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Donivan Bessinger, MD writes: First, we must come to terms with the fact that the mind and the body are not separate "beings." For thousands of years, we humans (at least in the West) have been thinking of our Selves as different from our bodies, and perhaps from our souls as well. Yet the more we know about the mind and the body, the more it is apparent that we function as one unit. For example, it is not the case that only the body can have cancer. It is the whole being which has (and reacts to) cancer, or to any other condition of life. It is also true that the whole body reacts to conditions in the mind-psyche. This is most strikingly seen in a recent report of mind-body interactions in patients with multiple personality. These patients act as if several different people lived in the same body, alternately changing places. One person seems to be in charge at one time, then another takes control. One such adult patient was very allergic to orange juice, and broke out in hives any time he drank it. Yet, when his "little boy" personality was in charge, he enjoyed orange juice, and did not have any noticable reaction to it. Another man had a muscle weakness disease that was medically well-documented; yet in another of his personalities, his muscle function immediately became normal. It is an inescapable fact that mind and body interact. The ideas by which we live can affect both the structure and the function of our bodies. Medical scientists have often tended to be skeptical on that point, but now the scientific question is not `Is it true?', but `How does it work?' Secondly, if we are to have a language of psychological function, we must have a theory of the psyche, that is, a description of how we think the mind-psyche functions. One of the most interesting research frontiers is the study of psychoneurology. How are actions created or mediated in the mind? How does my idea (desire) to move get translated into many well-coordinated nerve impulses which move among many different centers in the brain and throughout the body? And how are ideas and memories stored, and how are they brought to consciousness? Indeed, what is consciousness? (11/24/02) |
