- Mind over Matter?
Jenny lay back comfortably in the chair, closed her eyes, and in the space of a few seconds, increased her heart rate from 70 to 130 beats a minute when I asked her to think about a very exciting (imaginary) meeting with a pop star. After a rest she reduced her heart rate to 55 beats a minute, this time by thinking about lying in the sun on the beach relaxing on a lovely sunny day. Later, with just a little practice, she was able to produce these changes without any imagery at all. Somehow she just switched her heart rate faster or slower.
This kind of direct control over supposedly autonomous bodily systems is quite fascinating. It is generally assumed to be impossible. People in the West have long marvelled at reports of Indian yogis exerting such control over their bodies. But reports of yogis being buried for days without apparent ill effects, or of stopping the normal beating of their hearts, were treated with scepticism by scientists. We now know that control along these lines, if not to such extremes, is genuinely possible, that quite untrained people also have such capacities, and that most of us can increase our skills in these areas.
Psychologists first showed that people could learn to voluntarily and reliably control bodily systems such as blood pressure, skin temperature, and smooth muscle tension, by the use of a technique called biofeedback. This often involves the electronic amplification of normal bodily responses, like the sounds of the heart beating, and feeding it back to the person. Using such information paraplegics can learn to increase their blood pressure voluntarily before sitting up so that they do not faint, and asthmatics can learn to accelerate their heart rate so that their airways will open up.
In recent years it has been recognised that many people do not need biofeedback to make extraordinary changes in their bodies. The use of imagery and suggestion(via hypnosis) often seem to produce dramatic changes by themselves. For instance, some studies have shown that people with serious allergic responses to plants like stinging ivy do not show the response when they are first convinced that they are being touched with a harmless leaf. But when they are actually touched with a harmless leaf and believe that it is the stinging ivy, their skin breaks out in the usual rash.
It is quite easy for people to learn to control the temperature of specific parts of the body. For instance, by imagining that there is an ice pack on one ear, and a hot water bottle on the other, some people can cause a difference in ear skin temperature of as much as eight degrees(C). Women who reported relatively little genital sensitivity have learned to voluntarily increase blood flow to the genital area through the use of appropriate imagery, and therefore heighten their sexual response.
Similarly impressive are repeated studies, some published in very respectable journals, showing an average gain of four to five centimetres in breast size as a result of suggestion and visualization. Where good visualisation occurred, breast growth happened and persisted over time. Explanations about how this might have come about in the women involved included the proposal that the women somehow reactivated the hormonal changes of adolescence or that it was the result of actively imagining increased blood flow to the breasts.
Other studies indicate that hypnosis can lead to a 70% to 80% cure rate in the treatment of warts(although it should be noted that rubbing the wart on the bottom of a moss covered stone, turned over under a new moon, seems to work for some people too). Even more impressive, hypnosis has been used to cure the symptoms of a disfiguring congenital disease called fishskin disease (Erythrodermia Ichthyosiform of Broq) that looked like thousands of warts packed one on top of the other. In this latter case a young British doctor, A. A. Mason reported in the Lancet, way back in 1952, that he had been able to clear the thick horny fishlike skin, covereing 90% of the body of a 16 year old youth, where all medical efforts, including skin grafts, had failed.
All of these ideas confirm the notion that we may have a great capacity to directly alter our body's functioning and even appearance, through our thinking.
More readings will be added to my blog from time to time. Have a quick look now to see the first posting on my blog PSYC1PLUS