Chapter 4

Surfing the Psychosomatic Network

The Intimate Connection of Mind and Body

All of your body is in your mind, but not all of your mind is in your body.

—HUMANITARIAN, AUTHOR, AND YOGI JACK SCHWARZ¹

In 1973, a group of Indian researchers decided to test the extraordinary claim of some yogis that they could voluntarily stop their hearts—and survive. In this fascinating experiment, Yogi Satyamurti, a small man about sixty years old, was buried for eight days in a small underground pit dug into the lawn of a medical institute. He could not move, but he was connected to an electrocardiogram (EKG) device to record his heart’s electrical activity. Beforehand, he had told the researchers that he would fall into a deep trance, from which he planned to awaken in seven days—a full eight days after he was buried alive.

Yogi Satyamurti climbed into the pit, which was then sealed with bricks and cement mortar. Almost immediately, the EKG showed a rapid heartbeat, called tachycardia, that progressed until it reached 250 beats per minute—far above the normal resting heart rate of 60 to 100 beats per minute. This tachycardia continued for an astounding twenty-nine hours.

Then what researchers had feared suddenly happened. A straight line—indicating that his heart had stopped—appeared on the EKG tracing. The researchers wanted to abort the experiment. Clearly, the yogi was dead or dying. But the yogi’s attendants insisted that they continue for the full eight days.

For five more days, the yogi remained in the pit and the EKG continued to show a flat line. Then, half an hour before the experiment was scheduled to end, the needle began to move and the rapid heart rate appeared again. At the appointed time, they unsealed the pit and brought the yogi out—ten pounds lighter but otherwise alive and well.

His rapid heartbeat persisted for another two hours, and then returned to normal. The EKG device was checked to eliminate any malfunctioning, but it appeared to work flawlessly. The researchers were unable to account for this remarkable finding, but they admitted that they were not ready to accept that the yogi had deliberately stopped his heart for five days and survived.²

“The more optimistic amongst us considered this feat to be a marvellous extension of the ‘hypometabolic wakeful state of yogic meditation’ . . . and the conditioned learning of autonomic responses in rats reported by DiCara,” said one of the researchers in a letter to the Journal of the American Heart Association in 1973. “The sceptics, however, were inclined to take the whole thing as some cleverly disguised trick. But, for the present, we only want to put this interesting experiment on record just as an intriguing and inclusive attempt of a Yogi to demonstrate a voluntary control over his heart beat.”³ His statement demonstrates the difficulty Western science and medicine have traditionally had in coming to terms with the close relationship between mind and body, and the possibility that we can indeed use our minds to influence our health. Yet there is good evidence that such things are indeed possible.

In 1964, a few years before the yogi went into the pit, Norman Cousins—political journalist, peace activist, and editor-in-chief of the Saturday Review for more than thirty-five years—found himself in a great deal of pain. He was diagnosed as having ankylosing spondylitis, a chronic form of inflammatory arthritis that causes the breakdown of collagen⁴ in the joints between the vertebrae of the spine. “In a sense,” he has written, “I was coming unstuck, I had considerable difficulty in moving my limbs and even turning over in bed. . . . At the low point of my illness, my jaws were almost locked.”⁵ Cousins was told that he had only a few months to live and that he needed to get his affairs in order. Instead, he embarked on an unusual regimen of his own devising.

While hospitalized, Cousins read about the theory that stress and negative emotions are harmful to the body. He reasoned that if negative emotions were damaging, then positive emotions should improve health. Shocked by hospital conditions and persuaded that the authoritarian medical culture was not going to be good for his health status, he decided to fire his treating physician and find a doctor who would agree to work with him as a collaborator rather than as the physician “in charge.”

Cousins checked out of the hospital and checked into a Manhattan hotel. He began taking extremely high doses of vitamin C, strongly convinced of the efficacy of this treatment although his new physician did not endorse this approach. Decades before videos were commonly available, Cousins managed to obtain a movie projector and a stack of comedies, including Marx Brothers movies. Despite his pain he spent a lot of time watching these films and laughing. He quickly realized that ten minutes of genuine belly laughter had an anaesthetic effect and would give him at least two hours of pain-free sleep.

Over the next few months, Cousins slowly recovered the use of his limbs and his health gradually improved. Later, he returned to work full-time at the Saturday Review. He recounted his journey in a book titled Anatomy of an Illness as Perceived by the Patient ”⁶ In this book Cousins concluded that the “will to live” and positive emotions could have a huge impact on health, and even contribute to healing. He became popularly known as “the man who laughed himself to health,” and his book brought widespread attention to the idea that mind and body are not separate but are intimately connected.

If Cousins were the only person to test this theory, his experience would be extraordinary. But he is by no means unique. Take, for instance, the case of Jordan Fieldman.

In the 1980s, this Harvard medical student—already suffering from ulcerative colitis, a painful form of inflammatory bowel disease—was diagnosed with an aggressive brain tumor and had surgery to remove it. Unfortunately, he woke from surgery blind, and he was told that he would remain sightless for the few months he had left to live. But a week later, his sight returned. When he went to the medical library to research his disease, every book he consulted asserted that recurrence is invariable and death occurs within a year. Fieldman, who had already experienced the unexpected and unpredicted return of his sight, was incensed. “How dare they say invariable?” he thought to himself. At that moment he simply decided not to die of his brain tumor. With that decision, his ulcerative colitis also regressed.

Combining traditional medical therapy with alternative health approaches, Fieldman did indeed live—just as he had decided. He graduated from medical school in 1987 and specialized in preventive and internal medicine, focusing on a holistic approach. In 1997, Fieldman told the Boston Globe, “When Western medicine gives you zero percent survival, you start exploring other options. It would have been easy for me to obey the odds and do what it says in the textbooks. But I had faith I could overcome it.”⁷

Bernie Siegel, a retired New Haven surgeon, has written abundantly about empowering patients and teaching survival behavior. He believes that the power of healing stems from will, self-love, and hope. During his long career as a surgeon, Siegel had been personally involved with several patients, including Fieldman, who survived against all odds and experienced remarkable recoveries from supposedly incurable diseases. Of the mind–body connection, he writes, “Our bodies love us but if we do not love them and our lives then our body tries to get us out of here as fast as it can.”⁸

Psychosomatic medicine—founded on the belief that the mind can cause bodily symptoms—emerged during the beginning of the twentieth century in reaction against the mechanistic view that had taken over science and medicine.⁹ The Hungarian American psychoanalyst and physician Franz Alexander, one of the founders of this field, claimed that psychological factors are crucially involved in the production of disease. Many physicians and scientists could not see a plausible mechanism to explain the link between mind and body, and dismissed this idea as nonsense.¹⁰ The idea persisted; but it would be decades before research became more than speculative.

In the 1960s, George Solomon, a psychiatrist working at Stanford University, began conducting research on the effects of psychological factors, such as personality characteristics and emotional states, on the onset and course of rheumatoid arthritis. In 1964 he published a seminal article titled “Emotions, Immunity, and Disease: A Speculative Theoretical Integration,”¹¹ in which he argued that the immune system could be influenced by mental events associated with brain activity. To describe this, Solomon coined the term psychoimmunology.

Our immune systems are composed of the lymph nodes, the spleen, the bone marrow, the thymus, and various types of white blood cells. Some of these cells reside in certain tissues of the body, such as the skin, while others circulate throughout the body. The main job of the immune system is to recognize, bar, and destroy foreign agents of diseases that threaten our health. It also disposes of abnormal cells and repairs damage. To do this, the immune system must determine and discriminate between something that needs to be fixed and something that needs to be destroyed. Autoimmune diseases, such as the anklyosing spondylitis that Norman Cousins had, occur when something goes wrong and the autoimmune response mistakenly identifies its own cells as intruders and tries to destroy them.

By the early 1970s, clinicians and researchers realized that if stressful situations and stressed-out personalities were conducive to a variety of illnesses, including heart disease and cancer, it was quite reasonable that reducing stress might help prevent these illnesses and contribute to more efficient treatments.¹² In 1981 neuroscientist David Felten¹³ and his colleagues found a direct connection between nerve fibers of the sympathetic nervous system and cells of the immune system in the spleen, lymph nodes, thymus, and bone marrow. These researchers provided the first indication of how the brain and the immune systems can interact. This discovery established the field of psychoneuroimmunology (PNI), the study of the interactions between mental processes and the nervous and immune systems.

A few years later, neuropharmacologist Candace Pert and her co-workers discovered that neuropeptide receptors are present in the immune system. Neuropeptides—composed of short chains of amino acids—are small molecules that are used by neurons to communicate with each other. These molecules are implicated in various functions, including emotions, motivation, learning, and memory as well as food intake. Pert’s discovery suggested a viable mechanism through which emotions can influence the immune system.

Since the crucial findings of Felten and Pert, PNI researchers have demonstrated that there are, in fact, a myriad of connections between the brain and the immune system. Studies conducted during the past three decades have shown that chemicals produced by immune cells signal the brain, and the brain sends chemical signals to the immune system.¹⁴ Other studies have confirmed that our thoughts and feelings do affect our health and well-being. These studies indicate that the causes, development, and outcomes of an illness are determined by the interaction of psychological and social factors with biochemical changes that affect the immune system, the endocrine system, and the cardiovascular system.¹⁵

Here’s how we think it works: the mind, the nervous system, the immune system, and the endocrine system form a psychosomatic network. They are continuously communicating via chemical messengers, such as neuropeptides, that can be thought of as “information substances.” These chemical messengers allow subjective mental events—falling in love, losing a job, arguing with a friend—to influence, usually unconsciously, these physiological systems. But is it possible for the mind to deliberately affect this vast multidirectional network?¹⁶

Under ideal conditions, the mind and the nervous, immune, and endocrine systems interact harmoniously. The result is homeostasis, an optimal state of balance that promotes health and combats disease. Many factors influence the interaction between mind and these systems, such as lifestyle, environment, personality, and heredity. Illness may appear when there is a serious disruption of homeostasis.¹⁷

Increasingly, we are seeing evidence that the mind also affects gene expression—the process of how a gene works within a cell. Each cell in the human body contains several thousand genes, but not all of them are active at the same time. Within any given cell, some genes will be expressed (or “on”) while other genes will not be expressed (they are said to be “off”). Genes that are turned “on” may somehow alter, for instance, our body’s response to stress.

Psychologist Jeffery Dusek and his colleagues at Harvard Medical School recently conducted the first study about how the mind can affect gene expression. They compared gene-expression patterns in nineteen long-term relaxation practitioners, nineteen healthy controls, and twenty newcomers who underwent eight weeks of relaxation training. Dusek and his co-workers found that more than 2,200 genes were activated differently in the longtime practitioners relative to the controls. They found that a gene that is turned on or off by stress is turned the other way during relaxation. As the authors state in their conclusions, these “constitutive changes in gene expression . . . may relate to long-term physiological effects.”¹⁸ These findings have significant implications for the power of mind and body working in tandem to affect our health on a deep level.

A considerable portion of the human molecular and cellular machinery is employed to maintain homeostasis—the body’s ability to regulate itself in all sorts of situations. When we imagine consciously having to direct our bodies to perform all of the minute adjustments and functions that get us through twenty-four hours, we can see just how impressive and important this task is. When this state of equilibrium is perturbed or threatened, the brain’s stress response system quickly springs into action. When we become stressed out, the brain releases stress hormones and chemical messengers (such as adrenaline and noradrenaline), and the adrenal glands secrete cortisol. These biochemical reactions affect the capacity of immune cells to fight infectious agents.¹⁹

Although some stress is inevitable in daily living, and a degree of stress is necessary for survival, too much stress can have a detrimental effect on immunity. Acute or chronic psychological stress can increase the severity and duration of infectious diseases, prolong wound healing, and stimulate the reactivation of latent viruses. For instance, it has been shown that medical students receiving hepatitis B vaccine during the very stressful final exam period do not develop complete protection against this serious infectious disease. Moreover, negative immune changes have been documented for several months in victims of natural disasters such as hurricanes. Imprisonment in a prisoner of war camp and unemployment can also lead to negative immune alterations.²⁰

Events and situations that we perceive as uncontrollable can lead to important disruption of the immune and endocrine systems.²¹ For example, during marital discord, immune responses are weakened; and the levels of stress hormones are elevated in the spouse who experiences the greatest amount of stress and feelings of helplessness.²² Furthermore, men and women who provide long-term care for a spouse or parent with Alzheimer’s disease commonly show high levels of stress hormones as well as modifications in vaccine response and wound healing.²³

A number of studies have shown that chronic negative emotional states may even contribute to death. For instance, a study of 2,400 patients in Finland has shown that the feeling of “hopelessness” was significantly associated with higher rates of mortality from cancer and cardiovascular disease.²⁴ Abnormality in immune function and an increased risk of death have also been reported in bereaved spouses during the first years after bereavement.²⁵

Fortunately, positive emotions and determination can substantially improve health. One illustration of the impact of the “will to live” is that some people appear to have postponed their deaths until after some meaningful event, such as the arrival of a significant day or a loved one.²⁶ Two famous examples are that of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. These two influential founders of the United States died on the same day—July 4, 1826—exactly fifty years after the Declaration of Independence was adopted.²⁷

Researcher Sheldon Cohen and his colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University have recently performed studies in which volunteers were administered standard doses of infectious organisms such as rhinovirus (common cold) and influenza virus. The responses to the viruses were analyzed in relation to the emotional state of the participants. In these studies, volunteers were monitored in quarantine. Results revealed that participants whose affect remained very positive over several days had reduced risk of developing an infection.²⁸

Is there any evidence that an individual’s attitude and emotional state can positively influence the course of diseases more dangerous than the common cold and influenza? To tackle this important health issue, a group of researchers studied women with breast cancer, all of whom had undergone a simple mastectomy. Three months after the surgery, the researchers interviewed each woman to find out what having cancer implied to her, and to ask what she thought about the threat of cancer. These researchers discovered that at the five-, ten-, and fifteen-year follow-ups, the best single predictor of recurrence of cancer or death was the mental attitude of each woman three months after mastectomy. Women who showed fighting spirit had a 50 percent chance of surviving fifteen years in good health; whereas women who accepted stoically, or felt anxiety or helplessness, had about a 15 percent chance of surviving fifteen years.²⁹

Emotional support also plays a pivotal role in health. Individuals with high levels of support have stronger natural killer (NK) cell responses³⁰ than do individuals with lower levels of support; and high-quality emotional support from a spouse is associated with better NK cell activity in breast cancer patients.³¹

The effect of emotional support on people who have already been diagnosed with cancer can be dramatic. Studies indicate that people with various types of cancer who have more friends and relatives whom they see have a better quality of life and tend to live longer. One of these studies revealed that women with breast cancer who had no confidants had a seven-year survival rate of 56 percent, whereas those who had two or more confidants had a survival rate of 76 percent.³²

Cancer patients sometimes use visualization techniques as part of their treatment. Mind–body techniques such as mental imagery, relaxation, and deep breathing are relatively new to the West, but familiar to much of the world. Traditionally, they have played an important role in African, Indian, Chinese, and Native American medicine, where they are predicated on the view that our thoughts, emotions, and beliefs can affect several aspects of our bodies’ functioning. It is only in the past thirty years that Western medicine has begun to recognize the importance of such techniques.³³

Mental imagery—the ability to form mental images of objects or events when the relevant objects or events are not present to the senses—is one of the oldest healing techniques. It includes all senses—sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell—and can also be used to simulate a given action. Brain imaging studies have shown that these various forms of mental imagery activate specific areas of our brains as effectively as if the people scanned were actually seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, smelling, or moving.

In the 1990s, Howard Hall, a research psychologist at Case Western University in Ohio, showed that healthy volunteers could use mental imagery to positively influence the functioning of their immune systems, in particular the activity of neutrophils, the most abundant type of white blood cells.³⁴ This important finding demonstrated that even if a great deal of the activity of the psychosomatic network takes place at the unconscious level, it is possible for the mind to consciously influence its functioning.

Radiation oncologist Carl Simonton and psychologist Stephanie Matthews Simonton were the first to propose the use of relaxation and mental imagery to enhance the capacity of the immune system to defend against cancer. They encouraged people with cancer to visualize images of immune cells aggressively conquering or destroying cancer cells. Since the pioneering work of the Simontons, however, research has shown that visualizing a battle in which white blood cells destroy cancer cells does not serve or suit everyone. The types of images that are most efficient vary from individual to individual. For example, some people feel empowered by warlike images, while others prefer relaxing images such as cancer cells packing up and leaving the body. Moreover, some people prefer images that are symbolic, such as a big broom sweeping up cancer cells, whereas other people prefer images of white blood cells and cancer cells that are anatomically accurate.³⁵

Several studies that investigated the effect of mind–body techniques on people who have cancer involved a combination of mental imagery and relaxation. A vast majority of these studies indicate that mental imagery combined with relaxation increases the production and activity of immune cells, reduces nausea and vomiting associated with chemotherapy and the distress of radiation therapy, facilitates recovery from cancer surgery, decreases anxiety and depression, and enhances quality of life.³⁶

Mindfulness meditation is another mind–body technique that can help individuals suffering from cancer to cope with the physical and emotional symptoms associated with this disease. Research shows that people with various kinds of cancer who practice mindfulness on a daily basis report less anxiety, depression, anger, and bodily manifestations of stress.³⁷

Dissociative identity disorder (DID)—previously known as multiple personality disorder—is a condition in which a person appears to possess and manifest distinct, split personalities: a host personality or host, and one or more alter egos or alters. These distinct personalities alternate in control over the person’s thoughts, memories, feelings, conscious experience, actions, and sense of identity. Usually, the person with DID is not aware of the other personality states and does not have memories of the times when other alters are in control.³⁸

The number of alters in persons with DID varies widely. For example, the woman known as “Eve,” Chris Costner Sizemore—whose story was told in the 1957 film The Three Faces of Eve—developed a total of twenty-two different personalities over twenty years.

DID is relatively rare: its prevalence is about 1 percent in the general population. Nearly all of the individuals who develop this condition have experienced repeated trauma—overt physical, emotional or sexual abuse, or neglect—during their childhoods. Psychiatrists believe that dissociation is a coping mechanism; the person dissociates herself from events that are too traumatic, frightening, or painful to be assimilated within her conscious self.

Intriguingly, alters have their own ages, gender, name, race, or sexual orientation distinct from the host. They also have distinct postures, gestures, ways of talking, and temperaments. The transition between alters, called the “switch,” can take seconds to minutes to days.

In 2008, Herschel Walker, a former Heisman Trophy winner and NFL football star, released a book titled Breaking Free, in which he revealed that he suffers from DID. Walker’s life derailed not long after his football career ended. “I didn’t really learn about this [DID] until about ten years ago,” Walker told CNN reporter Miriam Falco. “My life was out of control. I was not happy, I was very sad, I was angry and I didn’t understand why.”³⁹

In his book Walker talks about a dozen alters, including the Hero, the Warrior, the Enforcer, the Daredevil, and the Consoler. Some of these alters contributed in generating good things: they helped Walker graduate at the top of his class and become one of the greatest college football players ever. But other alters caused wild and violent behaviors. On a number of occasions, Walker put himself in danger playing Russian roulette. At another time, the very late delivery of a car enraged him (or, more precisely, one of his alters) so much that he thought about killing someone. Ultimately, these violent alters led to the breakup of his nineteen-year marriage to Cindy Grossman. “I lost the person that was like everything to me,” Walker said. “I lost my wife and that’s totally, totally devastating to me.” ⁴⁰

Grossman said that when the “bad” alters emerged, her husband looked different. His eyes, she said, would turn “evil—I remember just getting chill bumps when he looked at me.” ⁴¹

A handful of times, Walker held a gun to his wife’s head and threatened her with knives. Once, Grossman was in bed and could not see well because she wasn’t wearing her contact lenses. Abruptly, she said, Walker threatened her with a razor. “He had it to my throat and kept saying he was going to kill me . . . think he choked me. I think I passed out.” When she regained consciousness, “There was someone else there [saying] ‘Cindy, Cindy, Cindy. Wake up, wake up!’” Walker said that he has no memory of these assaults.

Walker believes his mental condition is related to a trauma that occurred while he was in elementary school. As a fat child with a severe stuttering problem, he was beaten up a lot by other kids and couldn’t fight back.⁴²

One fascinating aspect of DID is the fact that the distinct alters often exhibit markedly different symptoms or physiological features. A few preliminary studies have been conducted to investigate this intriguing issue. For example, some of these studies have shown that one alter can experience anaesthesia or pain relief, but the others cannot. There have been reports of one alter being deaf or suffering from auditory hallucinations, while the others hear normally. Changes in handedness or handwriting have also been reported across alters.

Sometimes individuals with DID display allergies in some alters but not in others. For instance, one of Eve’s alters (“Eve Black”) showed an allergic reaction when she was wearing nylon stockings. Strikingly, Eve’s original personality (“Eve White”) did not. In another study one alter was allergic to cats, while another was not. Additionally, alter egos can respond differently to medications. For instance, a woman who had diabetes needed different amounts of insulin depending on which alter was in charge.

Changes in vision have also been commonly described. In one study, major optical differences—evidenced by measures of visual acuity, pupil size, corneal curvature, and so on—were found between alter egos. In another investigation, color-blindness was reported in one alter only. Research involving the measurement of EEG activity elicited by the presentation of pictures suggests that different alters can be associated by distinct brain responses. In other respects, a group of Dutch neuroscientists have used PET to demonstrate that different senses of self are associated with different patterns of regional cerebral blood flow in various regions of the brain.⁴³

Recurrent traumatic wounds are seen in certain individuals with DID. In one case, a woman whose mother had burned her with cigarettes over and over again displayed red marks on her skin when one alter surfaced. In another case, a woman addicted to heroin in one personality, but not in the others, exhibited needle track marks when she switched to that alter.⁴⁴

Clearly, switches between different alters can be accompanied by distinct physiological changes. Researchers are still puzzled by this tantalizing phenomenon. The bodily alterations associated with switches support the view that changes in mental states and events are accompanied by modifications in physiological activity. In other words, change the mind and you change the brain and the body. It is noteworthy that these modifications disappear following successful psychotherapeutic integration of the various alters.

Yogi Satyamurti, whose story was told at the beginning of this chapter, appeared to have stopped his heart for several days and then started it again. Other yogis have demonstrated that it is possible to voluntarily influence the temperature of the body through the practice of tummo meditation. Harvard researcher Herbert Benson found that practitioners of this form of meditation, who had learned to warm themselves while meditating in cold Himalayan mountains, could deliberately raise the temperature of their fingers and toes, by amounts ranging from 31.5°Celsius (C) up to 8.3°C, or 89°Fahrenheit (F) to 47°F. Benson proposed that these yogis were probably able to deliberately influence the widening of blood vessels (vasodilatation) in their toes and fingers.⁴⁵

Impressive voluntary control over bodily processes that usually are not supposed to be influenced voluntarily has also been seen in Westerners, and not in conjunction with yogic practices. Helen Flanders Dunbar, a psychoanalyst who specialized in psychosomatic medicine, described the cases of two Americans who could apparently produce urticaria, or wheals (raised red areas) on the skin, at will. One was able to generate an urticarial wheal at any selected spot on his forehead simply by “thinking about it.” The other was a physician who was able to produce urticaria on his trunk and arms.⁴⁶

In the 1970s, physicist Elmer Green and his wife, Alyce, a psychologist, brought Dutch yoga practitioner Jack Schwarz into their laboratory at the Menninger Foundation in Topeka, Kansas. Schwarz told the Greens that by voluntarily controlling his brain waves, he could control his blood pressure, heart rate, and the pain of physical trauma. Controlling his brain activity, he explained, involved moving his attention toward his “higher self,” the omnipotent and infinite intelligence within him.

Schwarz demonstrated the power of the mind over the body by putting a long, unwashed sail-maker’s needle through his biceps with no resultant pain, bleeding, or infection.⁴⁷ At the same time, his brain’s electrical activity, which was measured with an EEG device, dropped suddenly into the alpha band.

Today, the concept of a psychosomatic network requires mind and body to constitute an indivisible unity. This holistic conception has helped greatly to diminish the resistance of physicians and scientists to the idea that psychological factors can play an important role in health. For many contemporary PNI researchers, the psychological component of the psychosomatic network can simply be reduced to the brain. Oakley Ray, a professor of psychology and psychiatry at Vanderbilt University, writes that “our thoughts, our feelings, our beliefs, our hopes, are nothing more than chemical and electrical activity in the nerve cells of our brain.” ⁴⁸

The words “nothing more” are always a signpost to the reductionist view of life—in this case, the belief that the mind is identical with brain activity. I agree wholeheartedly with Emily Williams Kelly, a research psychologist at the University of Virginia, that this reductionist view avoids the problem of how subjective, nonmaterial mental events such as thoughts, emotions, and mental images can lead to very specific changes in the objective, physical body.⁴⁹ This simplistic perspective fails miserably to explain how, for example, people can intentionally stop their heart or mentally produce wheals on their skin.

This transduction process—the conversion of a signal from one system to another, in this case, from the mind to the body—still remains very mysterious. Candace Pert has hypothesized that information is the missing element that allows us to transcend the Cartesian mind–body split since it touches both mind and body. Indeed, information is processed both by the mind and the body, and it is not dependent on time and space, as matter and energy.⁵⁰ It is also possible that a larger Individuality or Self, of which our ordinary waking mind is usually not aware, is involved in the transduction of mental events into specific bodily changes. This idea was proposed a century ago by the brilliant Frederic Myers.⁵¹

Hypnosis is now a fairly common tool in health management—it is used, for example, by people who wish to quit smoking or get past a fear of dentists so that they can take better care of their teeth. Astonishingly, despite our familiarity with it, science still has no definitive idea of what it is or how it works. And, as the next chapter demonstrates, the ability of hypnosis to harness the mind’s power is being explored and utilized in some surprising ways.