And these responses are no mere grace notes. Hypnosis, long considered a negligible medical therapy, has been successfully employed to treat children with congenital ichthyosis, so-called fishskin disease—a genetic illness. Meditation and relaxation techniques have been shown to affect blood platelets, norepinephrine receptors, and cortisol levels; biofeedback to influence phagocyte activity; mental imagery to enhance natural killer cell function in patients with metastatic cancer. In a now famous study, David Spiegel, M.D., of Stanford University showed that women with advanced breast cancer who took part in a psychological support group lived twice as long as those who did not take part, a benefit no known drug can claim.
Researchers are beginning to wonder if mind-body effects may even contribute to what physician-essayist Lewis Thomas called "the rare but spectacular phenomenon" of spontaneous remission of cancer. Researcher Caryle Hirshberg, Ph.D., a blunt, no-nonsense biochemist, is the coauthor of a near-legendary study that collates some 450 medically documented cases. This startling body of evidence—the One White Crow that disproves the thesis All Crows Are Black— suggests that such events, treated in most oncology texts as chimerical (if not unreal as a paper moon), could point to yet-unsuspected powers of body and mind.
When I spoke with her, Hirshberg, hammering on publication deadline, grumped only half-jokingly about having to write her acknowledgments page. "What am I supposed to say?" she asks, referring to her peers' initial skepticism. "Thanks for telling me not to even bother?" I mention a case the late Norman Cousins recounted concerning a San Diego woman whose cancer was so far advanced the tumor was "like a hand grenade under a thin sheathing of skin." The woman had been sent to his office at UCLA Medical School because she was resisting her doctors' urgent recommendations for a mastectomy.
Cousins thought there would be no harm teaching her a few visualization techniques. He showed her a stock mental exercise that usually succeeds in slightly raising the skin temperature of the hand. The woman turned out to be an exceptional subject: Her hand temperature shot up 14 degrees. When she returned to the hospital after two weeks of practicing various meditations, the tumor, to his amazement, had completely disappeared.
"Who knows what mind is capable of?" Hirshberg asks rhetorically. "For that matter, who knows what mind is? Certainly, it's thinking and feeling. But is mind only thinking, body only feeling? I mean, mind feels. Mind is also dreams, mind is altered states, mind is consciousness, consciousness is spirit. It's not like we scientists know.
"Maybe the Dalai Lama knows," she adds parenthetically. "I met him once, and I think if there's a light in the world, he's it. I sometimes think the kind of understanding he has is where we'll have to go to look at what we're calling PNI"
In a recent documentary, as sunlight streams in through the window from the icy, glittering peaks of the nearby Himalayas, the Dalai Lama can be seen bending over a desk, one hand pressing a jeweler's loupe to his eye, the other twirling a screwdriver in the entrails of an old-fashioned watch. "It is my nature," the exiled leader is saying. "As soon as I got a playtoy ... few minutes later, I try to open ... see what is inside." He giggles delightedly, holding the watch up for inspection, then turns shrewdly to the camera: "That's the way to learn something." He laughs again.
Try to open. See what is inside. Now imagine a whole society turning its mental jeweler's tools in the innards of the mind, investing 1,200 years in a top-priority, national Inner Space Program. For eras, while the world blustered through the age of steam, spit electricity's cold fire in the face of the night, and unleashed the railing demons of the atom, Tibetan followers of the Lord Buddha sat calmly by the flickering light of millions of yak-butter lamps, calipering the depth and breath of the soul, doing essential R&D on consciousness itself, souping up the spiritual software.
Westerners have viewed Tibetans as Mind-Body Masters on the World's Rooftop ever since French pilgrim Alexandra David-Neel secretly entered Lhasa and returned bearing stories of monks sitting in the snow, drying water-soaked sheets on their naked bodies (a feat she puckishly filed under "psychic sports"). More than a decade ago, Harvard cardiologist Herbert Benson, M.D., best known for his best-seller, The Relaxation Response, on the medical effects of meditation, decided to investigate.
With the Dalai Lama's blessing, he wired up monks in India's northern foothills with electronic measuring devices while they performed their sheet-drying stunt. To his amazement, their skin temperature rose as much as 17 degrees above normal, even though in such near-freezing weather the body invariably routes blood from the periphery to keep core organs warm. "If an ordinary person were to try this," Benson says, "they would shiver uncontrollably and perhaps even die. But here, within three to five minutes, the sheets started to steam and within 45 minutes were completely dry."
How is such a feat possible? Benson offers that the yogis may have somehow learned to induce "nonshivering thermogenesis," a metabolic state in which the body burns so-called brown fat—a substance thought to be metabolized only in hibernating animals. But he adds, "It's difficult to understand from what source such energy is emanating. By our calculations of the amount of heat generated, there must be an energy source in the body other than the ones we're currently aware of."
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