise: If you are victim of rape, it is because of your thoughts. When you thought, "This campus isn't very busy today," you were inviting your rapist into your life. You wanted someone to be with you on campus, in your space, in your face and in your pants, so the Universe gave you what you asked for. B.S.!!!

The Secret is that Americans are suckers for get-rich schemes and prosperity gospels; that's why Linda Byrne came to this turd of a country floating on $500 trillion of worthless derivatives. That's the REAL secret; The Secret is a microcosm of the American dream.

Just you wait till the bubble bursts and all hell breaks loose. Then you can blame my negative thoughts for attracting all this mayhem and death;)

I bought the CD version of The Secret and listened to it at home, where my younger brother also lives. Unbeknownst to me, he had been eavesdropping and acting uncharacteristically upbeat. He told me that it was time to see the world and to grab a hold of life before it's gone.

This continued for almost a week when I got a call from the local police; it seems that my brother, who suffers from paranoid schizophrenia, went off his meds after listening to The Secret and the voices were telling him that enemies of Linda Byrne were plotting to destroy her, so he went ballistic at the subway station and started pushing people onto the tracks of oncoming subways, yelling, "I know The Secret and soon the whole world will too. You can't stop us; my thoughts will kill you all, messengers of darkness!" He was eventually gunned down by police.

I guess in retrospect, it was my brother's deranged thoughts that invited these deaths. I wonder what the poor people standing on the subway platform were thinking before they were pushed in front of the subway trains?

"The Secret" changed my life in a very real way and allowed me to overcome a severe crisis in my personal life. It is well known that the premise of "The Secret" is the science of attracting the things in life that you desire and need and in removing from your life those things that you don't want. Before finding this book, I knew nothing of these principles, the process of positive visualization, and had actually engaged in reckless behaviors to the point of endangering my own life and wellbeing.

At age 36, I found myself in a medium security prison serving 3-5 years for destruction of government property and public intoxication. This was stiff punishment for drunkenly vomiting in a mailbox but as the judge pointed out, this was my third conviction for the exact same crime. I obviously had an alcohol problem and a deep and intense disrespect for the postal system, but even more importantly I was ignoring the very fabric of our metaphysical reality and inviting destructive influences into my life.

My fourth day in prison was the first day that I was allowed in general population and while in the recreation yard I was approached by a prisoner named Marcus who calmly informed me that as a new prisoner I had been purchased by him for three packs of Winston cigarettes and 8 ounces of pruno (prison wine). Marcus elaborated further that I could expect to be raped by him on a daily basis and that I had pretty eyes.

Needless to say, I was deeply shocked that my life had sunk to this level. I became very homophobic and was dismayed that my overall personal street value was roughly $15. I returned to my cell and my cell mate Jim informed me that he knew about the Marcus situation and that he had something that could solve my problems. He handed me a copy of "The Secret". Normally I wouldn't have turned to a self help book to resolve such a severe and immediate threat but I literally didn't have any other available alternatives. I immediately opened the book and began to read.

The first few chapters deal with the essence of something called the "Law of Attraction" in which a primal universal force is available to us and can be harnessed for the betterment of our lives. The theoretical nature of the first few chapters wasn't exactly putting me at peace. In fact, I had never meditated and had great difficulty with closing out the chaotic noises of the prison and visualizing the positive changes that I so dearly needed. It was when I reached Chapter 6 "The Secret to Relationships" that I realized how this book could help me distance myself from Marcus and his negative intentions. Starting with chapter six there was a cavity carved into the book and in that cavity was a prison shiv.

The next day in the exercise yard I carried "The Secret" with me and when Marcus approached me I opened the book and stabbed him in the neck with my "secret shiv." The next eight weeks in solitary confinement provided ample time to practice positive visualization and the 16 hours per day of absolute darkness made visualization about the only thing that I actually could do. I'm not sure that everybody's life will be changed in such a dramatic way by this book but I'm very thankful to have found it and will continue to recommend it heartily.