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Learning to be Sick

The degree of control over internal conditions which an individual can learn to exert by first adopting and maintaining a calm and alert state of mind, such as is taught to students of meditation, is indeed remarkable. What is even more remarkable is the degree to which psychological and medical research have ignored, even actively resisted, the neurological implications and therapeutic possibilities of this kind of training. After all, it has long been known that negative states of mind can adversely affect specific organs in specific ways. At this point, no one can doubt that sustaining high levels of anxiety for extended periods of time is likely to produce stomach ulcers; researchers can even effec¬tively manipulate the size and number of gastric lesions in laboratory animals, simply by controlling the intensity of the anxiety-provoking agent and the length of exposure. Other studies have indicated similar direct correlations of various organic damages to sustained states of anger, grief, hatred, and apathy. Why then, one cannot help but wonder, has medical research as a whole not been keener on following up hints that specific positive states of mind may in fact have restorative effects on specific organs as well?
Given the success that many researchers have repeated in training both human beings and laboratory animals to exercise voluntary control over many of their autonomic processes, there seems to be no justification whatever for regarding the actions of our organs or our blood vessels as separate from or inaccessible to our conscious choices. With reference to a trained animal’s ability to constrict or dilate its arteries, Leo DiCara, a prominent researcher in this field, concludes the following:
These striking results suggest that vasomotor responses, which are mediated by the sympathetic division of the autonomic nervous system, are capable of much greater specificity than was believed possible. This specificity is compat¬ible with an increasing body of evidence that various visceral responses have specific representation at the cerebral cortex, that is, that they have neural connections of some kind to higher brain centers.”
In other words, there may be no organ, perhaps not even a cell of the body that is “autonomic” in the sense that it is not affected by the sensations, the feeling states, the attitudes the opinions, the fantasies, and the voluntary choices of the conscious mind. And there is no association in the cortex that fails to find concrete expression in a muscle, a gland, a chemical reaction.
Now if a laboratory animal or a human being can learn to selectively dilate arteries, or alter the rate of urine production, or isolate and amplify a single form of brain waves, what on earth may the conscious mind not do to the body, for both its well and its woe? As a matter of fact, doesn’t this kind of evidence suggest that perhaps all of our internal conditions, either healthy or pathological, are directly affected by our habitual states of mind, at least as much as they are by our habitual diets, our occupations, our exposure to viruses or bacteria, our genetic predispositions? Might we not grow up teaching our organs patterns of function¬ing just like we teach our skeletal muscles how to stand and walk and gesture?  And might not organ function suffer from slipshod training just as much as does muscular coordination? It may be the case that, whether we were noticing it or not, we have in many ways learned to be sick or be well, be depressed or be robust, in exactly the same fashion that we have learned to speak a language or to drive a car.

The evidence for instrumental learning of visceral responses suggests that psychosomatic symptoms may be learned. John I. Lacy of the Fels Research Institute has shown that there is a tendency for each individual to respond to stress with his own consistent sequence of such visceral responses as headache, queasy stomach, palpitation, or faintness. Instrumental learning might produce such a hierarchy. It is theoretically possible that such learning could be carried far enough to create an actual psychosomatic symptom.”

And what a list of “learned” symptoms might include! In addition to headaches (by far the most frequent medical complaint in the United States), there are queasiness, faintness, palpitations, and high blood pressure; there are ulcers and a host of other digestive, circulatory, and metabolic disorders; there are secondary responses to trauma; many skin conditions and allergies; neuropathies of various kinds; any number of imbalances of glandular secre¬tions, including the most powerful hormones of the body; very probably even lapses in the body’s immune system, and the legion of foreign invasions that can then take possession of us. Even some types of cancer have been tentatively linked to the failure to successfully cope with powerful, chronic, negative emo¬tions such as anger, hate, or despair.
The significance of effective bodywork in this kind of a learning process could be enormous. If we can learn to respond viscerally one way, then we can learn to respond in another. And manipulating sensory input is potentially an extremely potent means of evoking new responses, quite simply because sensations are one of the primary sources of information which the mind uses to establish motor patterns.
Pleasant, calming physical sensations can be instrumental in learning to cul¬tivate calm states of mind; we use this principle instinctively whenever we stroke an excited animal or caress a frightened child. Sensory stimulation also creates a flood of information that supplies the brain with the data it requires to make intelligent decisions and adjustments. Pleasant sensations and the positive feel¬ings that are associated with them can themselves become a “psychosomatic symptom,” triggering productive circles in the same way that pain and anxiety trigger vicious ones.
If visceral responses can be modified by instrumental learning, it may be possible in effect to  ‘train’ people with certain disorders to get well. Such therapeutic learning should be worth trying on any symptom that is under neural control.
The various forms of effective bodywork are direct sensory approaches to such a therapeutic learning.