The Mind-Body Cure. Bal Pawa
have trouble feeling motivated and excited about life?
fear making mistakes and have the need to be perfect?
struggle with minor daily stressors, such as traffic, while others cope and thrive?
worry excessively about health?
blame others or circumstances when you feel poorly?
We start with the mind because that is ultimately where we make choices and decisions that affect our health, sometimes consciously and more often unconsciously. How we perceive the world is more a reflection of our beliefs and thoughts and less about the reality that surrounds us. Many books discuss the connection between our mind and our body, but many of them miss the very important connection between our mind and our brain, specifically the intricate and close association of our thoughts to our body’s autonomous regulation centers. We can allow our negative thoughts to run automatically, signaling our brain to constantly release stress hormones that ultimately create disease. Alternatively, we can control our thoughts, choose our beliefs, and consciously affect our brain, reducing and eliminating stress and disease. Thus, we start our exploration of the mind-brain-body connection with an exploration of the mind.
MIND MATTERS
Most people use the terms “mind” and “brain” interchangeably. In fact, they are two related but very distinct entities. Our brain is an amazing organ with a definite shape, size, and function. It is three pounds of convoluted gray and white matter that looks like tofu and represents millions of nerve cells, nerves, and blood vessels. Humans used to think that only our species had a brain. We now know that many other species, from fruit flies to blue whales, have some kind of brain and nervous system to run their body. We also know that the shape and size of the human brain have changed over the millennia we have walked on Earth. For example, the frontal lobe of the modern human’s brain is remarkably larger and more developed than that of a Neanderthal human. Today, we view the brain as the control center for all our body’s actions. For example, when you accidentally touch a hot stove, the pain signals are communicated within a millisecond to the brain, you pull your hand away quickly, and further damage is controlled.
Our mind is more difficult to define because it is abstract. While most living things have a brain, the mind is harder to measure in other species. It is made up of concepts, beliefs, and individual perceptions based on our memories and experiences. The mind can evaluate situations, process information, and make decisions consciously or subconsciously. How do we x-ray someone’s mind? What does it look like? How big is it? Where is it located? The mind is a function of the brain but does not necessarily reside in the brain; the mind is the sense of awareness, consciousness, and intelligence that we all have. For example, imagine you say something on a whim that upsets someone, and you stop and think to yourself, “Why the heck did I say that?” Who is the thinker doing that reflective thinking? The observer of all the narration and thoughts that go on in the brain is the conscious mind, and the conscious mind is exclusive to humans (at least we used to presume it was).
In the 1800s, many intellectuals discussed whether specific areas of the brain controlled different parts and functions of the body, or if the whole brain integrating all of its various parts affected the entire body. A lot of discussion and research in this area was fueled by the case of Phineas Gage,1 a railroad foreman who suffered a brain injury in 1848. While he was directing a crew blasting rock to level the railbed, an iron rod pierced his skull on the left side just forward of the jaw, passed behind his left eye and through the left side of his brain, and then exited through the top of his skull. Extraordinarily, the young man’s life was spared. Before his head injury, Gage was described by people who knew him as a kind, sober, compassionate, moral, and friendly young man. After the accident, his friends and family observed a very different personality. He drank and became aggressive; he used profane language and became a belligerent jerk to all who came in contact with him. The man they once knew was gone. What is more surprising is that Gage recognized he was drastically different—he had an awareness and memory of his previous self—but could not control his behavior.
Scientists began to explore whether personality lives in the prefrontal cortex, the part of Gage’s brain that was pierced by the rod. Over a century passed before technology had developed enough that neuroscience could map out areas in the brain responsible for functions such as speech, physical movement, cognition, and memory storage. Scientists learned that the prefrontal cortex controls higher decision-making, personality traits, and judgment but not the awareness of self. Gage lost his inhibitions and his ability to filter emotions of right and wrong. He lost various personality traits, but the question remained whether he also lost his mind. Who was the observer in Gage’s brain that was “aware” he was behaving or thinking differently than before the accident?
The Mind as Distinct from the Brain
Mapping out our brain function has been fairly straightforward. Over the years, researchers have stimulated parts of the brain and looked for corresponding movement in the body so that we now have a concrete map of what areas in the brain control the many functions of our body, such as speech, hearing, sight, movement, and balance. This map remains fairly consistent from one human brain to another. Mapping mind function has been much more challenging, because there appears to be no rhyme or reason to the way people behave, and depending on whom you ask, you will get a variety of answers as to how the brain and mind are related.
Scientists do seem to agree on one thing: humans possess a trait called metacognition, the ability to have an awareness and understanding of our own thought processes. In other words, we think about thinking. We can use this power to be more precise about what, how, and why we think a certain way to optimize our behavior, performance, and understanding, which is why neuroscientists, psychologists, and psychiatrists continue to try to unravel the complexities of the human mind—each of them coming at these questions from a different perspective.
Neurologists are medical doctors who study the brain, nerves, and nervous systems. Most of them seem to have a very definite answer for how the mind and the brain are related. The mind is a function of the brain, of course! A functioning brain is identical to a conscious mind, they explain, and mind expression is science in its highest form. With no brain, there would be no mind. Therefore, they contend that consciousness is nothing more than the ability of our brain to acquire information (i.e., awake state), understand the content of that information, and then store and retrieve information from our memory. For example, a patient who suffers a massive stroke is no longer conscious but their brain is working. We know this because their heart, lungs, gut, and circulation all continue to work despite the patient’s lack of consciousness. But what about the mind? We don’t know. The patient is unconscious or sometimes in a coma. We do not have the means to see if their mind is functioning; however, if we develop more sophisticated means of measuring thought, perhaps this will become more precise.
Psychologists study human behavior and they seem to hold a very “dualistic” theory. They argue that the mind and the brain are two distinct entities, that many people have a fully functioning brain and are awake but “lose or disconnect from their mind.” That is, though people have the ability to feel empathy and compassion, they may become so self-absorbed that these functions of the mind are blunted and their brain automatically runs their bodily functions. Sometimes people who have experienced trauma or adversity disconnect from the memory by not engaging with the conscious mind, as it causes pain and suffering. Thus, they function physically but disconnected from the mind. They may choose to use alcohol or drugs or food to numb the memories that the mind keeps bringing up.
Most psychologists maintain the mind has a conscious and a subconscious component. They state that we spend much of our childhood or formative years collecting information on speech and behavior by observing and mimicking those around us, and we lock in these unprocessed memories, associated emotions, and patterns for future reference. This embedded program is often what we use as our reference point for the rest of our lives. It becomes our subconscious mind. It is what forms the basis of construct or