To climb to Machu Picchu, the fortress city of the Incas, is a formidable task. One crosses a sixteen-thousand-foot pass in the high Andes, where the oxygen is already low enough to cause giddiness, and once the city is in sight above the clouds, its walls are reached by three thousand stone steps. This was the last stronghold captured by Pizarro when he conquered Peru in 1532. One is astonished to think that foot-runners connected Machu Picchu with every village along the two thousand miles of the Incan empire. They were swift messengers of almost inhuman endurance. They ran barefoot, covering immense distances every day—at times the equivalent of two or three Olympic marathons. Some of their trails began at the height of a mountain peak in the Colorado Rockies and ascended more than a mile higher.
It must have been these runners, the eyes and ears of the emperor Atahualpa, who warned him of the approaching Spanish. By treachery, Pizarro collected a fortune in ransom when he kidnapped (and later murdered) Atahualpa. One hopes the legends are true which say that the most priceless Incan gold was secreted away in time. (Pizarro, who was unusually greedy, even for a conquistador, was himself murdered by jealous rivals in 1541.)
If you think of the human brain as the fortress at Machu Picchu, then it too must have runners to carry its commands to the farthest outposts of its empire—in this case, the big toe. The physical routes are certainly visible—the central nervous system runs down the spinal column, branching out on either side at each vertebra in the backbone; these major nerves then branch into millions of tinier pathways that communicate to every region of the body. The early anatomists saw the major nerves in the sixteenth century, but the nervous system kept a secret. Who were the runners that took the messages to and from the brain?
Many people still think that the nerves work electrically, like a telegraph system, because until fifteen years ago, that is what medical texts contended. However, in the 1970s, a series of important discoveries began, centering on a new class of minute chemicals called neurotransmitters. As their name implies, these chemicals transmit nerve impulses; they act in our bodies as “communicator molecules,” whereby the neurons of the brain can talk to the rest of the body.
Neurotransmitters are the runners that race to and from the brain, telling every organ inside us of our emotions, desires, memories, intuitions, and dreams. None of these events are confined to the brain alone. Likewise, none of them are strictly mental, since they can be coded into chemical messages. Neurotransmitters touch the life of every cell. Wherever a thought wants to go, these chemicals must go too, and without them, no thoughts can exist. To think is to practice brain chemistry, promoting a cascade of responses throughout the body. We have already seen that intelligence, as know-how, pervades the physiology—now it has acquired a material basis.
That gives away the plot of this chapter, but with none of the drama. In truth, no other recent event in biomedicine has been as revolutionary as these discoveries. The arrival of neurotransmitters on the scene makes the interaction of mind and matter far more mobile and flowing than ever before—far closer to the model of the river. They also help fill the gap that apparently separates mind and body, one of the deepest mysteries that man has faced since he began to consider what he is.
At first, around 1973, it seemed that only two neurotransmitters were needed, one to activate a distant cell, such as a muscle, and the other to slow down the activity. Two brain chemicals, acetylcholine and norepinephrine, do just that; they are the “go” and “slow down” signals of the nervous system. They were considered revolutionary at the time, because they proved that the impulse sent from one nerve cell to the next was not electrical but chemical in nature. All at once, the accepted notion of tiny sparks jumping from neuron to neuron was rendered obsolete. But the new chemical model at first continued to preserve the basic theory that only two signals were necessary. Man-made computers operate using just this kind of binary switch, and apparently so did the brain.
Then, as molecular biologists around the world began to investigate more deeply, numerous new neurotransmitters cropped up, each with a different molecular structure and apparently a different message to deliver. Structurally, many of them were related, being built up as peptides, complex chains of amino acids of the same kind as those which appear in the proteins that make up every cell, including brain cells.
A great many riddles began to be solved, directly or indirectly, as these discoveries emerged. If you take a sleeping cat, remove a tiny portion of its spinal fluid, and inject it into a cat that is awake, the second cat will immediately fall asleep. This is because a cat’s brain puts its body to sleep chemically, with its own internal sleeping potion. In order for the animal to wake up again, the opposite chemical, a wake-up signal, must be injected into the spinal column.
In humans, where the same chemical mechanisms operate, the body is awakened in the morning not by a rude internal alarm but by a series of timed signals, at first mild, then progressively stronger, that lift us from deep sleep by stages. The whole process involves a gradual transition, in four or five waves, from the biochemistry of sleep to the biochemistry of wakefulness. If this process is interrupted, you do not come as fully awake as you should—the biochemistry of two distinct phases has been mixed. That is why parents of newborns, having to get up several times during the night, feel that they are never quite normal during the day. Alarm clocks also jolt us out of our natural wake-up patterns, giving rise to grogginess that may persist all day, until the next round of sleeping-and-waking readjusts the mind-body chemistry.
Here is a related example. All camels exhibit an unusual tolerance for high levels of pain—they can calmly chew on thorns while at the same time being beaten with a stick by an irate camel driver. Curious researchers examined camels’ brain cells and found that they produce large quantities of a specific biochemical that, if injected into other animals, causes them to ignore pain, too. Sleep and pain tolerance, it is now known, thus depend on precise chemical messengers produced in the brain.
One by one, various other functions that were once “all in your head” have been connected to specific neurotransmitters. Schizophrenics suffering acutely from hallucinations and psychotic thoughts often improve dramatically if put on a kidney dialysis machine, which filters impurities from the blood. As we saw, brain researchers have established that a neurotransmitter called dopamine exists in abnormally high levels in the brains of schizophrenics. Current chemical treatment of the disorder entails using psycho-active drugs that suppress dopamine; perhaps the dialysis machine is actually removing it, or a related by-product, from the bloodstream.
By the mid-1980s, barely ten years after the original breakthrough, more than fifty such neurotransmitters and neuropeptides were known. All fifty can be manufactured on one side of the synapses between our neurons, and once they cross the synapses, all fifty can be received by the receptor sites on the other side. This implies an incredible flexibility to communicate from cell to cell. The individual neuron was now seen to be a producer of messages that did not just say “yes” or “no,” as a computer does. The brain’s vocabulary is far larger, encompassing thousands of combinations of separate signals, with no end in sight, since new neurotransmitters continue to be discovered at a fast rate.
What kind of messages do nerve cells exchange with one another? The answer is tantalizing, for certain segments of our chemical vocabulary seem to be just as specific as ordinary speech, while others are highly ambiguous. Our tolerance for pain, like the camel’s, depends on the class of biochemicals discovered in the 1970s called endorphins and enkephalins, which act as the body’s natural painkillers. The word endorphin means “internal morphine,” and enkephalin means “inside the brain.” And that is their story: they are like a version of morphine produced by the brain itself.
This hitherto unknown ability to make internal opiates proved very exciting. It was already suspected that the body must be able to regulate the sensation of pain. Although insistent, pain does not always register on our awareness. Strong emotions, for example, can override pain signals from the body, as when a mother rushes to save her child from a burning house or a wounded soldier fights on, ignoring the pain of his injuries. Under more ordinary circumstances, all of us to some extent can take our attention away from a minor pain—we don’t notice a sore throat, for instance, if we are talking to someone with intense interest.
Despite this common experience of having the pain threshold rise and fall, no mechanism had ever accounted for it. Now medicine could explain it by using these internal painkillers, the endorphins and enkephalins, which every neuron in the body is able to produce at will. Very quickly the general public was told that the brain produces narcotics up to two hundred times stronger than anything you can buy on the street, with the added boon that our own painkillers seemed to be nonaddictive. Perhaps in the future a physician would anesthetize his patients by stimulating some region in their brains, giving Western medicine a scientific form of Chinese acupuncture.
Morphine and endorphins both block pain by filling a certain receptor on the neuron and preventing other chemicals that carry the message of pain from coming in. Without these chemicals, there can be no sensation of pain, no matter how much physical provocation is present. Using this model, a molecule of endorphin is like a specific word, the word painkiller. One can imagine that whenever the word pain comes to the brain’s attention, it has the option of sending painkiller back as its answer. Unfortunately, this simple picture was clouded over by later research.
It was found that levels of endorphins in the body do not correspond on a one-to-one basis with how much pain is being felt. This can be proved with placebos, or dummy drugs. Patients who are in pain can often be relieved by receiving a placebo, usually a coated sugar pill, which they are told is a powerful painkiller. Not everyone will respond to this, but generally between 30 percent and 60 percent will report that their pain went away. This result, called the placebo effect, has been noted for centuries, but it is highly unpredictable. The doctor cannot tell in advance which patients will benefit or to what extent.
Why should a totally inert sugar pill relieve pain in the first place, even the stabbing pain of peptic ulcers or traumatic surgery? Endorphins, it was now discovered, must hold the answer. A drug called naloxone acts as a chemical antagonist to morphine, meaning that it has the ability to knock morphine molecules out of a receptor site. When naloxone is administered on top of a painkiller, the sensation of pain instantly floods back. As it turns out, the same thing will happen with the placebo. The patients whose pain went away from the sugar pill reported that it returned again after they took naloxone. This implied that endorphins and morphine must basically be the same drug, the difference being that one is manufactured by the body and the other by the opium poppy.
But once again, it was only a certain percentage of patients who showed this result. Naloxone made the pain return in full force for certain patients; for others, the placebo effect still worked totally; and for still others, only a little of the pain came back. Researchers found themselves in a state of renewed confusion, where they remain today. Endorphins are certainly internal painkillers, but uncovering these new molecules was not the whole answer.
Pain studies have now shown that morphine is not chemically identical to endorphins, that endorphins interact in a more complex way than narcotic drugs, and that any form of treatment for pain relief—morphine, endorphins, acupuncture, or hypnosis—is highly variable in its effectiveness. It was also discovered that endorphins cannot be made into satisfactory pharmaceuticals: our internal painkillers are just as addictive as heroin if given by injection.
Soon, the same frustrating complications that scientists ran up against with the endorphins and enkephalins spread to all the other neuro-transmitters. It turns out that a neuron does not simply catch a signal from a neighboring nerve cell and pass it along untouched to the next synapse. That is only one of its choices. Although no one can describe exactly how neurons receive their chemical messages or how they transport them down their own axons, or trunks, it is known that the process must be very flexible. The nerve cell can change the message en route, turning the chemical it received at point A into a different one at point B. The receptor sites on the ends of nerve cells can also modify themselves to receive different types of messages; the sending station on the other side of the synapse is equally versatile.
For our purposes, this confusion is actually a highly encouraging state of affairs, because it proves that the body cannot be understood without the missing ingredient of intelligence. The physical makeup of endorphins, or any other neurochemical, is not nearly as important as their know-how—how they choose their sites, what triggers them to act, how they “talk” to the rest of the body in precise coordination, and so on. Even in the midst of a genuine chemical revolution, mind is superior to matter. In fact, it now appears that the molecular structure of any neuro-transmitter is completely secondary to the brain’s ability to employ it.
It came as a tremendous surprise to cell biologists that, as far as molecules go, neurotransmitters are nothing special. All of the protein in our bodies is built up from chains of twenty basic amino acids, and these chains can be further arranged into longer strands called peptides. Neuropeptides have their own signature, making them distinct from the other peptide chains in the body, but the same factory, our DNA, makes all of them. DNA is the source for all the proteins that repair cells, build new ones, replace missing or defective pieces of the genetic code, heal cuts and bruises, and so forth.
Without bothering to invent a new class of chemicals, the DNA has figured out another use for its familiar raw materials, the amines, amino acids, and peptides. Once again, it is just the ability to make these different products that is crucial. There is nothing special about the molecules themselves, even though their discovery by a molecular biologist may be special to science.
Where does the ability to make the neurotransmitters come from, then? Perhaps we should look to the contribution made by the mind. After all, it is not really the adrenaline molecule that makes a mother rush into a burning building to save her child or an endorphin molecule that protects her from feeling the flames. Love makes her rush in, and single-minded determination protects her from pain. It just happens that these attributes of her mind have found a chemical pathway that the brain can follow to talk to the body.
Now we have arrived at the heart of the matter. Mind by any definition is nonmaterial, yet it has devised a way to work in partnership with these complicated communicator molecules. Their association is so close, as we have seen, that mind cannot be projected into the body without such chemicals. Yet these chemicals are not mind. Or are they?
The whole paradoxical situation was wittily summarized several years ago when the eminent English neurologist and Nobel Prize winner Sir John Eccles was asked to address a conference of parapsychologists, who were discussing the usual topics of ESP, telepathy, and psychokinesis—the ability to move physical objects with the mind. If you want to see real psychokinesis, he told his audience, then consider the feats of mind-over-matter performed in the brain. It is quite astonishing that with every thought, the mind manages to move the atoms of hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, and the other particles in the brain’s cells. It would appear that nothing is further apart than an insubstantial thought and the solid gray matter of the brain. The whole trick is somehow done without any apparent link.
The mystery of mind-over-matter has not been explained by biology, which prefers to push on to more and more complicated chemical structures operating at finer and finer levels of the physiology. It is still obvious that no one is ever going to find a particle, however minute, that nature has labeled “intelligence.” This is all the more apparent when we realize that all the matter in our bodies, large or small, has been designed with intelligence as a built-in feature. DNA itself, although acknowledged as the chemical mastermind of the body, is made up of essentially the same basic building blocks as the neurotransmitters it manufactures and regulates. DNA is like a brick factory that is also made out of bricks. (The great Hungarian mathematician John von Neumann, besides being a founder of the modern computer, was interested in robots of all types. He once invented, on paper, a truly ingenious machine, a robot that could build robots identical to itself—in other words, a self-reproducing machine. Our DNA has accomplished the same thing on a grand scale, since the human body is nothing more than variants of DNA built by DNA.)
You may find it easy to think of DNA, with its billions of genetic bits, as an intelligent molecule; certainly it must be smarter than a simple molecule like sugar. How smart can sugar be? But DNA is really just strings of sugar, amines, and other simple components. If these are not “smart” to begin with, then DNA couldn’t become smart just by putting more of them together. Following this line of reasoning, why isn’t the carbon or hydrogen atom in the sugar also smart? Perhaps it is. As we shall see, if intelligence is present in the body, it has to come from somewhere, and that somewhere may be everywhere.
If we follow the next step of the neurotransmitter story, we find ourselves faced with another quantum leap in complications, but surprisingly, the relation between mind and matter actually begins to clear up. The areas of the brain that mediate our emotions—the amygdala and the hypothalamus, which is also known as “the brain’s brain”—were both found to be particularly rich in all the substances in the neurotransmitter group. This implied that where thinking processes are abundant (meaning that many neurons are tightly clustered), so will be the chemicals associated with thinking. At this point there was still a rather well-defined division between chemicals that jumped the gap between brain cells and those that traveled from the brain down the bloodstream. (In my field, endocrinology, one of the defining qualities of a hormone is that it floats through the blood, a process that is generally much slower than the transmission speed of a nerve cell, which has been clocked at 225 miles per hour; a signal sent from head to toe takes less than l/50th of a second.)
Just when science thought it could isolate brain chemicals and categorize their sites, the body cropped up with its own complication. Researchers at the National Institute of Mental Health found receptors in equal abundance at other sites outside the brain. Starting in the early 1980s, receptors for neurotransmitters and neuropeptides were discovered on cells in the immune system called monocytes. “Brain” receptors on white cells in the blood?—it would be hard to exaggerate the significance of this discovery. In the past, it was thought that the central nervous system alone relayed messages to the body, rather like a complicated telephone system connecting the brain to all the organs it wanted to “talk” to. In this scheme, the neurons function like telephone lines conveying the brain’s signals—that is their unique function, shared by no other system in the physiology.
Now it was seen that the brain does not just send impulses traveling in straight lines down the axons, or trunks, of the neurons; it freely circulates intelligence throughout the body’s entire inner space. Unlike the neurons, which are fixed in place along the nervous system, the monocytes of the immune system travel through the bloodstream, giving them free access to every other cell in the body. Outfitted with a vocabulary to mirror the nervous system’s in its complexity, the immune system apparently sends and receives messages that are just as diverse. In fact, if being happy, sad, thoughtful, excited, and so on all require the production of neuropeptides and neurotransmitters in our brain cells, then the immune cells must also be happy, sad, thoughtful, excited—indeed, they must be able to express the full range of “words” that neurons do. Monocytes can be thought of in effect as circulating neurons.
With this one discovery, the concept of the intelligent cell took on full-fledged reality. One kind of localized intelligence was already well known, that possessed by the DNA in every cell. Since Watson and Crick mapped the structure of DNA in the early 1950s, investigation had proved that this remarkable, almost infinitely complex molecule encoded all the information necessary to create and sustain human life. But the intelligence of genes was seen primarily as fixed, because DNA itself is the stablest chemical in the body, and thanks to that stability, each of us is able to inherit genetic traits from our parents—blue eyes, curly hair, facial patterns, et cetera—and preserve them intact to pass on to our children.
The know-how carried by the neurotransmitters and neuropeptides represented something else altogether: the winged, fleeting, sentient intelligence of the mind. The wonder is that these “intelligent” chemicals are not only made by the brain, whose function is to think, but by the immune system, whose primary role is to protect us from disease. From the standpoint of a brain chemist, this sudden expansion of messenger molecules adds a new order of complexity to his work. But for us, the discovery of “floating” intelligence confirms the model of the body as a river. We needed a material basis for claiming that intelligence flows all through us, and now we have it.
Anyone can see that his mind is filled with a bewildering flood of impressions that are far too amorphous to pin down. To describe it, psychology is reduced to equally amorphous terms like the famous phrase stream of consciousness. Today, as if to fill that stream with water you can actually see and touch, brain researchers have found cascades of brain chemicals. But unlike a stream, these cascades have no banks; they flow anywhere and everywhere. They never cease this flow, either, for the smallest fraction of a second. A brain scientist in effect stops time to examine a cascade’s components. The chemicals he wants to find are extremely minute—it took three hundred thousand sheep brains to yield a single milligram of the molecule the brain uses to stimulate the thyroid. Nor are the cell receptors easy to grasp. They constantly dance on the surface of the cell walls and change their shape to receive new messages; any one cell may contain hundreds or even thousands of sites, only one or two of which can be analyzed at a time. Science learned more about brain chemistry in the last fifteen years than it knew in all of previous history, but we are all still like foreigners trying to learn English from scraps of paper found in the street.
No one has yet been able to grasp how the cascade of chemicals exactly patterns itself to do all the things a mind can do. Memory, recollection, dreaming, and all the other everyday activities of the mind remain a profound mystery as far as their physical mechanics is concerned. But now we know that the mind and body are like parallel universes. Anything that happens in the mental universe must leave tracks in the physical one.
Recently brain researchers have found a way to photograph a thought’s tracks in 3-D, like a hologram. The procedure, known as PET (positron-emission tomography), is done by injecting the bloodstream with glucose whose carbon molecules have been tagged with radioisotopes. Glucose is the brain’s sole food, which it uses much faster than do ordinary tissues. Therefore, when the injected glucose reaches the brain, its marker molecules of carbon can be picked out as the brain uses them, and thus pictured in three dimensions on a monitor, much the same way a CAT scan is produced. Watching these marker molecules shift around while the brain thinks, scientists saw that each distinct event in the universe of mind—such as a sensation of pain or a strong memory—triggers a new chemical pattern in the brain, not just at a single site but at several. The image looks different for every thought, and if one could extend the portrait to be full-length, there is no doubt that the whole body changes at the same time, thanks to the cascades of neurotransmitters and related messenger molecules.
As you see it right now, your body is the physical picture, in 3-D, of what you are thinking. This remarkable fact escapes our notice for several reasons. One is that the physical outline of the body does not change drastically with every thought. Even so, the whole body quite obviously projects thoughts. We literally read other people’s minds from the constant play of their facial expressions; without marking it, we also register the thousandfold gestures of body language as a sign of their moods and intentions toward us. Films made by sleep laboratories disclose that we change position dozens of times during the night, obeying commands from the brain that we are unconscious of.
Secondly, we don’t see our bodies as projected thoughts because many physical changes that thinking causes are unnoticeable. They involve minute alterations of cell chemistry, body temperature, electrical charge, blood pressure, and so on, which do not register on our focus of attention. You can be assured, however, that the body is fluid enough to mirror any mental event. Nothing can move without moving the whole.
The latest discoveries in neurobiology build an even stronger case for the parallel universes of mind and body. When researchers looked further, beyond the nervous system and the immune system, they began to discover the same neuropeptides and receptors for them in other organs, such as the intestines, kidneys, stomach, and heart. There is every expectation of finding them elsewhere, too. This means that your kidneys can “think,” in the sense that they can produce the identical neuropeptides found in the brain. Their receptor sites are not simply sticky patches. They are questions waiting for answers, framed in the language of the chemical universe. It is very likely that if we had the whole dictionary and not just our few scraps, we would find that every cell speaks as fluently as we do.
Inside us, the questions and answers go on forever. Just by itself, a single gland like the thyroid has so much to say to the brain, to its fellow endocrine glands, and through them to all the body, that its cascade of conversation influences dozens of vital functions, such as growth, metabolic rate, and much more. How fast you think, how tall you are, and the dimensions of your eyes, for example, all depend in part on advice from the thyroid. We can safely conclude, then, that mind is not confined to the brain by some neat division set up for our own convenience. Mind is projected everywhere in inner space.
One of the most forward-looking and accomplished researchers in the field of brain chemistry, Dr. Candace Pert, director of the brain biochemistry division at the National Institute of Mental Health, has pointed out that it is quite arbitrary to say that a biochemical like DNA or a neurotransmitter belongs to the body rather than the mind. DNA is almost as much sheer knowledge as it is matter. Dr. Pert refers to the entire mind-body system as a “network of information,” shifting the emphasis away from the gross level of matter toward the subtler level of knowledge.
Is there really any reason to keep mind and body apart at all? In her own writings, Pert prefers to use one term for both—bodymind. If this word sticks, it will clearly indicate that a wall has come crashing down. Pert does not have all of medical science behind her yet, but that may change very quickly. It is becoming clearer every day that the mind and body are amazingly alike. Insulin, a hormone always identified with the pancreas, is now known to be produced by the brain also, just as brain chemicals like transferon and CCK are produced by the stomach.
This shows that our neat division of the body into nervous system, endocrine system, digestive system, and so on is only partially right and may soon be outmoded. It has now been absolutely proved that the same neurochemicals influence the whole bodymind. Everything is interconnected at the level of the neuropeptide; therefore, to separate these areas is simply bad science.
A body that can “think” is far different from the one medicine now treats. For one thing, it knows what is happening to it, not just through the brain, but everywhere there is a receptor for messenger molecules, which means on every cell. This explains a great deal about drugs and their side effects that had not been known. Some drugs have a bewildering number of side effects. If I consult my Physician’s Desk Reference, which comprehensively lists the medications that a doctor can prescribe, I can find page after page under the listing for corticosteroids. The most familiar corticosteroid (or just steroid) is cortisone, but the whole family is widely prescribed to treat burns, allergies, arthritis, postoperative inflammation, and dozens of other conditions.
If you didn’t know about receptor sites, steroids would appear highly peculiar. Let us say that I prescribe steroids to a woman who is suffering from a difficult case of arthritis. The steroids would bring down the inflammation in her joints dramatically, but then a host of strange things might happen. She could begin to complain of being fatigued and depressed. Abnormal fatty deposits might begin to show under her skin, and her blood vessels could become so brittle that she would develop large bruises that are very slow to heal. What could link these entirely divergent symptoms?
The answer lies at the level of the receptors. Corticosteroids replace some of the secretions of the adrenal cortex, a yellowish pad on the top of the adrenal glands. At the same time, they suppress the other adrenal hormones, as well as secretions from the pituitary gland, which is located in the brain. As soon as it is given, the steroid rushes in and floods all the receptors throughout the body that are “listening” for a certain message. When a receptor becomes filled, what follows is not a simple action. The cell can interpret the adrenal “message” in many ways, depending on how long the site stays filled. In this case, the receptor stays filled indefinitely. (The fact that other messages are not being received is important, as is the loss of innumerable connections with the other endocrine glands.)
The cell can exhibit extreme reactions from filling one receptor. By analogy, look at a moth hanging under the eaves on a summer night. In a male moth, the fuzzy antennae on its head are actually receptor sites that have extended outside the body. As the sun sets, the moth waits for a signal from a female moth in his vicinity, who is emitting a special molecule called a pheromone. Moths are tiny creatures, and the number of pheromones they can send through the air is infinitesimal compared to the total volume of air and its immense freight of pollen, dust, water, and other pheromones being secreted by animals of every kind, including man. One would hardly suspect that two moths can communicate over any sizable distance.
But when a single pheromone molecule lands on the male’s antenna, his behavior is transformed. He swiftly homes in on the female, begins an elaborate courtship ritual in the air, and proceeds with the act of mating. Biologically speaking, the only thing that causes this complicated behavior is one molecule.
When I give steroids to an arthritis patient, trillions of molecules and receptor sites are involved. That is why the blood vessels, skin, brain, fat cells, and so on all exhibit their different responses. If I go to my desk reference, the long-term consequences of staying on steroids include diabetes, osteoporosis, suppression of the immune system (making a person more susceptible to infections and cancer), peptic ulcers, internal bleeding, elevated cholesterol, and much more. One might even include death among these side effects, because taking steroids for a long period causes the adrenal cortex to shrivel (an example of how an organ will atrophy if not used). If the steroid is withdrawn too quickly, the adrenal gland does not have time to regenerate. The patient is left with inadequate defenses against stress, which adrenal hormones help to buffer. He can go to the dentist to have a wisdom tooth extracted, a stress that is usually well within the normal limits, but deprived of adrenal hormones, he can go into shock. A tooth extraction could even kill him.
Take all of these details together, and what you see is that steroids can cause literally anything to happen. They may be the immediate cause or just the first domino—the distinction makes little difference to the patient. To her, there is no difference between the osteoporosis caused by steroids and the “real thing.” The same holds for depression, diabetes, or death. A single messenger has caused them all. In truth there is no such thing as a single messenger—each one is a strand in the body’s web of intelligence. Touch one strand, and the whole web trembles.
I realize that this makes drugs look much more dangerous than we had thought, even in an era that is obsessed with cataloging medical disasters. We are used to a more limited idea of what a side effect is—a touch of the bitter with the sweet, like the thorn that comes with the rose or the hangover with the bottle of wine. Instead, a side effect balloons out into anything the body can think of. Generally we are protected from serious harm because the body reacts along certain narrow lines. A patient who takes an aspirin might experience bleeding in his stomach lining but not a heart attack. However, every cell in the body has a wide latitude for action—it is a conscious being who understands the world around it. The side effects in my desk reference are just the ones that have been observed so far.
I recently read a story of an internist who was baffled when one of his patients, a man in his late seventies, suddenly began to act paranoid. The man was obsessed by the idea that robbers were going to break into his house, and he bought a gun to keep under his pillow. One night he terrified his wife by leaping out of bed at three in the morning, running downstairs with his pistol, and searching wildly for the intruders he thought were behind every chair. Knowing that he was hallucinating dangerously, the wife rushed him to the internist. The patient had no prior history of mental illness and was on no medications other than digitalis, which he took to stabilize his heart rhythm. Considering the patient’s age, a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease seemed imminent.
However, the internist consulted a neurologist to read the patient’s CAT scan. Nothing abnormal appeared on it, but the neurologist said, “I bet this man is hallucinating from the digitalis.” In thirty years of practice, the internist, who is also a professor of medicine in New York City, had never seen this side effect, although he had heard of it, barely. He reduced the digitalis, and within ten days the patient returned to normal. It seems quite freakish that a highly specific heart medication should lead to insanity. If this patient had hallucinated a few decades ago, when the desk reference did not list such a bizarre side effect, no doctor would have believed it; today, the internist believed it only after an extensive battery of tests ruled out everything else.
What this case teaches is that you can never tell what the body is thinking, or where. It is entirely possible that the man’s heart went insane, in the sense that it toppled the first domino and triggered the onset of his paranoia. The brain and the heart share many of the same receptor sites; more important, they share the same DNA, which implies that a heart cell can behave like a brain cell, a liver cell, or any other kind of cell. After open-heart surgery, patients sometimes have psychotic breaks and begin hallucinating. Flat on their backs, groggy from deprivation of oxygen to the brain, and locked into the blank sterility of an intensive care unit, they suddenly think that little green men are marching up and down the sheets—such is the accepted explanation for their episodes. Could it be that in fact it is the heart that is hallucinating here? Simply the trauma of the surgery could make the heart think that reality has run wild, and that is what it tells the brain.
The discovery of neurotransmitters, neuropeptides, and messenger molecules of all kinds has vastly extended our concept of intelligence. But if every cell has an endless number of messages it can send and receive, it is also clear that only a small fraction are activated at one time. Who or what controls the messages? That turns out to be an explosive question. In a chemistry lab, reactions will run automatically as soon as the experiment starts; it is just a matter of mixing one chemical with another. Yet, someone has to take the chemicals off the shelf to begin with.
Medicine has traditionally preferred to ignore this fact as it applies to the human body. Now we see that with thousands of chemicals on its shelf, a cell has not only to choose some, mix them together, and analyze the results. It has to make the chemicals in the first place, finding thousands of ways to create new molecules out of basically a handful of elements—carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen. To do that requires a mind. So, by following the story of neuropeptides, we have ultimately arrived at a dramatic shift in worldview. For the first time in the history of science, mind has a visible scaffold to stand upon. Before this, science declared that we are physical machines that have somehow learned to think. Now it dawns that we are thoughts that have learned to create a physical machine.
EXPANDING THE TOPIC
Placing mind before brain, the main point of this chapter, remains very hard for some people, in particular the researchers who devote their entire careers to exploring the brain. By developing ever more sophisticated brain scans, such as fMRI, which can look at brain activity “lighting up” in real time, neuroscience has entered a kind of golden age. New findings emerge literally by the month, and in some circles it is confidently promised that very soon the mystery of the mind will be completely solved.
This is a promise that will never be kept if science proceeds by assuming that brain = mind. Think about music. A piano sonata is written by Mozart, using a completely mental process. He writes the notes down on paper, and the sonata can be performed on the piano. Now imagine that a scientist comes along and says, “I’ve been examining how pianos work. I’ve looked at the keys and strings down to the molecular level. I can tell you how the piano’s mechanism registers the finest nuances of Mozart’s sonata. Very soon we will know exactly how he composed everything he ever wrote.”
The claim is nonsense, because dissecting a piano tells you nothing about how music is composed. Likewise, examining the human brain down to the subtlest chemical reactions inside neurons and across the synaptic gaps that separate them says nothing about where thoughts come from. This is the simplest refutation of materialism one can offer, and yet it has profound consequences.
Let’s ask the most basic question. How does the brain produce the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and textures of the three-dimensional world? In other words, when you see a red apple, where does its redness come from? Your brain is completely dark inside; there is no light anywhere in any part of the visual cortex, much less the color red. This mystery doesn’t bother most scientists, even brain scientists. They would simply respond that apples are red, and how the brain registers this fact comes down to chemical reactions in the visual cortex. But the notion that the color red exists “out there” in Nature is simply wrong.
Light is transmitted by photons, which are colorless; in fact, they are invisible. There is no brightness “out there” as photons sweep from the stars and certainly no brightness inside the brain’s total darkness. So if light’s brightness is neither “in here” nor “out there,” why is the sun so bright that you can’t look at it with the naked eye for more than a few seconds?
Light’s brightness and color, along with everything else we perceive, come from “conscious agents,” a term coined by the farseeing cognitive scientist Donald D. Hoffman of the University of California, Irvine. He proposes that the only reality we can know is the reality created by consciousness. If there is anything that is real but beyond the human mind, then it won’t be accessible. A conscious agent doesn’t have to be human. Every animal species experiences a reality that conforms to its nervous system, so that a dog’s image of sound reaches much higher than the human ear can perceive, while the hearing of a humpback whale reaches much lower (whales can hear one another’s songs for hundreds of miles underwater). Some snakes, including pythons and rattlesnakes, can detect infrared light through specialized “pit organs” located in their jaws, and so they “see” into a dimension entirely closed off to human perception.
Conscious agents fascinated me because the ancient Vedic rishis were in complete agreement with the notion that consciousness is the source of reality. They didn’t push the everyday world of the five senses completely out of the picture. Instead they gave it a lower status known as Maya, a Sanskrit word usually translated as “illusion”—it comes up later in this book. Maya is the apparent reality “out there” that all of us naïvely accept at face value, but which turns out to be no more real than the movie projected on the screen in a cinema. Consciousness serves as the projector whose light casts these images while itself remaining pure light, with no images at all.
Let me go into this subject a little more philosophically than I did in the original Quantum Healing. The ancient sages of India, and all philosophers since then, explored the mind by going inward. But in a scientific age, we have to ask: How can thinking about the mind be better than gathering hard facts about the brain?
Because data only has meaning given a certain way of seeing it. This point was made in the one book almost every college student reads (if they read any) in the philosophy of science, Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, published in 1962. Kuhn shattered the notion of objective progress in science by arguing that given their starting assumptions, every scientific scheme for explaining Nature—what he called a paradigm—is right on its own terms.
This groundbreaking insight went back to 1947, when Kuhn, then a graduate student at Harvard, was wrestling with how wrong Aristotle had been. Aristotelian physics was the first systematic explanation of Nature in mechanical terms, the cornerstone of Western science that made Copernicus, Newton, and Einstein possible. And yet a brilliant mind like Aristotle’s arrived at completely wrong conclusions about such basic things as why objects fall to earth or what heat is. Suddenly Kuhn had an epiphany: What we call Aristotle’s mistakes in fact weren’t mistakes at all. If you accept the starting assumptions behind Aristotelian physics, its description of Nature was valid.
Kuhn seemed to be saying that Aristotle was just as right as Newton, which to most people, including probably every physicist, makes no sense. In our time, the acceptance of scientific progress is all but universal, and the triumphs of modern technology are undeniable. Yet no one has rebutted Kuhn’s point that we view Nature through our own paradigm, our worldview. The history of science is a constant stream of shifting paradigms, one after another. There is no way to step outside the paradigm you totally believe in.
But what if the current paradigm happens to be absolutely right? A Theory of Everything has been on the horizon for decades, and we are told that it’s only a matter of time before the theory is complete. Kuhn’s point is that an absolutely correct theory, no matter how much data you feed into it, cannot be achieved. All you can achieve is the fulfillment of the paradigm you believe in. Eventually problems will arise that cannot be solved without shattering the present paradigm so that a new one can be formed.
To a doctor, spontaneous remission from cancer posed just such a problem. As long as your medical paradigm separated mind and body, no way existed for consciousness (including beliefs, expectations, fears, wishes, faith, and hope) to influence the daily life of cells. Looking beyond medicine, we have to consider consciousness as a whole. If the mind can influence the body, what do we mean by mind? If brain = mind, the answer to all ills should be a host of super-pills that alter brain function, steering it in the direction we want it to go. In effect, this is where neuroscience thinks it’s heading, because the old paradigm says so. There is literally no room for consciousness being the agent of change.
In the years since Quantum Healing was first published, my own thinking has become more sophisticated about the so-called hard problem of connecting mind and brain. Anyone who flatly says that brain = mind is turning their backs on what the philosophy of science teaches.
1. Theories are right about what they include and wrong about what they exclude.
2. No model of reality is big enough to explain reality.
3. Data has no meaning unless it is interpreted, and interpretations are bound by the observer’s starting assumptions.
In a word, everyone has a story, and everyone believes their story. Even contradictory stories can be valid and fit the same data. This startling conclusion applies to everyday life all the time. Competing stories are told in divorce court when marriages break apart, in criminal court when prosecution and defense do battle, and in the corridors of medicine when two doctors have different concepts of healing. Sticking to your story convinces you that you’re telling the truth when in fact you are just defending a way of seeing.
The story told by neuroscience, that brain = mind, is particularly weak. There is absolutely no data to indicate that neurons can think; they merely light up on an fMRI as thinking occurs, which isn’t the same thing. You could construct a setup so that a 100-watt bulb lights up over your head every time you have a bright idea, but that doesn’t mean the light bulb caused the idea. Neuroscience ignores this obvious flaw when it arrives at the same false conclusion, using neurons instead of a lightbulb.
The current state of total confidence in neuroscience requires thick blinders. Brain scientists don’t see the dead end they are walking toward when they promise that neurons are going to explain where thoughts come from. Not just thoughts, but no color, shape, sound, taste, and smell will ever be located in neurons, and what isn’t in a neuron isn’t in the brain, either.
It would be pointless to tear down the old paradigm without having something better to offer. In that regard, Quantum Healing pointed in the right direction. All the things the brain is credited with actually should be assigned to the mind. Once this shift is made, enormous untapped potential becomes available. Neuroscience will continue to do valuable things, in particular fixing the abnormalities and disorders of the brain connected to a wide range of diseases. You can’t play Mozart on a broken piano. Yet the mystery of Mozart’s genius, like all mysteries of the mind, must be solved on a different plane, beyond the physical.