242
The Body Electric
thus just as well distributed to integrate bodily processes as the nerves
themselves. They reach into each area of the body to create a normal
electrical environment around each cell, or a stimulatory one when heal-
ing growth is needed. Likewise they enable an organism to sense the
type and extent of damage anywhere in the body by transmitting the
current of injury, with its by-product of pain, to the CNS. One could
take a "fantastic voyage" from the farthest Schwann cell outpost in the
big toe through the spinal cord and into all parts of the brain. Indeed,
electrons are making this trip every moment of our lives.
Thus our bodies have an intricate and multilayered self-regulating
feedback arrangement. We know, on the psychological level, that a per-
son's emotions affect the efficiency of healing and the level of pain, and
there's every reason to believe that emotions, on the physiological level,
have their effect by modulating the current that directly controls pain
and healing.
These discoveries give us a testable physical basis for the placebo effect
and the importance of the doctor-patient bond. They also may give us
the key to understanding the "miracle" cures of shamans, faith healers,
and saints, as well as the spontaneous healing reported by means of
visions, prayer, yoga, or battlefield terror. At the Menninger Founda-
tion, Elmer Green has long been using biofeedback to explore the mind-
body relationship. Green has described the full yogic control of pain and
healing developed by one of his subjects, an otherwise average busi-
nessman. He lay against a bed of nails with no pain, and, when in-
formed that a puncture from one of the points was bleeding, he turned
his head, gazed at the wound, and immediately stopped the flow. A
combination of biofeedback, recording electrodes, and the SQUID mag-
netometer would seem to be the ideal setup for the next level of inquiry
into the mind's healing powers.
Moreover, since the analog system, like the impulse network, appears
to work on both conscious and subconscious levels simultaneously, it's a
likely missing link in several other poorly understood integrative func-
tions that also cross from one realm to the other. It may lead us at last to
fathom the twin wells of memory and emotion. It may even help us
understand what happens when a new synthesis of creative thought,
a.k.a. inspiration, bursts forth like a mushroom from strands of mycelia
that have been quietly gathering their subterranean forces. Then science
for the first time will begin to comprehend the artistic essence that
makes its rational side productive.