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It confuses me everytime that scientists have such difficulties accepting that the mind can have healing or destructive impact on the body by means of thoughts and emotions. After all the mind is inseperably embedded into the body (first and foremost through the brain). Actually accepting this is closer to scientific thinking than conjouring up a hypothetic sandbox the mind supposedly operates in. Instead the former is usually discarded as esoteric. Seems like scientists and physicians are at the end of the day just regular folks who happend to have spent a lot of time learning about a very small part of reality. Who can blame them for their inability to put pieces to gether and see the bigger picture.

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Is this really a common position? Are there prominent neuroscientists or physicians who insist that mental activity is incapable of enormous influence on the body?

I've heard doctors say things like "she lost the will to live after her husband died". And most actual life scientists I know have a healthy regard for the limits of our knowledge.

Some of my fellow software engineers, on the other hand...

> Is this really a common position? Are there prominent neuroscientists or physicians who insist that mental activity is incapable of enormous influence on the body?

Individual doctors may say it, but as an industry, it is largely ignored.

They'll say it, but they'll rarely act on it in any meaningful way.

The larger conceit is simply that we are intuitively all kind of Cartesian, despite ourselves. It is structurally difficult not to be. I think its reasonable for even scientists in this field to not fully escape its psychological and cultural grasp.

It feels like it's recognised (or assumed) in UK medical care, that contact with kin/friends leads to better care/health outcomes.

Mental effects are unfortunately pretty hard to measure reliably or even control, so people trying to do "cold hard science" tend to disregard it. It is easy to write off claims as unscientific if they are hard to replicate in lab conditions, but it does not mean they are necessarily false.

Yes, it even has a name. Placebo effect.

Totally agree. It’s getting better but people still can’t wrap their head around the fact that the mind influences the body and the body influences the mind in a never ending feedback cycle. I guess thinking like this makes the whole system way too complex to analyze.

Same happens in economics. Economists often model things based on the idea that people make only rational decisions based on their own gains and nothing else. The fact that people make decisions based on many other factors gets iginredd.

Scientists go by evidence, not anecdote. If people could think themselves to death, suicide would be a lot easier to accomplish.

Just take the first case, girl goes to a doctor because she is out of breath and chest pains, tells him a tale about witchcraft, dies. What reason is there to believe that the fear of witchcraft made that happen and not all the other symptoms that point to an undiagnosed medical condition? Or maybe we should just believe witchcraft is real and can make car accidents and gun shots happen?

There is no shortage of people who want to die. And no shortage of people that do die. Every day. If this would be a real thing, it should be possible to come up with some better example than stuff that happened many decades or even centuries ago.

  I guess you are correct and I agree with your reasoning, but one thing I'd like to add to the discussion as a point is that it's difficult to measure in a scientific way the proportion of people that 'state' they want to die that actually want to die for real. 

  Depression and anxiety are very crippling illnesses and there are times that people that are burdened by these illnesses really feel like they want to die or just disappear or stop "ticking", but when faced with a real life chance of that happening (inside an airplane with lots of turbulence going on), they shudder in terror. Sadly, scientifically measuring that intent vs statement to the point we would be able to discern if the actual intent alone could trigger bodily changes that would enable us to just 'lay down and die' is nigh on impossible, unless we find a way around our consciousness (like an out-of-ego debug "port") to measure stuff without warning our ego that we are measuring stuff. Complicated :-)

anecdotal: It's very revealing to be very depressed with occasional panic attacks. When depressed, while not necessarily wanting to die, I would simply not want to be. Yet, sometimes, a panic attack would sneak in and I would momentarily (15-60m) be terrified of dying and not being. After its passing, it would be straight back to being very depressed. It's an awful state of being but illuminating at how much brain state matters to perception. It's obvious, but experiencing it is jarring.

For the record, I'm doing very well now, thanks SSRIs...

For real. This is a subject that I find immensely fascinating and endlessly exciting. It's massive and we're barely starting to figure out that there's a surface we can even scratch (even though some segments of study have been shouting about it for some time, even if they've been a bit inaccurate or clumsy about it).

The more I learn, the less I seem to know.

For example:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0026265X2...

https://www.pnas.org/content/113/31/8753

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5433113/

These articles are weird and amazing, thanks for sharing. Do share if you have more.

In deed - that's some interesting rabbit hole to descend down into ... "biophotons" and "ultra-weak photon emission" - wtf

I'm really just stumbling onto the material elements of the subject after some shameless deep dives into the weird but sensical.

What staggers me, because maybe it makes it see more real, is that biophotons are increasingly being witnessed as local and non-local information carriers. In humans, but not just in humans. (https://www.nature.com/articles/srep36508, http://www.u.arizona.edu/~kcreath/pdf/pubs/2005_KC_GES_SPIE_..., https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30381897/, http://www.rrp.infim.ro/2008_60_3/43-885-898.pdf —probably a lot of crossover between these, I haven't read them through)

I'm ultimately ignorant, but when you put that information beside some of the other weirdness we see in frontier physics or start to consider what that kind of thing means on various time scales and the questions that start to arise are eye opening.

It's the realm of philosophy that takes the range of information into account that really thrills me, but understanding some of the mechanics will open up new possibilities that are really exciting (if its a bit early to get that excited). Whatever. I find it exciting, and sometimes I'm amazed more people don't find it more exciting.

Every cell in a living system is evolving in a feedback loop with every single aspect of its environment. Every systematic influcence of any kind will become a signal and impact development and progression of that cell. In other words if life forms radiate photons that can be received by other life forms then in the long run this will exert some sort of evolutionary pressure to use that signal in some way which will then cause evolutionary pressure to make use of that signal with regard to its emission. Take anything. So if there are quantum effects on atoms and hence cells, then it makes sense to hypothesize that systematic utilization will have evolved. I find this totally intuitive. And yet, even educated people will laugh at you for formulating such a farfetched idea.

I dunno, I can't imagine these biophotons having any effect when there are so many other major influences... Crazy to see, thanks for sharing.

> After all the mind is inseperably embedded into the body (first and foremost through the brain).

People will gloss over this, as this is the common western view, but it should be noted that this is not how it is.

Your body is contained in your mind. Your universe is contained within your mind. All of this is simply the contents of your mind.

That's just, like, your opinion, man

Ah yes, a bunch of silver-spooned layabouts, who happened to be able to read and write thousands of years ago, serve as a monument to man's ability to convince himself he's not just a sack of meat that's slowly rotting, thought by pointless thought -- and not just the collected writings of amateur poets who had no sense of prose.

There is no mind. There is no body. Any separation and categorization of groups of ever swapped-out atoms is arbitrary.

To a krill living in the ocean, there is no mind, or body, or any such nonsense about thought. There is simply food and not food.

To the universe, there is none but itself. And itself is all there is.

Really pleased to see this perspective. Conceptual boundaries are illusory; quantum physics reveals that there are no actual boundaries between "discrete" objects, except as a matter of linguistic convenience and evolutionally-beneficial environment interaction.

Our language divides the world into discrete regions of spacetime which we assume are unchanging "things" rather than ever-changing aspects of a single unified process. And any phenomenon you could ever possibly identify could only ever be another aspect of that process.

Whose mind?

idk, scientists have known that the mind influences the body (placebo/nocebo effect, physical symptoms passed off as anxiety, stress worse than smoking), and poor physical health lead to pains and energy issues as well as the gut-brain connection. I don’t think anyone doubts that good mental health leads to good physical health and vice versa.

But your mind cannot perform miracles. Most of the examples in this article and others are likely coincidences. There are many people who desperately wanted to kill themselves but couldn’t, and people who by all means should have wanted to live but unexpectedly passed away.

Kind of like how the mind is inseparable from the body, science is inseparable from human bias and fallacies.

On the other hand, the subject of certain chronic illnesses seems to be characterized by very real suffering followed by frustration at modern medicine for insisting on psychosomaticism as a leading hypothesis.

Imagine suffering from fibromyalgia, CFS or a similar condition for 15 years and then just once taking 2000mg of vitamin B1 and having all symptoms relieved immediately. One wonders if medicine is not led astray by the insistence on bleeding-edge research.

It doesn’t confuse me, is just super disappointing. What you are saying is certainly real, that the mind has healing and destructive capabilities.

It’s interesting you say this stance may actually be more ‘scientific’. My grandmother had a large part in my upbringing, and she was a life long Christian Scientist (not to be confused with Scientology). She raised me on its principals. They are hard to articulate concisely, but your words are pretty close.

It’s almost like scientists want to ignore Mind, and try to describe the world only in terms of matter. They believe matter, all on its own, contains all the answers and all the Intelligence of the universe.

A Christian Scientist on the other hand, believes Mind is everything and matter is nothing. Love, Wisdom, Intelligence are all properties of Mind. So no wonder others are surprised or confused when it’s power over the material world is clearly demonstrated.

Sometimes I wonder if modern science has actually proven that matter is ‘nothing’. Think about it, if you look at an atom close enough under a powerful microscope, it becomes clear that it’s actually almost 100% open space!

> It’s almost like scientists want to ignore Mind, and try to describe the world only in terms of matter

It's not a matter of scientists wanting that, and plenty of scientists have quite overt beliefs about non-material truth.

However, science, in the modern, systematic sense is about a process which is entirely concerned with testable predictive models of the relation of observable material facts. Non-material potential truth that is not materializable in the form of testable material predictions may or may not exist, and may or may not be interesting to a particular scientist, but is outside the domain of science.

> Think about it, if you look at an atom close enough under a powerful microscope, it becomes clear that it’s actually almost 100% open space!

No, it doesn't. The highest-resolution (new-as-in-this-year) electron microscopy techniques are sufficient to see atoms as somewhat more than point objects, but not enough to see that they are mostly empty, That they are mostly empty is part of the model produced by modern physics, and you've probably seen popularization that talked about what you would see if it was possible to see at certain granularity, but that's not the same thing as what you actually can see with the most powerful microscopes that actually exist.

Doesn’t seem strange to me considering the long shadow that Cartesian Dualism casts.

On the contrary it gives me a great deal of confidence that there is no scientific consensus on this subject based on how intuitive or how obvious it seems, and that instead scientists are hesitant to come to a consensus without experimental evidence.

I think plenty of physicians have personal opinions and hypotheses about the impact of the brain on the body, but it's something incredibly difficult to validate or refute, experiments are very hard to carry out on this subject, and consequently the responsible thing for a scientist to do is to avoid making conclusions or coming to a consensus on the basis of how nice or appealing something sounds.

If you want to hold a personal opinion on the subject, go for it... if that opinion inspires you to pursue an interest and develop a testable theory... wonderful do it. Until then, from a professional point of view it's best to avoid perpetuating an idea, no matter how strongly you believe it to be, as a well established scientific fact.

Just because science has not or cannot proven a concept, does not mean that concept is not real. That’s not the same as disproving a concept though science.

Don’t let double-blind, placebo controlled, peer reviewed studies with sufficient n limit your understanding of reality. There are aspects of reality which have not been and never will be tested with the scientific method.

I never said anything about proving or disproving. People are welcome to believe anything they'd like to on whatever basis they choose to... if you like Chinese medicine, go for it. Think drinking that awful cough medicine will make you feel better? Fine... Want to see a naturopath or chiropractor to perform vertebral subluxation to cure your back pain? Have at it... All of these practices sound very convincing, intuitive, and are almost common sense to billions of people, and I'm glad that professional doctors and scientists reject them regardless of how appealing they sound because none of them can be experimentally verified.

The fact that they are rejected does not mean that they don't work or have been proven to be ineffective, it means that they are not established scientific facts and as such it's absolutely dangerous to have physicians or other scientists promoting ideas as scientific fact or using said ideas as the basis for their professional practice.

Everybody should check out Joe Dispenza's work with an open mind. He basically teaches people to use placebo consciously.

It should not be confusing to realize that scientists cannot have a stance on something that cannot be measured, tested, or replicated.

It's not at all clear that this can't be measured, tested, or replicated.

Also, scientists are human - they are allowed to have opinions and ideas that aren't yet backed by evidence, as long as they do not present them as scientific ideas. Science isn't a religion where you take some sort of oath.

I fail to understand how many physicalists have trouble understanding just what kind of influence the mind has on the body.

You know, it all being the same.

In many spiritual practices as well, the mind is a parasite on the body (good and bad stuff equally count).

Placebo is routinely used and corrected for in studies, so your assumption is false.

No, OP is absolutely correct. We have open-label studies come out all the time (one posted here a few days ago about a long covid treatment) making grandiose claims and not taking into account the placebo effect at all. And many physicians and scientists are particularly bad at this, believing that stress and emotions can't cause significant physical illness. I can't count the number I've talked to who have bizarre ideas about this, including many of the top scientists working on certain diseases (of which I've suffered myself). I'm not going to post any examples here as I don't want to get into a mud slinging match.

An undergrad learns what the placebo effect is. A PhD learns control groups cost too much money.

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