The Effect of Mind On the Body

 We continue with insights and excerpts from the article Our Perception of Time Changes How We Heal in this second posting.  The conclusion will be shared in the next posting.

In The Perception of Time Influences Healing Independent of Actual Time we learned that abstract psychological precepts, such as those that guide how we perceive the passage of time, can significantly impact physical health outcomes.

The idea of the mind’s influence on the body was investigated in a groundbreaking study conducted in 1979. Men in their 70s and 80s, spent a week in a facility entirely designed to resemble the 1950s, a period when the participants were 20 years younger. The pictures on the walls, the books on the shelves, the magazines on the table, and even the radio and TV broadcasts were all tailored to events from 1959. 

Not only were the participants asked to imagine themselves as being 20 years younger and to converse as such, but they were also required to be unusually self-reliant. They had to take care of everything themselves: preparing meals and even carrying their luggage to the second-floor rooms, even if it meant doing so in stages, one item at a time.

“The results were astonishing. In just one week, their hearing improved, their vision sharpened, and their memory and physical strength increased. They even visibly appeared younger, all without any medical intervention,” the researcher reported.

Influencing the research in a manner more close to home was a personal encounter that continued her interest in the connection between our perception of time and the actual healing process. “My mother had breast cancer. It spread to her pancreas, which is usually considered the end of the road” she said.

She did everything possible to help her mother maintain optimism, pretending that one day this nightmare would be behind them. “One day, the cancer miraculously disappeared, and the doctors couldn’t explain it. It was a ‘spontaneous remission.’ These two events led me to try to understand better how something as vague as a thought can influence the physical world—the body,” she said.

In the 1600s the French philosopher René Descartes developed the concept of “mind-body dualism”, suggesting that the mind and body are separate entities. 

For thousands of years before Descartes, philosophers believed in monism— the unity of body and mind. According to this view, the body is a single system encompassing both body and mind, changing as a whole.  “It suddenly occurred to me, the researcher noted. “Why not bring the body and mind back together, treat them as one unit, and see where that takes us? 

Usually, the question is ‘How do we get from the mind to the body?’ But if they are one, this question no longer exists.” In the last installment we will learn more about thinking about the mind and the body as one entity. In the meantime ponder these questions: If mind and body are TWO, then who is “in control?” AND If mind and body are ONE then in what ways do each of them influence the other.

Also consider a “third partner” in this equation: what entity partners with the mind and the body?