Hidden Depths: The Story of Hypnosis (52 page)

Those two realms [the brain and the immune system] were once thought to be fairly separate – your immune system kills bacteria, makes antibodies, hunts for tumors; your brain thinks up poetry, invents the wheel, has favorite TV shows. Yet the dogma of the separation of the immune and nervous systems has fallen by the wayside. The autonomic nervous system sends nerves into the tissues that form or store the cells of the immune system that wind up in the circulation. Furthermore, tissue of the immune system turns out to be sensitive to (that is, it has receptors for) all the interesting hormones released
by the pituitary under the control of the brain. The result is that the brain has a vast potential for sticking its nose into the immune system's business.

The branch of science which studies the interaction between the mind and the endocrine and immune systems is called psychoneuroimmunology (PNI). Although PNI is as complex a science as its name, it is now perfectly clear that, for instance, stress depresses the immune system, delaying the production of antibodies and making us more liable to viral infections and slower to throw them off; that a secure, warm childhood increases one's immunity; and that bereavement and, perhaps above all, the feeling of helplessness in the face of the difficulties of modern life, lower your resistance to illness. As long as you have control, or think you have control, you have considerably less chance of a stress-related disease. Viewing life as a challenge and being committed to your own health are also important factors; if you don't think so, just read the autobiographical section of psychiatrist Viktor Frankl's
Man's Search for Meaning
, in which he illuminates the factors that allowed him and others to survive the horrors and degradations of Nazi death camps. Finding life meaningful – as in having religious faith – also helps hugely. When you think that even some forms of cancer are viral, you can begin to see the potential importance of these discoveries. Laughter, as Shakespeare knew long ago, is the best medicine:

Your honour's players, hearing your amendment,

Are come to play a pleasant comedy,

For so your doctors hold it very meet,

Seeing too much sadness hath congealed your blood,

And melancholy is the nurse of frenzy.

Therefore they thought it good you hear a play

And frame your mind to mirth and merriment,

Which bars a thousand harms and lengthens life.

Laughter, of course, should be taken as a cure only in conjunction with proper medical prescriptions from your doctor – but then even your doctor's attitude can influence whether or not you give in to an illness. The mind may or may not be able to move mountains, but it can certainly move molecules.

A particularly clear demonstration that the body and mind are intertwined came with the development of biofeedback technology. Suppose you are shooting a rifle at a target. You see that your first shot goes left of centre, and so you adjust your sights. That seeing and adjustment is feedback. Biofeedback is just feedback related to the body. By hooking people up to complex instruments which show them what they are doing with their bodies, they can be trained, with surprising ease and rapidity, to change things, even in parts of the body previously thought to be beyond conscious control. Blushers need not blush, warts can be dissolved, migraines vanish and so on. The instruments teach people to see what is going on in their bodies, and to make the appropriate adjustments.

The mind can affect the body in three ways. It can affect our voluntary behaviour: we anticipate meeting an attractive member of the opposite sex at a party and choose to dress accordingly. It can affect what are called our ‘expressive innervations': blushing, weeping, laughing and so on. But it can also affect our vegetative responses, the working of our internal organs. To take an extreme example, there are reports that certain yoga masters can raise the rate at which their hearts beat from 80 to 300 beats a minute. This kind of ability – obviously less extreme in most of us – came as a surprise because these functions were supposed to be involuntary. This (in a hugely simplified version) is how it happens.

The nervous system as a whole has the job of maintaining the body in a state at which our oxygen, temperature and so on are at optimum levels. This state is called ‘homeostasis', though physicians also talk about ‘allostasis', which refers to the fact that under different conditions what counts as an optimum level is different. The nervous system is constantly trying to restore equilibrium, although things impinge on our bodies and our minds to disrupt it. The things that impinge and disrupt homeostasis are ‘stressors', and the ‘stressresponse' is the body's attempt to restore equilibrium.

The nervous system achieves this goal by giving different parts of itself different specific jobs. The CNS regulates our relations with the external world, while the autonomic nervous system (ANS) looks after the internal vegetative processes. The ANS in turn has two parts. The parasympathetic division is concerned with the conservation of the body: it does things like stimulating digestion so that we
absorb food and excrete waste matter, or like checking the level of sugar in the liver. The sympathetic part of the ANS is responsible for the functioning of the internal organs in emergency situations; it shuts down things like your digestive system (which is unnecessary in the circumstances, and is handled by the parasympathetic system) and focuses only on fight-or-flight responses. You could say that the parasympathetic nervous system slows down the functioning of the body, while the sympathetic nervous system speeds it up.

The division of the ANS into sympathetic and parasympathetic parts has important consequences for understanding how psychosomatic illnesses work, and how, just as certain pathological micro-organisms have a special affinity for certain organs, so certain emotional conflicts afflict certain organs too. Anger is an emotional response to an emergency situation, a perceived threat; it affects the internal organs in such a way as to get the body ready to fight. Now, suppose we repress that anger, as we commonly do in civilized societies: the body has been got ready to fight, but no fight has taken place. Fine – or at least fine for most of us, since we don't spend all that much time in a state of anger. But what about those who suffer chronically from repressed anger? In the due course of time, just as we saw above with the example of the paralysed arm, the effect of more-or-less constant anger on the internal organs may well create organic disturbances. It won't
necessarily
create organic disorders, because nothing in this new medicine is straightforwardly mechanical; other factors, such as diet, or having hobbies or a supportive family environment, can offset the risk.

Doctors now have to look at personality types, and at lifestyles and how they might be changed to assist healing. Ayurvedic medicine in India has always known this, but now even arch-rationalists among the Western medical community are, at least to this extent, holistic. Even cultural factors play a part in some disorders: anorexia nervosa is predominantly found among middle-class teenage girls; Jews of an eastern European origin suffer more from nervous disorders than others. Typically, a person who affects his neuroendocrine systems by means of the sympathetic nervous system will suffer from things like migraine, hypertension, hyperthyroidism, cardiac neuroses and arthritis, while a person who does so by means of the parasympathetic nervous system will find himself suffering from things like peptic
ulcers, constipation or diarrhoea, colitis, fatigue and asthma. This is not to say that all ailments and illnesses are ‘psychogenic' (caused by the mind), but it is to say that a number are, and that certain personality types are more liable to certain illnesses than others. This is a controversial area: some doctors think that there is, for instance, a cancer-prone personality and an arthritis-prone personality; others are more cautious and speak only in a more general fashion of the type of personality – basically one which is subject to all kinds of stresses – which is liable to have an adverse effect on the immune system, and of another type which is stress-resistant.

Of course, many diseases are caused by particular microorganisms, and there are powerful medicines available to destroy those organisms. But the psychogenic origin of some human illnesses has long been known, and so have the psychological benefits of a healthy attitude. In medieval times both illnesses and cures might be attributed to the imagination, and in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the remarkable cures achieved by hypnotists brought the point home forcefully. We've long known that moving house, getting married (or divorced) and so on are stressful and likely to cause an illness; we've long spoken of emotions in physical terms – ‘cold feet', ‘butterflies in the stomach' – and known that people can die of a broken heart. You look around at your family members and see that it's the cheerful one who doesn't get the cold everyone else is suffering from. You've heard of ‘phantom limbs' – of how a person whose leg has been amputated can still feel pain in the missing leg.

But understanding the whys and wherefores only really began in the 1930s, with research accelerating since the 1960s. Until recently, then, as the name implies, the
autonomic
nervous system was thought to be out of reach. Liébeault and Bernheim, ahead in this respect as in so many others, suggested that it was not as independent as it might seem; but they lived decades before this idea could be proved. So did the respectable English doctor Hack Tuke, who in 1872 published his
Illustrations of the Influence of the Mind upon the Body in Health and Disease
. But now psychosomatic medicine is a fast-developing area of research. In the seventeenth century the French philosopher René Descartes tried to separate the mind from the body, but that is no longer possible. We are each a unit of mind and body, and changes in one system result in changes in the other. In a
nice turn of phrase, PNI specialists talk of ‘the biology of hope' and ‘the biology of belief'. PET scans have shown that remembering a visual event activates the same parts of the brain as the original seeing; in other words, the supposedly ‘purely mental' activity of remembering has the same physiological result as the supposedly ‘purely physical' activity of using the senses.

We all knew most of this anyway, but it is nice to have it confirmed by the men and women in white coats. But the point is this: if the mind can help to
cause
illness, can it also help to
cure
it? This is where hypnotherapy comes in. It can help, obviously, with psychosomatic illnesses; and it can help, psychosomatically, even with illnesses that were not psychogenic in origin. But how does it do so? The problem is, in a sense, one of communication. If I know only English and you speak only Urdu, we need a translator before we can communicate. Similarly, you could say that the body speaks one language and the mind another. Yet it is clear that they do communicate. Discovering the biology of how they do so is the job of PNI, but hypnosis research, especially by Ernest Rossi, an associate of Milton Erickson, has come up with some interesting results too, to suggest just how hypnosis acts on the brain's structures and chemistry to facilitate that communication process and aid healing. In brief, Rossi believes that hypnosis acts on the limbic-hypothalamic part of the brain, which coordinates and can alter mind-body interactions, and that it achieves this coordination and these alterations by normalizing the body's ultradian rhythms, disruption of which is a major cause of stress-related diseases. Our bodies are subject to a rhythmic cycle of roughly 90–150 minutes, from a peak of high energy down to a trough of low energy and back again. If we go along with these cycles (by, for example, resting from strenuous mental or physical activity when we're in the trough), we avoid stress. Hypnosis, according to Rossi, puts us back in tune with our natural rhythms.

Psychosomatic research is, as I've said, fairly new. There is still a lot of misunderstanding around, not only among us laymen, but also in the medical community:

There remains a tendency to pigeon-hole people as suffering from one kind of disorder or another. Cancer is generally a
physical disease requiring medical attention. Anxiety is a psychological problem for which a psychologist or psychiatrist may be consulted. Doubts about the goodness of God are usually labelled a spiritual problem needing pastoral care. How convenient! How simple! How misleading!

As for the general public, I suspect that many people, faced with the idea that their illness is psychosomatic, might feel rather offended. They take this to mean that they have somehow caused the disease themselves, almost as if they wanted it to gain attention or something. There is an element of truth in this, but rather than giving offence, I hope readers can see it as exciting, and proof of the size and importance of the mind. Research has shown that people tend to get ill after rather than before important occasions; even mortality rates drop during major religious holidays. In other words, to say that an illness is psychosomatic, and caused by your unconscious, actually points to the fact that to say that something is unconscious is not entirely to say that you are not responsible for it. If you are or should be responsible for every product of your own mind, that extends even to psychosomatic illnesses, because – again – your mind is so much bigger than it is normally taken to be.

In this section I've focused on how the mind affects the body, because that is most relevant to a book on hypnosis. But the body and the mind are a unit, and the influence can run the other way too. In fact, some psychologists think that it's not so much that a stimulus causes an emotion (say, sadness) which then causes in its turn a physical reaction (tears), as that a stimulus causes the tears, which then cause the emotion. I have a friend who has a sure-fire method of cheering people up. He says: ‘Robin, lift one corner of your mouth … Now lift the other.' And so you find you're smiling, and you suddenly feel better. But anyway, the basic message of this section is this: the body and the mind are such a unity that the one can affect the other. There are no longer a limited range of illnesses that can be called ‘psychosomatic': every illness is psychosomatic, because every illness involves the body–mind unit. The body is not a mechanical automaton, nor is the mind a disembodied ‘ghost in the machine'.