It is raining because the street is wet

A few speculations about soul, mind, and body

A couple of days ago I was reminded of what is called the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect. Basically, you read a news article about a topic you know well, or about an event you actually witnessed, and you realize that the journalist made many mistakes in the reporting. (And two related common mistakes are, one, mixing up cause and effect - it is raining because the street is wet, instead of the street is wet because it is raining. Or, two, and which we saw over and over again during Covid, mistaking coincidence or correlation for causation.) But then, after you realize this article is full of errors, you go read the next article about the Israeli conflict or something, about which you have no particular expertise or personal experience, and you assume that everything you read in that article is true. But… why? The news publication has already evidenced incompetence or dishonesty. You have amnesia.

Adam and Eve and the mind-body unity

On a related note (give me a minute), over the last couple of days I quickly read through the book The Mindbody Prescription, by physician John Sarno, originally published in 1998. Now this is a widely read book, so I’m guessing some of you have read it, and perhaps have strong feelings one way or the other about it. I’ll talk more about his claims in a moment but, I will say that (like Sarno) I generally have increasing sympathy for the idea that… humans are a mind-body unity (say soul-mind-body if you’d like), and if something is amiss in our minds, that can produce physical changes. In fact if we make that claim small, I think we’d all agree that definitely, that at least sometimes happens, and I think modern medicine is perhaps more inclined to agree than it was in 1998 when the book was written.

And - caution, HIGHLY SPECULATIVE - this actually connects to how I think about what human life might have been like in Eden, before the Fall. See, students being students, they will sometimes ask questions like, “if Adam stepped on a sharp rock, would he have gotten a cut? Would it have hurt?” And students will sometimes offer answers I don’t particularly like, like “maybe there just were no sharp rocks”. Yes, the sharpness of objects is also a result of the Fall! Well maybe, I can’t really know for sure.

But in this world, many things which are quite beautiful, are also dangerous to us, and I don’t want to get rid of that beauty. So what I say in my head (again, SPECULATION), is that Adam could have gotten a cut, and perhaps we could say it would have hurt, but his mental state was different than ours and so he would’ve handled it with perfect equanimity (no temptation at all to speak some profanity at the injury, for example). So maybe you’d say the physical pain (which is a useful signal to our bodies, after all) was there, but not the mental pain we would also have today. And, perhaps also his body was more capable of healing itself than our bodies, and perhaps things like the modern “placebo affect” are a sort of after-image of our mental powers before the Fall.

(And just as illustration of the power of the mind, Sarno offers the example that, in WWII, it was noticed that the most severely injured soldiers often required little or no morphine for the control of pain. They were so glad to be alive, and so relieved that they’d never have to face a battlefield again, that they had little or no pain. Behold the power of the mind.)

The claims of Dr. Sarno

Since I mentioned the book (and surely many of you have NOT read it), I have to give you his major claims, which go as follows¹.

1. In a very Freudian way, he divides the mind into the conscious and unconscious (and perhaps also subconscious, but not as relevant here). The conscious is generally rational. The unconscious is not, it behaves as a sort of spoiled child. [And I would at least agree… our minds are a complicated thing. We spend a lifetime trying to understand ourselves, which says something.]

2. Within the unconscious mind, over the course of our lives, develops suppressed or repressed anger and rage. Sometimes the causes are obvious (abuse received as a child for example), sometimes mundane (stress at work). But he also throws in here stuff like a new mother being unconsciously angry at her new child for ending her career or upsetting her life. [This was the part of the book I had the most trouble with. If he’d left it as our minds being generally in conflict or stress, sure. But he seemed keen to make it into anger or rage, which is harder for me.]

3. Our brain, which doesn’t want to deal with these uncomfortable feelings, creates physical symptoms to divert attention away from emotions and into the realm of the physical. He calls it a “strategy of avoidance”. And, somewhat fascinatingly, he proposes that the symptoms created are somewhat culture-dependent, depending on what is acceptable at the time. In the recent past, ulcers were a common move. In our day, very commonly what the brain does is create back pain, by (he proposes) reducing the oxygen supply to certain muscles, nerves, or tendons. But, if you read the book, although he thinks (really) that nearly all back pain today is “psychogenic” in nature, he brings up just about every malady you can imagine as potentially having a strong mental component. [And again, I think you could soften this claim by saying that a distressed mind causes a distressed body, without making it into the unconscious mind trying to play tricks on the conscious mind.]

4. Therefore, if indeed your physical symptom is the result of mental distress, the way to end it is not physical therapy or drugs or surgery, but by education and self-talk (and perhaps psychotherapy). The conscious mind needs to tell the unconscious mind that it has caught onto the trick being employed and it isn’t going to work anymore, so cut it out. [Or, again to soften it, maybe to say that an important step in getting the physical symptoms of something like anxiety under control, is recognizing that they are just physical manifestations of anxiety!]

There you go. If you’re skeptical of all that (and you should approach such claims with skepticism), the book is chock-full of stories of long-suffering people who saw doctor after doctor, had procedure after procedure, and were finally cured when offered the suggestion that their physical malady was the manifestations of an unhappy unconscious mind.

Or, if you’re worried people who genuinely have serious medical conditions are going to ignore them because of this book, he does say several times something like “don’t assume it's fundamentally a mental problem until a doctor has cleared you of it being something more serious”. Unfortunately (and I'm sure he realized this), his book is full of stories of people who WERE told by doctors that they had something more serious, perhaps underwent surgeries to fix that more serious thing, but in fact it actually was always psychogenic. Well, it's a imperfect world.

Science getting confused about the rain

But along the way, he offers a couple of illustrations more widely applicable to science. One of them is that the medical profession also regularly mistakes coincidence for cause, or mixes up cause and effect. I’ll give you a couple of examples here.

One - what about that back pain? Well here (he says) is a common occurrence.

1. Patient comes in complaining about back pain (commonly), or pain somewhere else in the body. Eventually they are subject to x-ray, CT, or MRI imaging to figure it out.

2. If the patient is past the age of twenty, the imaging inevitably finds something “wrong” - some spinal deformation, or a disc herniation, or a bone spur near the location of a nerve. Ah ha, says the doctor, who sees himself as an engineer of the body, here is the source of your problem.

But, says Sarno, this is often wrong, it’s just a coincidence. He thinks he has seen the proof of this in his own medical practice either because other people with the same “problem” seen in imaging have no physical symptoms, or (and more convincingly to me), these folks ostensibly suffering from a disc herniation or bone spur get better, permanently, through education / self-talk / psychotherapy. Well that shouldn’t work if the problem was the bone spur. Ergo the problem must have actually been fundamentally in the brain, and we hope we realize that before the surgery and not afterwards.

Or, two, he offers the example of ulcers. Again, I’m not a doctor, so I’m just reporting what he reports here, but he says it has been noticed that some people with peptic ulcers harbor the bacterium Helicobacter pylori. Doctors have therefore concluded that this bacterium is the cause of ulcers. But, Sarno suggests, that may be a commonly carried bacterium, and it is emotional factors that first affected the immune system that then set the stage for the ulcer (and at that point, sure, the bacterium may have been involved, but it was not the originating cause). He says at one point, “Identifying the chemistry of a clinical state is not establishing its cause”, which was a good line I thought. Noticing that A and B seem to come along together doesn't necessarily mean that one caused the other.

Medicine and the sunk cost fallacy

More quickly here, but another problem that prevents science/medicine from improving itself, he suggests, is a sort of sunk cost fallacy. Once it has been decided that X is the problem, and it is cured by Y, and huge sums of money have been invested and are being made through Y, good luck getting medicine to turn away from it. (And to be fair, this doesn't have to be fat cats conspiring in the back room, it could also be doctors prescribing what they know and are comfortable with.) He writes:

In view of the many diagnostic and therapeutic programs now used in the management of these pain syndromes, any significant disruption in the application of existing therapies would create financial havoc, for the diagnosis and treatment of chronic pain is now a gigantic industry in the United States.

IN ANY CASE… there you go, I found the book an interesting read at least.

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PS, The Haunted Cosmos Podcast

PS, if you enjoy speculations about life before the Fall, you might also enjoy a podcast I came across recently and am enjoying, thought I’d mention it, called The Haunted Cosmos. The hosts are Ben Garrett and Brian Sauve. If you know of the old “Coast to Coast AM”, or listen to the Roman Catholic “Jimmy Akin’s Mysterious World” - if you imagine either of those being ported over so that the show is now run by Reformed Protestants, that is Haunted Cosmos.

And I know some of you will appreciate that one recurring theme in this podcast is that… we live in a world filled with spiritual entities, and in our technological culture, those entities (particularly those that wish us ill) interact with us in technological ways. For example, UFO sightings take place over the United States, and almost never happen in Africa. Why? Because in Africa, demons just possess people, but in the US they get more traction pretending to be aliens (so the hosts suggest, anyway). Or, how about AI as an easy way for the demonic to interact with humans? They have quite a fascinating episode about that.

THE END

1. Incidentally, although he is very keen that we stop seeing the body as just a mechanism (woo-hoo!), Sarno is not a Christian near as I can tell, and if he is it doesn’t affect his book in any way. But you could imagining modifying most of what he says in a way that is more accepting of also the spiritual nature of man.