Evidence that the mind and body influence each other abounds, and suggests something much stranger: that awareness isn't confined to the brain; it operates 'nonlocally,' beyond the biochemical lines between brain and, say, the immune system. This consciousness revolution is rattling the very foundation of Western medicine.
Anyone who didn't spend 1993 in a severely media-deprived locale—an Antarctic substation, say, or the lazily pinwheeling Russian space-lab—has probably heard the news: Rene Descartes, the 17th century mathematician who shaped the world as we know it, has been officially pronounced dead.
The eulogy was delivered by Bill Moyers, public television's own Piers Ploughman, via his phenomenally successful TV series and book-cum-transcript, Healing and the Mind. But in truth, the old philosophe's stiff—which had lain for three centuries in the halls of medicine like some glass-entombed Lenin—had become a bit of an embarrassment.
Immortalized in Bartlett's for his inscrutable, Popeye-like declamation, "I think therefore I am," Descartes was history's most persuasive partisan of the mind-body split, a bedrock notion of modern science. Mental events, the savant declared, occur in a separate domain from those of the flesh. Consciousness has no business in the mean streets of matter. As a result, medical science came to be dominated by a materialism so iron-clad that one 19th century theorist felt emboldened to quip that the mind's influence upon the mechanism of the body was like "the steam-whistle which accompanies the work of a locomotive engine but cannot influence its machinery."
The problem with this is obvious to anyone who ever had an unseemly thought about their junior-high English teacher and then blushed: "The soul's passions," said Aristotle, who had it right all along, "seem to be linked with a body, as the body undergoes modifications in their presence."
By 1900, medical science had at least begun to suspect as much. Freud and Janet's investigations of hysterical paralysis provided a benchmark of the mind's power over the body. Dr. Walter Cannon discovered in the 1930s that the central nervous system controlled many bodily functions and suggested that it in turn was subject to a regulatory mechanism "which in human beings we call the personality."
Still, if anyone could be credited with shutting off the refrigeration on Descartes' mortal remains and letting the aroma of a paradigm gone bad reach science's stuffed nostrils, it is Candace Pert, Ph.D., former chief of the Brain Biochemistry Section of the National Institute of Mental Health and co-discoverer of the brain's opiate receptors. Subsequent revelations that similar docking sites for "information molecules" (or neuropeptides) were myriad as stars scattered through the bodily firmament have launched the branch of medicine known as psychoneuroimmunology (PNI), which is busy codifying a self-evident truth: Mind and body have their hands so deep in each other's pockets it's hard to tell whose car keys are whose.
So-called messenger molecules are suddenly turning up everywhere—in the brain (particularly in the centers governing emotion), throughout the immune system, and in organs from gut to gland. Our thoughts and feelings are mediated by neuropeptides; diseases secrete neuropeptides; neuropeptides may be crucial to the healing response. What Pert proved once and for all is that brain, nervous system, and immune system, far from being incommunicado, are at this very second hunched elbow-to-elbow at the espresso bar of the Chatterbox Cafe, animatedly sharing your most intimate particulars.
I met Pert four years ago when she was in town to speak at a healing conference. I was already well apprised of the mind-body factor, having suffered a hellacious bout with cancer that was accompanied by altered states more colorful than any I'd encountered in a lifetime of Buddhist meditation. Pert was just beginning to venture forth from the autoclaved precincts of official research to more new-age venues, trying out the PNI gospel on an audience more receptive than most of her colleagues. In her flowing orange floral-print dress, slinging her pointer over her shoulder with precision rifle-drill panache, her words ricocheting in breathless spurts, she was like some hip diva of science. The next day, recognizing a kindred glimmer, we decided to play hooky from that afternoon's lectures for a picnic lunch in the mountains.
Though she may tone it down at phlegmier scientific gatherings, Pert at ease seems on the verge of autoelectrocution from a surfeit of cranial wattage. "Emotions exist in two realms," she told me between exclamations about the view from a dizzying curve that sent gravel rattling into our wheel rims. "One is the mind. The other is the realm of living matter. Of course, science expects you to dutifully exclude the soul. But I can't. The whole thing's vibrating back and forth. We're actually talking about music."
She hazarded that each neuropeptide, the first of which has burgeoned from five just a few years ago to over five dozen, may "evoke a unique 'tone' that is equivalent to a mood state." I pictured mind and body as a thousand-octave piano, with every note—from the highest glissando of altruism to the middle-C of fight-or-flight to bass-heavy autonomic arpeggios—as part of a seamless, interdigitated boogie-woogie.
Staggering stuff: What PNI has shown us is that the human being is a walking biological Heisenberg Principle, in which the observer's thoughts, feelings, and attitudes can have measurable effects on physical reality. Within the margins of its homeostatic aloofness, the "It" of our own biology is exquisitely responsive to the "I" of subjective experience.
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