In truth, no other recent event in biomedicine
has been as revolutionary as these discoveries. The arrival
of neurotransmitters on the scene makes the interaction of
mind and matter far more mobile and ﬂowing than ever
before—far closer to the model of the river. They also help
ﬁll the gap that apparently separates mind and body, one of
the deepest mysteries that man has faced since he began to
consider what he is. —
At ﬁrst, around 1973, it seemed that only two
neurotransmitters were needed, one to activate a distant
cell, such as a muscle, and the other to slow down the
activity . Two brain chemicals, acetylcholine and
norepinephrine, do just that; they are the “go” and “slow
down” signal s of the nervous system. They were considered
revolutionary at the time, because they proved that the
impulse sent from one nerve cell to the next was not
electrical but chemical in nature. All at once, the accepted
notion of tiny sparks jumping from neuron to neuron was
rendered obsolete. But the new chemical model at ﬁrst
continued to preserve the basic theory that only two signals
were necessary . Man-made computers operate using just
this kind of binary switch, and apparently so did the brain. Then, as molecular biologists around the world began to
investigate more deeply , numerous new neurotra nsmitters
cropped up, each with a diﬀerent molecular structure and
apparently a diﬀerent message to deliver . Structurally ,
many of them were related, being built up as peptides,
complex chains of amino acids of the same kind as those
which appea r in the proteins that make up every cell,
including brain cells.A great many riddles began to be solved, directly or
indirectly , as these discoveries emerged. If you take a
sleeping cat, remove a tiny portion of its spinal ﬂuid, and
inject it into a cat that is awake, the second  cat will
immediately fall asleep. This is becau se a cat’s brain puts
its body to sleep chemically , with its own internal sleeping
potion. In order for the animal to wake up again, the
opposite chemical, a wake-up signal, must be injected into
the spinal column. In humans, where the same chemical mech anisms
operate, the body is awakened in the morning not by a rude
internal alarm but by a series of timed signals, at ﬁrst mild,
then progressively stronger , that lift us from deep  sleep by
stages. The whole process involves a gradual transition, in
four or ﬁve waves, from the biochemistry of sleep to the
biochemistry of wakefulness. If this process is interrupted,
you do not come as fully awake as you should—the
biochemistry of two distinct phases has been mixed. That is
why parents  of newborns, having to get up several times
during the night, feel that they are never quite normal
during the day. Alarm clocks also jolt us out of our natural
wake-up patterns, giving rise to grogginess that may
persist all day, until the next round of sleeping-and-waking
readjusts the mind-body chemistry . Here is a related example. All camels exhibit an unusual
tolerance for high levels of pain—they can calmly chew on
thorns while  at the same  time being beaten with a stick by
an irate camel driver . Curious researchers examined
camels’ brain cells and found that they produce large
quantities of a speciﬁc biochemical that, if injected into
other animals, causes them to ignore pain, too. Sleep and
pain toleranc e, it is now known, thus depend on precise
chemical messengers produced in the brain. One by one, various other functions that were once “all in
your head ” have been connected to speciﬁcneurotransmitters. Schizophrenics suﬀering acutely from
hallucinations and psychotic thoughts often improve
dramatically if put on a kidney dialysis machine, which
ﬁlters impurities from the blood. As we saw, brain
researchers have established that a neurotransmitter called
dopamine exists in abnormally high levels in the brains of
schizophrenics. Current chemical treatment of the disorder
entails using psycho-active drugs that suppress dopamine;
perhaps the dialysis machine is actually removin g it, or a
related by-product, from the bloodstream. By the mid-1980s, barely ten years after the original
breakthrough, more than ﬁfty such neurotransmitters and
neuropeptides were known. All ﬁfty can be manufactured
on one side of the synapses between our neurons, and once
they cross the synapses, all ﬁfty can be received by the
receptor sites on the other side. This implies an incredible
ﬂexibility to communicate from cell to cell. The individual
neuron was now seen to be a producer of messages that did
not just say “yes” or “no,” as a computer does. The brain’s
vocabulary is far larger , encompassing thousands of
combinations of separate signals, with no end in sight,
since new neurotransmitters continue to be discovered at a
fast rate. What kind of messages do nerve cells exchange with one
another? The answer is tantalizing, for certain segments of
our chemica l vocabulary  seem to be just as speciﬁc as
ordinary speech, while others are highly ambigu ous. Our
tolerance for pain, like the camel’s, depends on the class of
biochemicals discovered in the 1970s called endorphins
and enkeph alins, which act as the body’s natural
painkillers. The word endorphin  means “internal
morphine,” and enkephalin  means “inside the brain .” And
that is their story: they are like a version of morphine
produced by the brain itself .This hitherto  unknown ability to make internal opiates
proved very exciting. It was already suspecte d that the
body must be able to regulate the sensation of pain. Although insistent, pain does not always register on our
awareness. Strong emotions, for example, can override
pain signals from the body, as when a mother rushes to
save her child from a burning house or a wounded soldier
ﬁghts on, ignoring the pain of his injuries. Under more
ordinary circumstances, all of us to some extent can take
our attention away from a minor pain—we don’t  notice a
sore throat, for instance, if we are talking to someone with
intense interest. Despite this common experience of having the pain
threshold rise and fall, no mechanism had ever accounted
for it. Now medicine could explain it by using these internal
painkillers, the endorphi ns and enkephalins, which every
neuron in the body is able to produce at will. Very quickly
the general public was told that the brain produces
narcotics up to two hundred times stronger than anything
you can buy on the street, with the added boon  that our
own painkillers seemed to be nonaddictive. Perhaps in the
future a physician would anesthetize his patients by
stimulating some region in their brains, giving Western
medicine a scientiﬁc form of Chinese acupuncture. Morphine and endorphins both block pain by ﬁlling a
certain receptor on the neuron and preventing other
chemicals that carry the message of pain from coming in. Without these chemicals, there can be no sensatio n of pain,
no matter how much physical provocation is present. Using
this model, a molecule of endorphin is like a speciﬁc word,
the word painkiller . One can imagine that whenever the
word pain comes to the brain’s attention, it has the option
of sending painkiller  back as its answer . Unfortunately , this
simple picture was clouded over by later research.It was found that levels of endorphins in the body do not
correspond on a one-to-one basis with how much pain is
being felt. This can be proved with placebos, or dummy
drugs. Patients who are in pain can often be relieved by
receiving a placebo, usually a coated sugar pill, which they
are told is a powerful painkiller . Not everyone will respon d
to this, but generally between 30 percent and 60 percent
will report that their pain went away . This result, called the
placebo eﬀec t, has been noted for centuries, but it is highly
unpredictable. The doctor cannot tell in advance which
patients will beneﬁt or to what extent. Why should a totally inert sugar pill relieve pain in the
ﬁrst place, even the stabbing pain of peptic ulcers or
traumatic surgery? Endorphins, it was now discovered,
must hold the answer . A drug called naloxone acts as a
chemical antagonist to morphine, meaning that it has the
ability to knock morphine  molecules out of a receptor site. When naloxo ne is administered on top of a paink iller, the
sensation of pain instantly ﬂoods back. As it turns out, the
same thing will happen  with the placebo . The patients
whose pain went away from the sugar pill reported that it
returned again after they took naloxone. This implied that
endorphins and morphine must basically be the same drug,
the diﬀerence being that one is manufactured by the body
and the other by the opium poppy . But once again, it was only a certain percentage of
patients who showed this result. Naloxone made the pain
return in full force for certain patients; for others, the
placebo eﬀec t still worked totally; and for still others, only
a little of the pain came back. Researchers found
themselves in a state of renewed confusion, where they
remain today . Endorphins are certainly internal painkillers,
but uncovering these new molecules was not the whole
answer .Pain studies have now shown that morphine is not
chemically identical to endorphins, that endorphins interact
in a more complex way than narcotic drugs, and that any
form of treatment for pain relief—morphine, endorphins,
acupuncture, or hypnosis—is highly variable in its
eﬀectiveness. It was also discovered  that endorphins
cannot be made into satisfactory pharmaceuti cals: our
internal painkillers are just as addictive as heroin if given
by injection. Soon, the same frustrating complications that scientists
ran up against with the endorphins and enkephalins spread
to all the other neuro-transmitters. It turns out that a
neuron does not simply catch a signal from a neighboring
nerve cell and pass it along untouched to the next synapse. That is only one of its choices. Although no one can
describe exactly how neurons receive their chemical
messages or how they transport them down their own
axons, or trunks, it is known that the process must be very
ﬂexible. The nerve cell can change the message en route,
turning the chemical it received at point A into a diﬀerent
one at point B. The receptor sites on the ends of nerve cells
can also modify themselves to receive diﬀerent types of
messages; the sending station on the other side of the
synapse is equally versatile. For our purposes, this confusion is actually a highly
encouraging state of aﬀairs, because it proves that the
body cannot be understood without the missing ingredient
of intelligence. The physical makeup of endorphins, or any
other neurochemical, is not nearly as important as their
know-how—how they choose their sites, what trigg ers them
to act, how they “talk” to the rest of the body in precise
coordination, and so on. Even in the midst of a genuine
chemical revolution, mind is superior to matter . In fact, it
now appears that the molecular structure of any neuro-transmitter is completely secondary to the brain’s ability to
employ it. It came as a tremendous  surprise to cell biologists that,
as far as molecules go, neurotransmitters are nothing
special. All of the protein in our bodies is built up from
chains of twenty basic amino acids, and these chains can be
further arranged into longer strands called peptides. Neuropeptides have their own signature, making them
distinct from the other peptide chains in the body, but the
same factory , our DNA, makes all of them. DNA is the
source for all the proteins that repair cells, build new ones,
replace missing or defective pieces of the genetic code,
heal cuts and bruises, and so forth. Without bothering to invent a new class of chemic als, the
DNA has ﬁgured out another use for its familiar raw
materials, the amines, amino acids, and peptides. Once
again, it is just the ability  to make these diﬀerent products
that is crucial. There is nothing special about the molecules
themselves, even though their discovery by a molecular
biologist may be special to science. Where does the ability to make the neurotrans mitters
come from, then? Perhaps we should look to the
contribution made by the mind. After all, it is not really the
adrenaline molecule that makes a mother rush into a
burning building to save her child or an endorphin
molecule that protects her from feeling the ﬂames. Love
makes her rush in, and single-minded determination
protects her from pain. It just happe ns that these attributes
of her mind have found a chemical pathway that the brain
can follow to talk to the body . Now we have arrived at the heart of the matter . Mind by
any deﬁnition is nonmat erial, yet it has devised a way to
work in partnership with these complicated comm unicator
molecules. Their association is so close, as we have seen,that mind cannot be projected into the body without such
chemicals. Yet these chemicals are not mind. Or are they? The whole paradoxical situation was wittily summ arized
several years ago when the eminent English neurologist
and Nobel Prize winner Sir John Eccles was asked to
address a conference of parapsychologists, who were
discussing the usual topics of ESP, telepathy , and
psychokinesis—the ability  to move physical objects with the
mind. If you want to see real psychokinesis, he told his
audience, then consider the feats of mind-ov er-matter
performed in the brain. It is quite astonishing that with
every thought, the mind  manages to move the atoms of
hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, and the other particles in the
brain’s cells. It would appear that nothing is further apart
than an insubstantial thought and the solid gray matter of
the brain. The whole trick is somehow done without any
apparent link. The mystery of mind-over-matter has not been explained
by biology , which prefers to push on to more and more
complicated chemical structures operating at ﬁner and
ﬁner levels of the physiology . It is still obvious that no one
is ever going to ﬁnd a particle, however minute, that nature
has labeled “intelligence .” This is all the more apparent
when we realize that all the matter in our bodies, large or
small, has been designed with intelligence as a built-in
feature. DNA itself, although ackn owledged as the chemica l
mastermind of the body, is made up of essentially the same
basic building blocks as the neurotransmitters it
manufactures and regulates. DNA is like a brick factory
that is also made out of bricks. (The great Hungarian
mathematician John von Neumann, besides being a founder
of the modern computer , was interested in robots of all
types. He once invented, on paper , a truly ingeniou s
machine, a robot that could build robots identical to itself—
in other words, a self-reproducing machine. Our DNA hasaccomplished the same thing on a grand scale, since the
human body is nothing more than variants of DNA built by
DNA.) You may ﬁnd it easy to think of DNA, with its billions of
genetic bits, as an intellig ent molecule; certainly it must be
smarter than a simple molecule like sugar . How smart can
sugar be? But DNA is really just strings of sugar , amines,
and other simple components. If these are not “smart” to
begin with, then DNA couldn’t become smart just by
putting more of them together . Following this line of
reasoning, why isn’t the carbon or hydrogen atom in the
sugar also smart? Perhaps it is. As we shall see, if
intelligence is present in the body, it has to come from
somewhere, and that somewhere may be everywhere. —
If we follow the next step of the neurotransmitter story , we
ﬁnd ourselves faced with another quantum leap in
complications, but surprisingly , the relation between mind
and matter actually begins to clear up. The areas of the
brain that mediate our emotions—the amygdala  and the
hypothalamus, which is also known as “the brain’s brain”—
were both found to be particularly rich in all the substances
in the neurotransmitter group. This implied  that where
thinking processes are abundant (meaning that many
neurons are tightly clustered), so will be the chemicals
associated with thinking. At this point there was still a
rather well-d eﬁned divisio n between chemicals that jumped
the gap between brain cells and those that traveled from
the brain down the bloodstream. (In my ﬁeld,
endocrinology , one of the deﬁning qualities of a hormone is
that it ﬂoats through the blood, a process that is generally
much slower than the transmission speed of a nerve cell,
which has been clocked at 225 miles per hour; a signal sent
from head to toe takes less than l/50th of a second. )Just when science thought it could isolate brain
chemicals and categorize their sites, the body cropped up
with its own complication. Researchers at the National
Institute of Mental Health found receptors in equal
abundance at other sites outside the brain. Starting in the
early 1980s, receptors for neurotransmitt ers and
neuropeptides were discovered on cells in the immune
system called  monocytes . “Brain” receptors on white cells
in the blood?—it would be hard to exaggerate the
signiﬁcance of this discovery . In the past, it was thoug ht
that the central nervous system alone relayed messages to
the body, rather like a complicated telephone system
connecting the brain to all the organs it wanted to “talk” to. In this scheme, the neurons function like telephone lines
conveying the brain’s signals—that is their unique  function,
shared by no other system in the physiology . Now it was seen that the brain does not just send
impulses traveling in straight lines down the axons, or
trunks, of the neurons; it freely circulates intelligence
throughout the body’s entire inner space. Unlike the
neurons, which are ﬁxed in place along the nervous system,
the monocytes of the immune system travel through the
bloodstream, giving them free access to every other cell in
the body. Outﬁtted with a vocabulary to mirror the nervous
system’s in its complexity , the immune system apparently
sends and receives mess ages that are just as diverse. In
fact, if being happy , sad, thoughtful, excited, and so on all
require the production of neuropeptides and
neurotransmitters in our brain cells, then the immune cells
must also be happy , sad, thoughtful, excited—indeed, they
must be able to expres s the full range of “words” that
neurons do. Monocytes can be thought of in eﬀect as
circulating neurons. With this one discovery , the concept of the intelligent cell
took on full-ﬂedged reality . One kind of localizedintelligence was already well known, that possessed by the
DNA in every cell. Since Watson and Crick  mapped the
structure of DNA in the early 1950s, investigation had
proved that this remar kable, almost inﬁnitely complex
molecule encoded all the information necessary to create
and sustain human life. But the intelligence of genes was
seen primari ly as ﬁxed, because DNA itself is the stablest
chemical in the body, and thanks to that stability , each of us
is able to inherit genetic traits from our parents—blue eyes,
curly hair, facial patterns, et cetera—and prese rve them
intact to pass on to our children. The know-how carried by the neurotransmitters and
neuropeptides represented something else altogether: the
winged, ﬂeeting, sentient intelligence of the mind. The
wonder is that these “intelligent” chemicals are not only
made by the brain, whose function is to think, but by the
immune system, whose primary role is to protect  us from
disease. From the standpoint of a brain chemist, this
sudden expa nsion of messenger molecules adds a new
order of complexity to his work. But for us, the discovery of
“ﬂoating” intelligence conﬁrms the model of the body as a
river. We needed a material basis for claiming that
intelligence ﬂows all through us, and now we have it. Anyone can see that his mind is ﬁlled with a bewildering
ﬂood of impressions that are far too amorphous to pin
down. To describe it, psychology is reduced to equal ly
amorphous terms like the famous phrase stream of
consciousness . Today, as if to ﬁll that stream with water you
can actually see and touch, brain researchers have found
cascades of brain chemicals. But unlike a stream, these
cascades have no banks; they ﬂow anywhere and
everywhere. They never cease this ﬂow, either , for the
smallest fraction of a second. A brain scientist in eﬀect
stops time to examine a cascade’s components. The
chemicals he wants to ﬁnd are extremely minute—it tookthree hundred thousand sheep brains to yield a single
milligram of the molecul e the brain uses to stimulate the
thyroid. Nor are the cell receptors easy to grasp. They
constantly dance on the surface of the cell walls and
change their shape to receive new messages; any one cell
may contain hundreds or even thousands of sites, only one
or two of which can be analyzed at a time. Science learned
more about brain chemis try in the last ﬁfteen years than it
knew in all of previous history , but we are all still like
foreigners trying to learn English from scraps of paper
found in the street. —
No one has yet been able to grasp how the cascade of
chemicals exactly patterns itself to do all the things a mind
can do. Memory , recollection, dreaming, and all the other
everyday activities of the mind remain a profound mystery
as far as their physical mechanics is concerned. But now
we know that the mind and body are like parallel universes. Anything that happens in the mental universe must leave
tracks in the physical one. Recently brain researchers have found a way to
photograph a thought’s tracks in 3-D, like a hologram. The
procedure, known as PET (positron-emission tomography),
is done by injecting the bloodstream with glucose whose
carbon molecules have been tagged with radioisotopes. Glucose is the brain’s sole food, which it uses much faster
than do ordinary tissues. Therefore, when the injected
glucose reaches the brain, its marker molecules of carbon
can be picked out as the brain uses them, and thus pictured
in three dimensions on a monitor , much the same way a
CAT scan is produced. Watching these marker molecules
shift around while the brain thinks, scientists saw that each
distinct event in the universe of mind—such as a sensation
of pain or a strong memory—triggers a new chemicalpattern in the brain, not just at a single site but at several. The image looks diﬀerent for every thought, and if one
could extend  the portrait to be full-length, there is no doubt
that the whole body changes at the same time, thanks to
the cascades of neurotra nsmitters and related messenger
molecules. As you see it right now, your body is the physical picture,
in 3-D, of what you are thinking. This remarkable fact
escapes our notice for several reasons. One is that the
physical outline of the body does not change drastically
with every thought. Even so, the whole body quite
obviously projects thoughts. We literally read other
people’s minds from the constant play of their facial
expressions; without marking it, we also register the
thousandfold gestures of body language as a sign of their
moods and intentions toward us. Films made by sleep
laboratories disclose that we change position dozens of
times during the night, obeying commands from the brain
that we are unconscious of . Secondly , we don’t see our bodies as projected thoughts
because many physical changes that thinking causes are
unnoticeable. They involve minute alterations of cell
chemistry , body temperature, electrical charg e, blood
pressure, and so on, which do not register on our focus of
attention. You can be assured, however , that the body is
ﬂuid enough to mirror any mental event. Nothing can move
without moving the whole. —
The latest discoveries in neurobiology build an even
stronger case for the parallel universes of mind and body. When researchers looked further , beyond the nervous
system and the immune system, they began to discover the
same neuropeptides and receptors for them in other
organs, such as the intestines, kidneys, stomach, and heart.There is every expectation of ﬁnding them elsewhere, too. This means that your kidneys can “think,” in the sense that
they can produce the identical neuropeptides found in the
brain. Their receptor sites are not simply sticky patche s.
They are questions waiting for answers, framed in the
language of the chemical universe. It is very likely that if
we had the whole dictionary and not just our few scraps,
we would ﬁnd that every cell speaks as ﬂuently as we do . Inside us, the questions and answers go on forever . Just
by itself , a single gland like the thyroid has so much to say
to the brain, to its fellow endocrine glands, and through
them to all the body, that its cascade of conversation
inﬂuences dozens of vital functions, such as growth,
metabolic rate, and much more. How fast you think, how
tall you are, and the dimensions of your eyes, for example,
all depend in part on advice from the thyroid. We can safely
conclude, then, that mind is not conﬁned to the brain by
some neat division set up for our own convenience. Mind is
projected everywhere in inner space. One of the most forward-looking and accomplished
researchers in the ﬁeld of brain chemistry , Dr. Candace
Pert, director of the brain biochemistry division at the
National Institute of Mental Health, has pointed out that it
is quite arbitrary to say that a biochemical like DNA or a
neurotransmitter belongs to the body rather than the mind. DNA is almost as much sheer knowledge as it is matter . Dr.
Pert refers to the entire mind-body system as a “network of
information,” shifting the emphasis away from the gross
level of matter toward the subtler level of knowledge. Is there really any reason to keep mind and body apart at
all? In her own writings, Pert prefers to use one term for
both— bodymind . If this word sticks, it will clearly indicate
that a wall has come crashing down. Pert does not have all
of medical science behin d her yet, but that may change
very quickly . It is becoming clearer every day that the mindand body are amazingly alike. Insulin, a hormone always
identiﬁed with the pancre as, is now known to be produced
by the brain also, just as brain chemicals like transferon
and CCK are produced by the stomach. This shows that our neat division of the body into nervous
system, endocrine system, digestive system, and so on is
only partially right and may soon be outmoded. It has now
been absolutely proved that the same neuroc hemicals
inﬂuence the whole bodymind. Everything is
interconnected at the level of the neuropeptide; therefore,
to separate these areas is simply bad science. A body that can “think” is far diﬀerent from the one
medicine now treats. For one thing, it knows what is
happening to it, not just through the brain, but everywhere
there is a receptor for messenger molecules, which means
on every cell. This explains a great deal about drugs and
their side eﬀects that had not been known. Some drugs
have a bewildering numb er of side eﬀects. If I consult my
Physician’s Desk Reference , which comprehensively  lists
the medications that a doctor can prescribe, I can ﬁnd page
after page under the listing for corticosteroids. The most
familiar corticosteroid (or just steroid) is cortisone, but the
whole family is widely prescribed to treat burns, allergies,
arthritis, postoperative inﬂammation, and dozens of other
conditions. If you didn’t know about receptor sites, steroids would
appear highl y peculiar . Let us say that I prescribe steroids
to a woman who is suﬀering from a diﬀicult  case of
arthritis. The steroids would bring down the inﬂammation
in her joints dramatically , but then a host of stran ge things
might happen. She could begin to complain of being
fatigued and depressed. Abnormal fatty deposits  might
begin to show under her skin, and her blood vessels could
become so brittle that she would develop large bruises thatare very slow to heal. What could link these entirely
divergent symptoms? The answer lies at the level of the receptors. Corticosteroids replace some of the secretions of the
adrenal cortex, a yellowish pad on the top of the adrenal
glands. At the same time, they suppress the other adrenal
hormones, as well as secretions from the pituitary gland,
which is located in the brain. As soon as it is given, the
steroid rushes in and ﬂoods all the receptors throughout
the body that are “listening” for a certain message. When a
receptor becomes ﬁlled, what follows is not a simple action. The cell can interpret the adrenal “message” in many ways,
depending on how long the site stays ﬁlled. In this case, the
receptor stays ﬁlled indeﬁnitely . (The fact that other
messages are not being received is important, as is the loss
of innumerable connections with the other endocrine
glands.) The cell can exhibit extreme reactions from ﬁlling one
receptor . By analogy , look at a moth hanging under the
eaves on a summer night. In a male moth, the fuzzy
antennae on its head are actually receptor sites that have
extended outside the body. As the sun sets, the moth waits
for a signal from a female moth in his vicinity , who is
emitting a special molecu le called a pheromone. Moths are
tiny creatures, and the number of pheromones they can
send through the air is inﬁnitesimal compared to the total
volume of air and its immense freight of pollen, dust, water ,
and other pheromones being secreted by animals of every
kind, including man. One would hardly suspe ct that two
moths can communicate over any sizable distance. But when a single pheromone molecule lands on the
male’s anten na, his behavior is transformed. He swiftly
homes in on the female, begins an elaborate courtship
ritual in the air, and proceeds with the act of mating.Biologically speaking, the only thing that causes this
complicated behavior is one molecule. When I give steroids to an arthritis patient, trillions of
molecules and receptor sites are involved. That is why the
blood vessels, skin, brain, fat cells, and so on all exhibit
their diﬀerent responses. If I go to my desk reference, the
long-term consequences of staying on steroids include
diabetes, osteoporosis, suppression of the immun e system
(making a person more susceptible to infections and
cancer), peptic ulcers, internal bleeding, elevated
cholesterol, and much more. One might even include death
among these side eﬀects, because taking steroids for a long
period causes the adrenal cortex to shrivel (an example of
how an organ will atrophy if not used). If the steroid is
withdrawn too quickly , the adrenal gland does not have
time to regenerate. The patient is left with inadequate
defenses against stress, which adrenal hormone s help to
buﬀer . He can go to the dentis t to have a wisdom tooth
extracted, a stress that is usually well within the normal
limits, but deprived of adrenal hormones, he can go into
shock. A tooth extraction could even kill him. Take all of these details together , and what you see is
that steroids can cause literally anything  to happen. They
may be the immediate cause or just the ﬁrst domino—the
distinction makes little diﬀerence to the patient . To her,
there is no diﬀerence between the osteoporosis caused by
steroids and the “real thing.” The same holds for
depression, diabetes, or death. A single messenger has
caused them  all. In truth there is no such thing as a single
messenger—each one is a strand in the body’s web of
intelligence. Touch one strand, and the whole web
trembles. I realize that this makes drugs look much more
dangerous than we had thought, even in an era that is
obsessed with cataloging medical disasters. We are used toa more limited idea of what a side eﬀect is—a touch of the
bitter with the sweet, like the thorn that comes with the
rose or the hangover with the bottle of wine. Instead, a side
eﬀect balloons out into anything the body can think of. Generally we are protected from serious harm because the
body reacts along certain  narrow lines. A patient who takes
an aspirin might experience bleeding in his stomach lining
but not a heart attack. However , every cell in the body has
a wide  latitude for action—it is a conscious being who
understands the world around it. The side eﬀects in my
desk reference are just the ones that have been observed
so far . I recently read a story of an internist who was baﬄed
when one of his patien ts, a man in his late seventies,
suddenly began to act paranoid. The man was obsessed by
the idea that robbers were going to break into his house,
and he bought a gun to keep under his pillow . One night he
terriﬁed his wife by leaping out of bed at three in the
morning, running downst airs with his pistol, and searching
wildly for the intruders he thought were behind every chair . Knowing that he was hallucinating dangerously , the wife
rushed him to the internist. The patient had no prior
history of mental illness and was on no medicatio ns other
than digitalis, which he took to stabilize his heart rhythm. Considering the patient’s age, a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s
disease seemed imminent. However , the internist consulted a neurologist to read the
patient’s CAT scan. Nothing abnormal appeared on it, but
the neurologist said, “I bet this man is hallucinating from
the digitalis.” In thirty years of practice, the internist, who
is also a professor of medicine in New York City, had never
seen this side eﬀect, altho ugh he had heard of it, barely . He
reduced the digitalis, and within ten days the patient
returned to normal. It seems quite freakish that a highly
speciﬁc heart medication should lead to insanity . If thispatient had hallucinated a few decades ago, when the desk
reference did not list such a bizarre side eﬀect, no doctor
would have believed it; today, the internist believed it only
after an extensive battery of tests ruled out everything else. What this case teaches is that you can never tell what the
body is thinking, or where. It is entirely  possible that the
man’s heart went insane , in the sense that it toppled the
ﬁrst domino and triggere d the onset of his paranoia. The
brain and the heart share  many of the same recep tor sites;
more important, they share the same DNA, which implies
that a heart cell can beha ve like a brain cell, a liver cell, or
any other kind of cell. After open-heart surgery , patients
sometimes have psychoti c breaks and begin hallucinating. Flat on their backs, groggy from deprivation of oxygen to
the brain, and locked into the blank sterility of an intensive
care unit, they suddenly  think that little green men are
marching up and down the sheets—such is the accepted
explanation for their episodes. Could it be that in fact it is
the heart that is hallucinating here? Simply the trauma of
the surgery could make the heart think that reality has run
wild, and that is what it tells the brain. —
The discove ry of neurotransmitters, neuropeptides, and
messenger molecules of all kinds has vastly extended our
concept of intelligence. But if every cell has an endless
number of messages it can send and receive, it is also clear
that only a small fraction are activated at one time. Who or
what controls the messages? That turns out to be an
explosive question. In a chemistry lab, reactions will run
automatically as soon as the experiment starts; it is just a
matter of mixing one chemical with another . Yet, someone
has to take the chemicals oﬀ the shelf to begin with. Medicine has traditionally preferred to ignore this fact as
it applies to the human body. Now we see that withthousands of chemicals on its shelf , a cell has not only to
choose some, mix them together , and analyze the results. It
has to make the chemicals in the ﬁrst place, ﬁnding
thousands of ways to create new molecules out of basically
a handful of elements— carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and
nitrogen. To do that requires a mind. So, by follow ing the
story of neuropeptides, we have ultimately arrived at a
dramatic shift in worldview . For the ﬁrst time in the history
of science, mind has a visible scaﬀold to stand upon. Before
this, science declared that we are physical machines that
have somehow learned to think. Now it dawns that we are
thoughts that have learned to create a physical machine. EXPANDING THE TOPIC
Placing mind before brain, the main point of this chapter ,
remains very hard for some people, in particular the
researchers who devote their entire careers to exploring
the brain. By developin g ever more sophisticated brain
scans, such as fMRI, which can look at brain activity
“lighting up” in real time, neuroscience has entered a kind
of golden age. New ﬁndings emerge literally by the month,
and in some circles it is conﬁdently promised that very
soon the mystery of the mind will be completely solved. This is a promise that will never be kept if science
proceeds by assuming that brain = mind. Think about
music. A piano sonata is written by Mozart, using a
completely mental process. He writes the notes down on
paper , and the sonata can be performed on the piano . Now
imagine that a scientist comes along and says, “I’ve been
examining how pianos work. I’ve looked at the keys and
strings down  to the mole cular level. I can tell you how the
piano’s mech anism registers the ﬁnest nuances of Mozart’ssonata. Very soon we will know exactly how he composed
everything he ever wrote.”
The claim is nonsense, because dissecting a piano tells
you nothing  about how music is composed. Likewise,
examining the human brain down to the subtlest chemical
reactions inside neurons and across the synaptic gaps that
separate them says nothing about where thoug hts come
from. This is the simplest refutation of materialism one can
oﬀer, and yet it has profound consequences. Let’s ask the most basic question. How does the brain
produce the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and textures of
the three-dimensional world? In other words, when you see
a red apple, where does its redness come from? Your brain
is completely dark inside;  there is no light anywhere in any
part of the visual corte x, much less the color red. This
mystery doesn’t bothe r most scientists, even brain
scientists. They would simply respond that apples are red,
and how the brain registers this fact comes down to
chemical reactions in the visual cortex. But the notio n that
the color red exists “out there” in Nature is simply wrong. Light is transmitted by photons, which are colorless; in
fact, they are invisible. There is no brightness “out there”
as photons sweep from the stars and certainly no
brightness inside the brain’s total darkness. So if light’s
brightness is neither “in here” nor “out there,” why is the
sun so bright that you can’t look at it with the naked eye for
more than a few seconds? Light’s brightness and color, along with everythi ng else
we perceive, come from “conscious agents,” a term coined
by the farseeing cognitiv e scientist Donald D. Hoﬀman of
the Universi ty of California, Irvine. He proposes  that the
only reality we can know is the reality created by
consciousness. If there is anything that is real but beyond
the human mind, then it won’t be accessible. A conscious
agent doesn ’t have to be human. Every animal speciesexperiences a reality that conforms to its nervous system,
so that a dog’s image of sound reaches much higher than
the human ear can perceive, while the hearing of a
humpback whale reaches much lower (whales can hear one
another’s songs for hund reds of miles underwate r). Some
snakes, inclu ding pytho ns and rattlesnakes, can detect
infrared light through specialized “pit organs” located in
their jaws, and so they “see” into a dimension entirely
closed oﬀ to human perception. Conscious agents fascin ated me because the ancient
Vedic rishis were in complete agreement with the notion
that consciousness is the source of reality . They didn’t push
the everyday world of the ﬁve senses completely out of the
picture. Instead they gave it a lower status known as Maya,
a Sans krit word usually translated as “illusion”—it comes
up later in this book. Maya is the apparent reality “out
there” that all of us naïvely accept at face value, but which
turns out to be no more real than the movie projected on
the screen in a cinema. Consciousness serves as the
projector whose light casts these images while itself
remaining pure light, with no images at all. Let me go into this subject a little more philosop hically
than I did in the original Quantum Healing . The ancient
sages of India, and all philosophers since then, explored the
mind by going inward. But in a scientiﬁc age, we have to
ask: How can thinking about the mind be better than
gathering hard facts about the brain? Because data only has meaning given a certain way of
seeing it. This point was made in the one book almost every
college stude nt reads (if they read any) in the philosophy of
science, Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scien tiﬁc
Revolutions,  published in 1962. Kuhn shattered the notio n
of objective progress in science by arguing that given their
starting assumptions, every scientiﬁc scheme for explainingNature—what he called a paradigm—is right on its own
terms. This groundb reaking insight went back to 1947, when
Kuhn, then a graduate student at Harvard, was wrestling
with how wrong Aristotle had been. Aristotelian physics
was the ﬁrst systema tic explanation of Nature in
mechanical terms, the cornerstone of Western science that
made Copernicus, Newton, and Einstein possible. And yet a
brilliant mind like Aristo tle’s arrived at complete ly wrong
conclusions about such basic things as why objec ts fall to
earth or what heat is. Suddenly Kuhn had an epiphany:
What we call Aristotle’s mistakes in fact weren’t mistakes
at all. If you accept the starting assumptions behind
Aristotelian physics, its description of Nature was valid. Kuhn seemed  to be saying that Aristotle was just as right
as Newton, which to most people, including probably every
physicist, makes no sense. In our time, the accepta nce of
scientiﬁc progress is all but universal, and the triumphs of
modern technology are undeniable. Yet no one has rebutted
Kuhn’s point that we view Nature through our own
paradigm, our worldview . The history of science is a
constant stream of shifting paradigms, one after another . There is no way to step outside the paradigm you totally
believe in. But what if the current paradigm happens to be
absolutely right? A Theory of Everything has been on the
horizon for decades, and we are told that it’s only a matter
of time before the theory  is complete. Kuhn’s point is that
an absolutely correct theory , no matter how much data you
feed into it, cannot be achieved. All you can achieve is the
fulﬁllment of the paradigm you believe in. Eventually
problems will arise that cannot be solved without
shattering the present paradigm so that a new one can be
formed.To a doctor , spontaneous remission from cancer  posed
just such a problem. As long as your medical paradigm
separated mind and body, no way existed for consciousness
(including beliefs, expec tations, fears, wishes, faith, and
hope) to inﬂuence the daily life of cells. Looking beyond
medicine, we have to consider consciousness as a whole. If
the mind can inﬂuence the body, what do we mean by
mind? If brain = mind, the answer to all ills should be a
host of super-pills that alter brain function, steering it in
the direction we want it to go. In eﬀect, this is where
neuroscience thinks it’s heading, because the old paradigm
says so. There is literally no room for consciousness being
the agent of change. In the years since Quantum Healing  was ﬁrst published,
my own thinking has become more sophisticated about the
so-called hard problem of connecting mind and brain. Anyone who ﬂatly says that brain = mind is turning their
backs on what the philosophy of science teaches. 1.Theories are right about what they include and wrong
about what they exclude. 2.No model of reality is big enough to explain reality . 3.Data has no meaning unless it is interpreted, and
interpretations are bound by the observer’s starting
assumptions. In a word, everyone has a story , and everyone believes
their story . Even contradictory stories can be valid and ﬁt
the same data. This startling conclusion applies to everyday
life all the time. Competing stories are told in divorce court
when marriages break apart, in criminal court when
prosecution and defense do battle, and in the corridors of
medicine when two doctors have diﬀerent concepts of
healing. Sticking to your story convinces you that you’retelling the truth when in fact you are just defending a way
of seeing. —
The story told by neuroscience, that brain = mind, is
particularly weak. There is absolutely no data to indicate
that neurons  can think; they merely light up on an fMRI as
thinking occurs, which isn’t the same thing. You could
construct a setup so that a 100-watt bulb lights up over
your head every time you have a bright idea, but that
doesn’t mean  the light bulb caused  the idea. Neuroscience
ignores this obvious ﬂaw when it arrives at the same false
conclusion, using neurons instead of a lightbulb. The current state of total conﬁdence in neuroscience
requires thick blinders. Brain scientists don’t see the dead
end they are walking toward when they promise that
neurons are going to explain where thoughts come from. Not just thoughts, but no color , shape, sound, taste, and
smell will ever be locate d in neurons, and what isn’t in a
neuron isn’t in the brain, either . It would be pointless to tear down the old paradigm
without having somethin g better to oﬀer. In that regard,
Quantum Healing  pointed in the right direction. All the
things the brain is credited with actually should be
assigned to the mind. Once this shift is made,  enormous
untapped potential becomes available. Neuroscience will
continue to do valuable things, in particular ﬁxing the
abnormalities and disorders of the brain connected to a
wide range of diseases. You can’t play Mozart on a broken
piano . Yet the mystery of Mozart’s genius, like all mysteries
of the mind,  must be solved on a diﬀerent plane, beyond
the physical. OceanofPDF .comRecently a young woman in her late twenties, a part-time
model, came  to my oﬀice  in Boston. After years of hiding
the fact that she had an eating disorder , her family had
ﬁnally persua ded her to seek treatment. Since adolescence
she had been obsessed with her ﬁgure, and over time this
concern had become more and more abnormal until it
blossomed into a double sickness, anorexia nervosa and
bulimia. Looking at this attractive, bright woman, who to all
appearances was normal, I was not lulled into thinking that
her problem was easy. Despite extensive resea rch and
publicity in recent years, both anorexia and bulimia remain
highly puzzling. Why should young wome n, many of them
well educated and from high-income backgrounds , nurture
an uncontro llable obsession with diet and weight? Anorexics develop a fear of food and a horror at the act of
eating. Conﬁned to a rigidly ritualized pattern of behavio r
that leads them to voluntary starvation, they will deny that
they are too thin, even to the point of death.The companion disease, bulimia, can be separate from
anorexia or can coexist with it, as in this woman’s case. In
bulimia, the horror of food takes a weird turn in the form of
bingeing. The secret food binges that a bulimic goes on are
often enorm ous—anywhere from 2,000 to 50,000  calories
at a sitting (2,000 calor ies is enough food to sustain a
vigorous 150-pound perso n for a day). This huge amount of
food is then vomited back up, causing tremendous stress on
the digestive system and the body as a whole. This particul ar woman’s  disorder had advanced to the
point where she was vomiting every day in order to
maintain the normal but still low weight needed  for her
work. The very sight of a dessert, she told me, caused her
to break out in a cold sweat and sent her heart racing. She
was extremely intelligent and listened closely when I said
that at the root of her disorder was a mistake in her self-
image. Because our society is obsessed with the ideal of
thinness, many women try to live up to an inner image of
their bodies that is simply not right for their physical
makeup. In her case, however , the image was not saying, “I
have to be thin.” It was saying, “I can never be thin
enough.”
To explain this paradoxical illness, one has to drop the
distinction between mind and body and think of one
system, the “bodymind.” This is because an eating disorder
is a holistic disease, the cruel opposite of holistic health. In
anorexics, the distorted idea, “I must be thinner ,” takes
over the bodymind like a malevolent and elusive phantom. Even after long hospitalization and exhaustive psychiatric
treatment, the patient rarely eats like a normal person. A
normal person would have to struggle to starve himself—
once the body went past a certain point of deprivation, its
hunger signa ls would take precedence over everyt hing else
in the bodymind, until the desire for food became
overpowering. For someone with anorex ia, the same thinghappens but in reverse—the compulsion to avoid eating is
all but irresistible. As I was talking about this, the young woman looked at
me sorrowfully and whispered, “So there really are such
things as ghosts, aren’t there?”
I was startled, and after a moment I answered, “It’s true,
but this ghost can be exorcised.” What we were talking
about is a ghost of memory , a memory picked up and stored
in the body. Memory sounds very abstract, while food is
very concrete. But the memory is far more real in this case. Whether a person is compulsively too thin or too fat does
not depend primarily on how much food he takes in. This is
true for conditions that are less bizarre than anorexia. For
centuries, obesity has been seen as a ﬂaw in character ,
which religious ages called the sin of gluttony . The
implication was that if fat people were just strong enough
and used a little self-discipline, they could be as thin as the
rest of us simply by eating less. Now it is generally recognized that for the chronically
obese, diets  do not solve the problem (just as, at the
opposite extreme, ﬁlling an anorexic with food does not
solve that problem), because the brain of a fat person is
actually sending out overpowering signals for too much
food. How these messages are triggered and how to turn
them around  are open questions. Unless some  degree of
control is gained at a very deep level, obese people can
spend their whole lives forcing themselves to diet, a self-
defeating tactic that only makes the mental distortion
worse. The loss of 10 pounds is registered in their brains as
a famine, and the next time food is oﬀered, the brain will
not stop until 15 pounds is put back on, adding an extra 5
as a safety margin against the next famine. Obese people
have been known to gain weight on diets where no extra
calories are oﬀered beyond the bare minimum to sustain
basal metabolism. The reason for this is that the brain canactually alter the metabolism in such a way that the
calories are stored as fat instead of being burned up as
fuel. No one knows why the intellect is so powerless to change
these distortions in self-image. The ghost gets stronger the
more you ﬁght it. Although anorexics will persistently deny
that they have a proble m, once the doctor pierces this
defense, it is clear that a profound split in the bodymind is
involved, with one part of the system struggling to maintain
rationality while another sends up wildly irrational
impulses. I once spent an hour counseling another anorexic woman
in her thirties who weigh ed less than 80 pounds, had given
birth at that weight, and was going into rapid physical
decline (10 percent of anorexics die from deliberate
starvation or from causes related to malnutrition). Her case
was made particularly bizarre by the fact that she loved
nothing better than going home to cook for her large Italian
family , doling out pasta and olive oil to a dozen brothers,
sisters, cousins, aunts, and uncles. Our conversation had been rather eerily reasonab le until
she suddenly snapped at me, “Do you really think you can
talk me out of this? I alrea dy understand the whole thing
perfectly , you know , and it hasn’t done me a damn bit of
good. Leave me alone. This is how I have to eat.”
She glared at me with unconcealed hostility . “Tell me,”
she demanded, “how many people do you cure of smoking
by talking to them? They know what nicotine  does and the
danger of lung cancer and all that. It doesn’t do them any
good to talk, and you won’t do me any good, either .”
I sat back, feeling the cold blasts of despair and the hot
blasts of hatred in what she had said. How horrible to have
to live with both, in a weird, poisonous tangle. “The real question isn’t whether I can help you, is it?” I
pointed out after she calmed down. “It’s whether you canhelp yourself .” She started to soften just a little, and I
added gently , “You know , you’re not hurting me by not
eating. You’re not hurting anyone real at all, but someone
who is an image. It is all inside you, and that is the part
that is so tough, both for you as a person and for me as
your doctor .”
This story does not have an immediate happy ending. Certainly my patient was right about the futility of talking
about her disease. She remains  a very hostile, confused
person, and my best hope  is that joining a peer group with
other anorexics and bulimics will help. To get her to
exorcise the ghost of memory , she will have to reach the
level where the ghost lives. Until the ghost is gone, patients
like her do not feel that they have a disease—they  are their
disease. I mean this quite literally . What happen s to you when you
see a snake  and jump out of its way? The frightened
thought, Look out, a snake! comes  to mind at exactly the
same instant  as adrenaline makes you jump. Usually the
thought and the action are so closely tied together that the
conscious thought doesn’t even have time to say its words
—you just see the snake and you jump. So there is no space
where you can drive in a wedge between the two. In the
case of an anorexic, the mere sight of food sets up a wave
of revulsion. Perhaps the sight and smell of a fresh loaf of
bread sends the thought, Ugh, I can’t eat this, while at the
same time the stomach turns, the salivary glands dry up,
and the whole digestive tract is alerted not to function. Naturally , this is a twisted reaction, but the thought and
the reaction come packag ed together , and there is no place
to drive in a wedge betw een them. What is at work here is
something we can call an “impulse of intelligence,” which
means a thought and a molecule tied together , like a two-
sided coin. Once the impulse starts to rise, there is no
turning it back. The thought is the molecule; the moleculeis the thought. At the time it takes place, an impulse of
intelligence constitutes the patient’s whole inner reality . When an anorexic is repelled by food, her reaction is all
there is (at least for that instant)—she is her disease at the
moment. The same holds true for the obese person trying
to resist food, the smoker trying to resist another cigarette,
and so on. You cannot change a thought after you have had it—the
entire inner struggle of such patients is totally futile. But
there is another component to an impulse of intelligence
besides the thought and the molecule. The third component
is silence; this is the unseen component. Like all of us, the
anorexic must fetch thoughts from the region that lies
deeper than thought, and it is there that a cure might be
found. The anorexic’s dreaded realization, I am my disease , may
be true, but it is not the ﬁnal truth. If the anorexic could
transcend her compulsions, looking on them without
involvement, her disease would end. Becoming a silent
witness would be enough to disentangle her from the
ghost. Archimedes said that if he had a lever long enou gh
and a place to stand on, he could move the Earth—
presumably , he would have to stand in outer space. The
anorexic needs just such a place; unfortunately , a human
being is conﬁned to inner space. No one has a spare
nervous system hanging in the closet in case his primary
one gets strange ideas. Sadly but inevitably , there is no
place outside to stand on. —
Without realizing it, we count very heavily on the fact that
our thoughts  will trigger the right chemicals in our bodies;
the mind and its messen ger molecules are automatically
and perfectly matched. But this process can break down,
and then the resulting confusion is like running twoprograms on the same computer—when the input is
scrambled, it is no wonder that the printout, your body,
becomes garbled. For example, one of the most ambiguous
drugs ever devised is V alium. Valium belongs to a class of chemicals called
benzodiazepines, which are used as both tranquilizers and
sleeping pills. These substances were greeted in their day
as revolutionary . Their predecessors, the barbiturates, had
many notorious drawbacks: they were highly addictive;
they induced  poor-quality  sleep because they blocked REM,
or dream sleep; and overdoses could prove fatal. Valium
and its relatives, on the other hand, produced better sleep
with less hangover , were  much harder to overdose on, and
at ﬁrst seemed nonaddictive. At the height of its imme nse
popularity , Valium was said to account for one-quarter of all
new prescriptions written in America. Now it is known that Valium is itself addictive, that it
produces sleep irregular ities of its own (interfering with
the third and fourth stages of deep, dreamless sleep), and
that serious withdrawal symptoms occur after prolonged
use. If you look at the level of the receptors on the cell wall,
none of this is surprising, because Valium acts by
outcompeting the body’s own neurochemicals and taking
over their receptor sites. This kind of interference would
perhaps be advantageous if Valium competed only with the
neuropeptides responsib le for causing the feelings of
anxiety (called octadeca neuropeptides). But the calming
eﬀect of the drug does not come by itself; Valium confuses
the nervous system as a whole. Moreover , it was recently
discovered that the monocytes of the immune system also
are attracted to Valium. So when a doctor gives what he
thinks is a sleeping pill or a tranquilizer , he is aﬀecting the
immune system at the same time, adding more confusion at
the level of the receptors.No one knows if this has caused any harm, largely
because the ﬁnding about  the immune system is too new. In
all likelihood, we will discover that nature has already
provided our bodies with an exact internal analogue to
Valium, which means that we are clumsily reproducing
something that already exists in nearly perfect form. If I
ask myself whether I like the idea of plugging the same
chemical into my immune cells every day, in the
indiscriminate fashion that Valium was doled out to millions
of patients, primarily women, for thirty years, the answer is
obvious. The immune cells have a reason for each receptor; they
use them to think, act, perceive, and respond in precise
ways. A person uses the same two eyes to view the whole
world; a cell, however , has a diﬀerent eye for each thing it
needs to see. In other words, a constantly ﬁlled receptor
renders the cell blind to one speciﬁc thing. At a time when
the incidence of many cancers, such as breast cancer , is
still rising, sending unkn own messages into the immune
system seems very risky . —
Currently there is a “chem ical revolution” under way in the
treatment of mental disease, and it seems as miraculous as
Valium did thirty years ago. Doctors now widely give their
mental patients mind-altering, or psychotropic, drugs to
clear up the overt symptoms of their sickness, mainly
depression, mania, and hallucinations. The symptoms are
often relieved, sometimes quite dramatically and suddenly ,
although many patients cannot tolerate the mental
numbness and fatigue that are common side eﬀects (not
that the side eﬀects are simple: certain antidepressants can
make the patient’s depression worse for the ﬁrst few
weeks, or swing it in the opposite direction until it turns
into wild mania).Critics of drug therapies call them “chemical lobotomies”
and charge that they strip the patient of his huma n dignity . Doubtless there are many abuses, particularly in large,
understaﬀed public hospitals for the insane. It takes very
careful ﬁne-tuning to stabilize the correct dosage of any
psychotropic drug, and horror stories abound of depressed
patients who reacted so badly to their medication that they
committed suicide rather than endure the cure. Still, the
success in this ﬁeld impli es that drugs will be used to cure
schizophrenia and depression altogether , if not today , then
in the future. A “cured” schizophreni c does not yet exist through
chemical means. This is because there is more to being
normal than not having hallucinations. Once you suppress a
schizophrenic’s bizarre visions or the strange voices he
hears in his head, you do not ﬁnd a normal person facing
you, but a shell. Altering the chemical level of dopamine,
even if it could be done a hundred times better than it is
done today , will not lead to a cure. The reason is contained
in the lesson learned from the neurotransmitters
themselves: for every chemical breakthrough, there is also
a chemical barrier . The good news about neurotransmitters is that they are
material. A thought, whether sane or mad, is hard to grasp
because it is so intangi ble; it is not something you can
touch or feel. The neurotransmitters, however , are certainly
tangible, although they are extremely tiny and often short-
lived. It is the neurotransmitter’s role to match up with a
thought. To do that, its molecules must be just as ﬂexible as
thoughts, just as ﬂeeting, elusive, changeable, and faint. Such ﬂexibility is a kind of miracle but also a curse, in
that it throws  up a barrier that is almost impossibl e to pass. No man-made drug can duplicate this ﬂexibility , either now
or in the foreseeable future. No drug actually pairs up with
a thought. This is apparent just by looking at the structureof the receptor . Receptors are not ﬁxed: they have been
accurately described as looking like lily pads that have
ﬂoated up from the depth of the cell. Like lily pads, their
roots sink downward, reaching the cell’s nucleu s, where
the DNA sits. DNA deals in many , many  kinds of messages,
potentially an inﬁnite number . Therefore, it makes new
receptors and ﬂoats them up to the cell wall constantly . There is no ﬁxed number of receptors, no ﬁxed
arrangement on the cell wall, and probably no limit to what
they are tuned in to. A cell wall can be as barren of lily
pads as a pond in winter , or as crammed as one in full
ﬂower in June. The only thing constant about a receptor is its
unpredictability . Researchers recently discovered, for
example, that a neurotransmitter called imipramine is
produced abnormally in the brains of depressed people. While looking for the distribution of imipramine receptors,
they were startled to ﬁnd them not just on the brain cells
but on skin cells. Why should the skin create receptors for
a “mental molecule”? What did these skin receptors have to
do with depression? One plausible answer is that a depressed person is
depressed everywhere—he has a sad brain, sad skin, sad
liver, and so on. (Likewise, researchers have examined
patients who complain of feeling jittery all the time and
discovered abnormally high levels of two chemicals,
epinephrine and norepinephrine, in their brains and
adrenal glands. However , high concentrations were then
found in their blood platelets, meaning that they had
“jittery blood cells,” too .) It has been frustrating for doctors to realize how complex
the whole business is becoming. Hopes for a quick cure of
schizophrenia, depression, alcoholism, drug addiction, and
other disorde rs were dashed in the mid-1970s, just a few
years after the original endorphins had been isolated in1973. Now the chemical barrier is stronger than ever, as
the true ﬂexibility of the messenger molecules is being
divined. —
Thinking about this probl em, I have to ask myself a deeper
question: Can a drug really exorcise the ghost of memory? My medical experience says no—I have seen too many
depressed patients who were “cured” by drugs and yet who
still radiate a feeling of hollow sickness. Instead of trusting
drugs, one needs to ﬁnd out how the patient’s sick memory
got into his chemical system to begin with. For it is
absolutely clear that the nonmaterial memory is there. It
may be taking a ride on a molecule, but its life does not
depend on that. The following case serves as an example. Walter grew up on the streets of south Boston in the late
1960s; he felt the edge of hatred that greeted black people
who moved into that neighborhood. To escape this and the
poverty that had dogged  him all his life, Walter joined the
Army at 18. Within six months he found himself in Vietnam. He fought in combat and survived, but when he bounced
back onto the street again two years later, he was hooked
on heroin, which many soldiers used to make the war less
traumatic. Unlike most soldiers, Walter had no reason to
quit when he got home. Eventually the police caught him,
and by order of the court he came under my care at the V .A. hospital for his addiction.
Quantum_Healing_by_Deppak_Chopra.txt
Summarize the following text section accurately and concisely. Maintain specific details and numerical information, and use anti-repetition mechanisms:

        In truth, no other recent event in biomedicine
has been as revolutionary as these discoveries. The arrival
of neurotransmitters on the scene makes the interaction of
mind and matter far more mobile and ﬂowing than ever
before—far closer to the model of the river. They also help
ﬁll the gap that apparently separates mind and body, one of
the deepest mysteries that man has faced since he began to
consider what he is. —
At ﬁrst, around 1973, it seemed that only two
neurotransmitters were needed, one to activate a distant
cell, such as a muscle, and the other to slow down the
activity. Two brain chemicals, acetylcholine and
norepinephrine, do just that; they are the “go” and “slow
down” signal s of the nervous system. They were considered
revolutionary at the time, because they proved that the
impulse sent from one nerve cell to the next was not
electrical but chemical in nature. All at once, the accepted
notion of tiny sparks jumping from neuron to neuron was
rendered obsolete. But the new chemical model at ﬁrst
continued to preserve the basic theory that only two signals
were necessary. Man-made computers operate using just
this kind of binary switch, and apparently so did the brain. Then, as molecular biologists around the world began to
investigate more deeply, numerous new neurotra nsmitters
cropped up, each with a diﬀerent molecular structure and
apparently a diﬀerent message to deliver. Structurally,
many of them were related, being built up as peptides,
complex chains of amino acids of the same kind as those
which appea r in the proteins that make up every cell,
including brain cells. A great many riddles began to be solved, directly or
indirectly, as these discoveries emerged. If you take a
sleeping cat, remove a tiny portion of its spinal ﬂuid, and
inject it into a cat that is awake, the second  cat will
immediately fall asleep. This is becau se a cat’s brain puts
its body to sleep chemically, with its own internal sleeping
potion. In order for the animal to wake up again, the
opposite chemical, a wake-up signal, must be injected into
the spinal column. In humans, where the same chemical mech anisms
operate, the body is awakened in the morning not by a rude
internal alarm but by a series of timed signals, at ﬁrst mild,
then progressively stronger, that lift us from deep  sleep by
stages. The whole process involves a gradual transition, in
four or ﬁve waves, from the biochemistry of sleep to the
biochemistry of wakefulness. If this process is interrupted,
you do not come as fully awake as you should—the
biochemistry of two distinct phases has been mixed. That is
why parents  of newborns, having to get up several times
during the night, feel that they are never quite normal
during the day. Alarm clocks also jolt us out of our natural
wake-up patterns, giving rise to grogginess that may
persist all day, until the next round of sleeping-and-waking
readjusts the mind-body chemistry. Here is a related example. All camels exhibit an unusual
tolerance for high levels of pain—they can calmly chew on
thorns while  at the same  time being beaten with a stick by
an irate camel driver. Curious researchers examined
camels’ brain cells and found that they produce large
quantities of a speciﬁc biochemical that, if injected into
other animals, causes them to ignore pain, too. Sleep and
pain toleranc e, it is now known, thus depend on precise
chemical messengers produced in the brain. One by one, various other functions that were once “all in
your head ” have been connected to speciﬁcneurotransmitters. Schizophrenics suﬀering acutely from
hallucinations and psychotic thoughts often improve
dramatically if put on a kidney dialysis machine, which
ﬁlters impurities from the blood. As we saw, brain
researchers have established that a neurotransmitter called
dopamine exists in abnormally high levels in the brains of
schizophrenics. Current chemical treatment of the disorder
entails using psycho-active drugs that suppress dopamine;
perhaps the dialysis machine is actually removin g it, or a
related by-product, from the bloodstream. By the mid-1980s, barely ten years after the original
breakthrough, more than ﬁfty such neurotransmitters and
neuropeptides were known. All ﬁfty can be manufactured
on one side of the synapses between our neurons, and once
they cross the synapses, all ﬁfty can be received by the
receptor sites on the other side. This implies an incredible
ﬂexibility to communicate from cell to cell. The individual
neuron was now seen to be a producer of messages that did
not just say “yes” or “no,” as a computer does. The brain’s
vocabulary is far larger, encompassing thousands of
combinations of separate signals, with no end in sight,
since new neurotransmitters continue to be discovered at a
fast rate. What kind of messages do nerve cells exchange with one
another. The answer is tantalizing, for certain segments of
our chemica l vocabulary  seem to be just as speciﬁc as
ordinary speech, while others are highly ambigu ous. Our
tolerance for pain, like the camel’s, depends on the class of
biochemicals discovered in the 1970s called endorphins
and enkeph alins, which act as the body’s natural
painkillers. The word endorphin  means “internal
morphine,” and enkephalin  means “inside the brain. ” And
that is their story: they are like a version of morphine
produced by the brain itself. This hitherto  unknown ability to make internal opiates
proved very exciting. It was already suspecte d that the
body must be able to regulate the sensation of pain. Although insistent, pain does not always register on our
awareness. Strong emotions, for example, can override
pain signals from the body, as when a mother rushes to
save her child from a burning house or a wounded soldier
ﬁghts on, ignoring the pain of his injuries. Under more
ordinary circumstances, all of us to some extent can take
our attention away from a minor pain—we don’t  notice a
sore throat, for instance, if we are talking to someone with
intense interest. Despite this common experience of having the pain
threshold rise and fall, no mechanism had ever accounted
for it. Now medicine could explain it by using these internal
painkillers, the endorphi ns and enkephalins, which every
neuron in the body is able to produce at will. Very quickly
the general public was told that the brain produces
narcotics up to two hundred times stronger than anything
you can buy on the street, with the added boon  that our
own painkillers seemed to be nonaddictive. Perhaps in the
future a physician would anesthetize his patients by
stimulating some region in their brains, giving Western
medicine a scientiﬁc form of Chinese acupuncture. Morphine and endorphins both block pain by ﬁlling a
certain receptor on the neuron and preventing other
chemicals that carry the message of pain from coming in. Without these chemicals, there can be no sensatio n of pain,
no matter how much physical provocation is present. Using
this model, a molecule of endorphin is like a speciﬁc word,
the word painkiller. One can imagine that whenever the
word pain comes to the brain’s attention, it has the option
of sending painkiller  back as its answer. Unfortunately, this
simple picture was clouded over by later research. It was found that levels of endorphins in the body do not
correspond on a one-to-one basis with how much pain is
being felt. This can be proved with placebos, or dummy
drugs. Patients who are in pain can often be relieved by
receiving a placebo, usually a coated sugar pill, which they
are told is a powerful painkiller. Not everyone will respon d
to this, but generally between 30 percent and 60 percent
will report that their pain went away. This result, called the
placebo eﬀec t, has been noted for centuries, but it is highly
unpredictable. The doctor cannot tell in advance which
patients will beneﬁt or to what extent. Why should a totally inert sugar pill relieve pain in the
ﬁrst place, even the stabbing pain of peptic ulcers or
traumatic surgery. Endorphins, it was now discovered,
must hold the answer. A drug called naloxone acts as a
chemical antagonist to morphine, meaning that it has the
ability to knock morphine  molecules out of a receptor site. When naloxo ne is administered on top of a paink iller, the
sensation of pain instantly ﬂoods back. As it turns out, the
same thing will happen  with the placebo. The patients
whose pain went away from the sugar pill reported that it
returned again after they took naloxone. This implied that
endorphins and morphine must basically be the same drug,
the diﬀerence being that one is manufactured by the body
and the other by the opium poppy. But once again, it was only a certain percentage of
patients who showed this result. Naloxone made the pain
return in full force for certain patients; for others, the
placebo eﬀec t still worked totally; and for still others, only
a little of the pain came back. Researchers found
themselves in a state of renewed confusion, where they
remain today. Endorphins are certainly internal painkillers,
but uncovering these new molecules was not the whole
answer. Pain studies have now shown that morphine is not
chemically identical to endorphins, that endorphins interact
in a more complex way than narcotic drugs, and that any
form of treatment for pain relief—morphine, endorphins,
acupuncture, or hypnosis—is highly variable in its
eﬀectiveness. It was also discovered  that endorphins
cannot be made into satisfactory pharmaceuti cals: our
internal painkillers are just as addictive as heroin if given
by injection. Soon, the same frustrating complications that scientists
ran up against with the endorphins and enkephalins spread
to all the other neuro-transmitters. It turns out that a
neuron does not simply catch a signal from a neighboring
nerve cell and pass it along untouched to the next synapse. That is only one of its choices. Although no one can
describe exactly how neurons receive their chemical
messages or how they transport them down their own
axons, or trunks, it is known that the process must be very
ﬂexible. The nerve cell can change the message en route,
turning the chemical it received at point A into a diﬀerent
one at point B. The receptor sites on the ends of nerve cells
can also modify themselves to receive diﬀerent types of
messages; the sending station on the other side of the
synapse is equally versatile. For our purposes, this confusion is actually a highly
encouraging state of aﬀairs, because it proves that the
body cannot be understood without the missing ingredient
of intelligence. The physical makeup of endorphins, or any
other neurochemical, is not nearly as important as their
know-how—how they choose their sites, what trigg ers them
to act, how they “talk” to the rest of the body in precise
coordination, and so on. Even in the midst of a genuine
chemical revolution, mind is superior to matter. In fact, it
now appears that the molecular structure of any neuro-transmitter is completely secondary to the brain’s ability to
employ it. It came as a tremendous  surprise to cell biologists that,
as far as molecules go, neurotransmitters are nothing
special. All of the protein in our bodies is built up from
chains of twenty basic amino acids, and these chains can be
further arranged into longer strands called peptides. Neuropeptides have their own signature, making them
distinct from the other peptide chains in the body, but the
same factory, our DNA, makes all of them. DNA is the
source for all the proteins that repair cells, build new ones,
replace missing or defective pieces of the genetic code,
heal cuts and bruises, and so forth. Without bothering to invent a new class of chemic als, the
DNA has ﬁgured out another use for its familiar raw
materials, the amines, amino acids, and peptides. Once
again, it is just the ability  to make these diﬀerent products
that is crucial. There is nothing special about the molecules
themselves, even though their discovery by a molecular
biologist may be special to science. Where does the ability to make the neurotrans mitters
come from, then. Perhaps we should look to the
contribution made by the mind. After all, it is not really the
adrenaline molecule that makes a mother rush into a
burning building to save her child or an endorphin
molecule that protects her from feeling the ﬂames. Love
makes her rush in, and single-minded determination
protects her from pain. It just happe ns that these attributes
of her mind have found a chemical pathway that the brain
can follow to talk to the body. Now we have arrived at the heart of the matter. Mind by
any deﬁnition is nonmat erial, yet it has devised a way to
work in partnership with these complicated comm unicator
molecules. Their association is so close, as we have seen,that mind cannot be projected into the body without such
chemicals. Yet these chemicals are not mind. Or are they. The whole paradoxical situation was wittily summ arized
several years ago when the eminent English neurologist
and Nobel Prize winner Sir John Eccles was asked to
address a conference of parapsychologists, who were
discussing the usual topics of ESP, telepathy, and
psychokinesis—the ability  to move physical objects with the
mind. If you want to see real psychokinesis, he told his
audience, then consider the feats of mind-ov er-matter
performed in the brain. It is quite astonishing that with
every thought, the mind  manages to move the atoms of
hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, and the other particles in the
brain’s cells. It would appear that nothing is further apart
than an insubstantial thought and the solid gray matter of
the brain. The whole trick is somehow done without any
apparent link. The mystery of mind-over-matter has not been explained
by biology, which prefers to push on to more and more
complicated chemical structures operating at ﬁner and
ﬁner levels of the physiology. It is still obvious that no one
is ever going to ﬁnd a particle, however minute, that nature
has labeled “intelligence. ” This is all the more apparent
when we realize that all the matter in our bodies, large or
small, has been designed with intelligence as a built-in
feature. DNA itself, although ackn owledged as the chemica l
mastermind of the body, is made up of essentially the same
basic building blocks as the neurotransmitters it
manufactures and regulates. DNA is like a brick factory
that is also made out of bricks. (The great Hungarian
mathematician John von Neumann, besides being a founder
of the modern computer, was interested in robots of all
types. He once invented, on paper, a truly ingeniou s
machine, a robot that could build robots identical to itself—
in other words, a self-reproducing machine. Our DNA hasaccomplished the same thing on a grand scale, since the
human body is nothing more than variants of DNA built by
DNA. ) You may ﬁnd it easy to think of DNA, with its billions of
genetic bits, as an intellig ent molecule; certainly it must be
smarter than a simple molecule like sugar. How smart can
sugar be. But DNA is really just strings of sugar, amines,
and other simple components. If these are not “smart” to
begin with, then DNA couldn’t become smart just by
putting more of them together. Following this line of
reasoning, why isn’t the carbon or hydrogen atom in the
sugar also smart. Perhaps it is. As we shall see, if
intelligence is present in the body, it has to come from
somewhere, and that somewhere may be everywhere. —
If we follow the next step of the neurotransmitter story, we
ﬁnd ourselves faced with another quantum leap in
complications, but surprisingly, the relation between mind
and matter actually begins to clear up. The areas of the
brain that mediate our emotions—the amygdala  and the
hypothalamus, which is also known as “the brain’s brain”—
were both found to be particularly rich in all the substances
in the neurotransmitter group. This implied  that where
thinking processes are abundant (meaning that many
neurons are tightly clustered), so will be the chemicals
associated with thinking. At this point there was still a
rather well-d eﬁned divisio n between chemicals that jumped
the gap between brain cells and those that traveled from
the brain down the bloodstream. (In my ﬁeld,
endocrinology, one of the deﬁning qualities of a hormone is
that it ﬂoats through the blood, a process that is generally
much slower than the transmission speed of a nerve cell,
which has been clocked at 225 miles per hour; a signal sent
from head to toe takes less than l/50th of a second. )Just when science thought it could isolate brain
chemicals and categorize their sites, the body cropped up
with its own complication. Researchers at the National
Institute of Mental Health found receptors in equal
abundance at other sites outside the brain. Starting in the
early 1980s, receptors for neurotransmitt ers and
neuropeptides were discovered on cells in the immune
system called  monocytes. “Brain” receptors on white cells
in the blood. —it would be hard to exaggerate the
signiﬁcance of this discovery. In the past, it was thoug ht
that the central nervous system alone relayed messages to
the body, rather like a complicated telephone system
connecting the brain to all the organs it wanted to “talk” to. In this scheme, the neurons function like telephone lines
conveying the brain’s signals—that is their unique  function,
shared by no other system in the physiology. Now it was seen that the brain does not just send
impulses traveling in straight lines down the axons, or
trunks, of the neurons; it freely circulates intelligence
throughout the body’s entire inner space. Unlike the
neurons, which are ﬁxed in place along the nervous system,
the monocytes of the immune system travel through the
bloodstream, giving them free access to every other cell in
the body. Outﬁtted with a vocabulary to mirror the nervous
system’s in its complexity, the immune system apparently
sends and receives mess ages that are just as diverse. In
fact, if being happy, sad, thoughtful, excited, and so on all
require the production of neuropeptides and
neurotransmitters in our brain cells, then the immune cells
must also be happy, sad, thoughtful, excited—indeed, they
must be able to expres s the full range of “words” that
neurons do. Monocytes can be thought of in eﬀect as
circulating neurons. With this one discovery, the concept of the intelligent cell
took on full-ﬂedged reality. One kind of localizedintelligence was already well known, that possessed by the
DNA in every cell. Since Watson and Crick  mapped the
structure of DNA in the early 1950s, investigation had
proved that this remar kable, almost inﬁnitely complex
molecule encoded all the information necessary to create
and sustain human life. But the intelligence of genes was
seen primari ly as ﬁxed, because DNA itself is the stablest
chemical in the body, and thanks to that stability, each of us
is able to inherit genetic traits from our parents—blue eyes,
curly hair, facial patterns, et cetera—and prese rve them
intact to pass on to our children. The know-how carried by the neurotransmitters and
neuropeptides represented something else altogether: the
winged, ﬂeeting, sentient intelligence of the mind. The
wonder is that these “intelligent” chemicals are not only
made by the brain, whose function is to think, but by the
immune system, whose primary role is to protect  us from
disease. From the standpoint of a brain chemist, this
sudden expa nsion of messenger molecules adds a new
order of complexity to his work. But for us, the discovery of
“ﬂoating” intelligence conﬁrms the model of the body as a
river. We needed a material basis for claiming that
intelligence ﬂows all through us, and now we have it. Anyone can see that his mind is ﬁlled with a bewildering
ﬂood of impressions that are far too amorphous to pin
down. To describe it, psychology is reduced to equal ly
amorphous terms like the famous phrase stream of
consciousness. Today, as if to ﬁll that stream with water you
can actually see and touch, brain researchers have found
cascades of brain chemicals. But unlike a stream, these
cascades have no banks; they ﬂow anywhere and
everywhere. They never cease this ﬂow, either, for the
smallest fraction of a second. A brain scientist in eﬀect
stops time to examine a cascade’s components. The
chemicals he wants to ﬁnd are extremely minute—it tookthree hundred thousand sheep brains to yield a single
milligram of the molecul e the brain uses to stimulate the
thyroid. Nor are the cell receptors easy to grasp. They
constantly dance on the surface of the cell walls and
change their shape to receive new messages; any one cell
may contain hundreds or even thousands of sites, only one
or two of which can be analyzed at a time. Science learned
more about brain chemis try in the last ﬁfteen years than it
knew in all of previous history, but we are all still like
foreigners trying to learn English from scraps of paper
found in the street. —
No one has yet been able to grasp how the cascade of
chemicals exactly patterns itself to do all the things a mind
can do. Memory, recollection, dreaming, and all the other
everyday activities of the mind remain a profound mystery
as far as their physical mechanics is concerned. But now
we know that the mind and body are like parallel universes. Anything that happens in the mental universe must leave
tracks in the physical one. Recently brain researchers have found a way to
photograph a thought’s tracks in 3-D, like a hologram. The
procedure, known as PET (positron-emission tomography),
is done by injecting the bloodstream with glucose whose
carbon molecules have been tagged with radioisotopes. Glucose is the brain’s sole food, which it uses much faster
than do ordinary tissues. Therefore, when the injected
glucose reaches the brain, its marker molecules of carbon
can be picked out as the brain uses them, and thus pictured
in three dimensions on a monitor, much the same way a
CAT scan is produced. Watching these marker molecules
shift around while the brain thinks, scientists saw that each
distinct event in the universe of mind—such as a sensation
of pain or a strong memory—triggers a new chemicalpattern in the brain, not just at a single site but at several. The image looks diﬀerent for every thought, and if one
could extend  the portrait to be full-length, there is no doubt
that the whole body changes at the same time, thanks to
the cascades of neurotra nsmitters and related messenger
molecules. As you see it right now, your body is the physical picture,
in 3-D, of what you are thinking. This remarkable fact
escapes our notice for several reasons. One is that the
physical outline of the body does not change drastically
with every thought. Even so, the whole body quite
obviously projects thoughts. We literally read other
people’s minds from the constant play of their facial
expressions; without marking it, we also register the
thousandfold gestures of body language as a sign of their
moods and intentions toward us. Films made by sleep
laboratories disclose that we change position dozens of
times during the night, obeying commands from the brain
that we are unconscious of. Secondly, we don’t see our bodies as projected thoughts
because many physical changes that thinking causes are
unnoticeable. They involve minute alterations of cell
chemistry, body temperature, electrical charg e, blood
pressure, and so on, which do not register on our focus of
attention. You can be assured, however, that the body is
ﬂuid enough to mirror any mental event. Nothing can move
without moving the whole. —
The latest discoveries in neurobiology build an even
stronger case for the parallel universes of mind and body. When researchers looked further, beyond the nervous
system and the immune system, they began to discover the
same neuropeptides and receptors for them in other
organs, such as the intestines, kidneys, stomach, and heart. There is every expectation of ﬁnding them elsewhere, too. This means that your kidneys can “think,” in the sense that
they can produce the identical neuropeptides found in the
brain. Their receptor sites are not simply sticky patche s. They are questions waiting for answers, framed in the
language of the chemical universe. It is very likely that if
we had the whole dictionary and not just our few scraps,
we would ﬁnd that every cell speaks as ﬂuently as we do. Inside us, the questions and answers go on forever. Just
by itself, a single gland like the thyroid has so much to say
to the brain, to its fellow endocrine glands, and through
them to all the body, that its cascade of conversation
inﬂuences dozens of vital functions, such as growth,
metabolic rate, and much more. How fast you think, how
tall you are, and the dimensions of your eyes, for example,
all depend in part on advice from the thyroid. We can safely
conclude, then, that mind is not conﬁned to the brain by
some neat division set up for our own convenience. Mind is
projected everywhere in inner space. One of the most forward-looking and accomplished
researchers in the ﬁeld of brain chemistry, Dr. Candace
Pert, director of the brain biochemistry division at the
National Institute of Mental Health, has pointed out that it
is quite arbitrary to say that a biochemical like DNA or a
neurotransmitter belongs to the body rather than the mind. DNA is almost as much sheer knowledge as it is matter. Dr. Pert refers to the entire mind-body system as a “network of
information,” shifting the emphasis away from the gross
level of matter toward the subtler level of knowledge. Is there really any reason to keep mind and body apart at
all. In her own writings, Pert prefers to use one term for
both— bodymind. If this word sticks, it will clearly indicate
that a wall has come crashing down. Pert does not have all
of medical science behin d her yet, but that may change
very quickly. It is becoming clearer every day that the mindand body are amazingly alike. Insulin, a hormone always
identiﬁed with the pancre as, is now known to be produced
by the brain also, just as brain chemicals like transferon
and CCK are produced by the stomach. This shows that our neat division of the body into nervous
system, endocrine system, digestive system, and so on is
only partially right and may soon be outmoded. It has now
been absolutely proved that the same neuroc hemicals
inﬂuence the whole bodymind. Everything is
interconnected at the level of the neuropeptide; therefore,
to separate these areas is simply bad science. A body that can “think” is far diﬀerent from the one
medicine now treats. For one thing, it knows what is
happening to it, not just through the brain, but everywhere
there is a receptor for messenger molecules, which means
on every cell. This explains a great deal about drugs and
their side eﬀects that had not been known. Some drugs
have a bewildering numb er of side eﬀects. If I consult my
Physician’s Desk Reference, which comprehensively  lists
the medications that a doctor can prescribe, I can ﬁnd page
after page under the listing for corticosteroids. The most
familiar corticosteroid (or just steroid) is cortisone, but the
whole family is widely prescribed to treat burns, allergies,
arthritis, postoperative inﬂammation, and dozens of other
conditions. If you didn’t know about receptor sites, steroids would
appear highl y peculiar. Let us say that I prescribe steroids
to a woman who is suﬀering from a diﬀicult  case of
arthritis. The steroids would bring down the inﬂammation
in her joints dramatically, but then a host of stran ge things
might happen. She could begin to complain of being
fatigued and depressed. Abnormal fatty deposits  might
begin to show under her skin, and her blood vessels could
become so brittle that she would develop large bruises thatare very slow to heal. What could link these entirely
divergent symptoms. The answer lies at the level of the receptors. Corticosteroids replace some of the secretions of the
adrenal cortex, a yellowish pad on the top of the adrenal
glands. At the same time, they suppress the other adrenal
hormones, as well as secretions from the pituitary gland,
which is located in the brain. As soon as it is given, the
steroid rushes in and ﬂoods all the receptors throughout
the body that are “listening” for a certain message. When a
receptor becomes ﬁlled, what follows is not a simple action. The cell can interpret the adrenal “message” in many ways,
depending on how long the site stays ﬁlled. In this case, the
receptor stays ﬁlled indeﬁnitely. (The fact that other
messages are not being received is important, as is the loss
of innumerable connections with the other endocrine
glands. ) The cell can exhibit extreme reactions from ﬁlling one
receptor. By analogy, look at a moth hanging under the
eaves on a summer night. In a male moth, the fuzzy
antennae on its head are actually receptor sites that have
extended outside the body. As the sun sets, the moth waits
for a signal from a female moth in his vicinity, who is
emitting a special molecu le called a pheromone. Moths are
tiny creatures, and the number of pheromones they can
send through the air is inﬁnitesimal compared to the total
volume of air and its immense freight of pollen, dust, water,
and other pheromones being secreted by animals of every
kind, including man. One would hardly suspe ct that two
moths can communicate over any sizable distance. But when a single pheromone molecule lands on the
male’s anten na, his behavior is transformed. He swiftly
homes in on the female, begins an elaborate courtship
ritual in the air, and proceeds with the act of mating. Biologically speaking, the only thing that causes this
complicated behavior is one molecule. When I give steroids to an arthritis patient, trillions of
molecules and receptor sites are involved. That is why the
blood vessels, skin, brain, fat cells, and so on all exhibit
their diﬀerent responses. If I go to my desk reference, the
long-term consequences of staying on steroids include
diabetes, osteoporosis, suppression of the immun e system
(making a person more susceptible to infections and
cancer), peptic ulcers, internal bleeding, elevated
cholesterol, and much more. One might even include death
among these side eﬀects, because taking steroids for a long
period causes the adrenal cortex to shrivel (an example of
how an organ will atrophy if not used). If the steroid is
withdrawn too quickly, the adrenal gland does not have
time to regenerate. The patient is left with inadequate
defenses against stress, which adrenal hormone s help to
buﬀer. He can go to the dentis t to have a wisdom tooth
extracted, a stress that is usually well within the normal
limits, but deprived of adrenal hormones, he can go into
shock. A tooth extraction could even kill him. Take all of these details together, and what you see is
that steroids can cause literally anything  to happen. They
may be the immediate cause or just the ﬁrst domino—the
distinction makes little diﬀerence to the patient. To her,
there is no diﬀerence between the osteoporosis caused by
steroids and the “real thing. ” The same holds for
depression, diabetes, or death. A single messenger has
caused them  all. In truth there is no such thing as a single
messenger—each one is a strand in the body’s web of
intelligence. Touch one strand, and the whole web
trembles. I realize that this makes drugs look much more
dangerous than we had thought, even in an era that is
obsessed with cataloging medical disasters. We are used toa more limited idea of what a side eﬀect is—a touch of the
bitter with the sweet, like the thorn that comes with the
rose or the hangover with the bottle of wine. Instead, a side
eﬀect balloons out into anything the body can think of. Generally we are protected from serious harm because the
body reacts along certain  narrow lines. A patient who takes
an aspirin might experience bleeding in his stomach lining
but not a heart attack. However, every cell in the body has
a wide  latitude for action—it is a conscious being who
understands the world around it. The side eﬀects in my
desk reference are just the ones that have been observed
so far. I recently read a story of an internist who was baﬄed
when one of his patien ts, a man in his late seventies,
suddenly began to act paranoid. The man was obsessed by
the idea that robbers were going to break into his house,
and he bought a gun to keep under his pillow. One night he
terriﬁed his wife by leaping out of bed at three in the
morning, running downst airs with his pistol, and searching
wildly for the intruders he thought were behind every chair. Knowing that he was hallucinating dangerously, the wife
rushed him to the internist. The patient had no prior
history of mental illness and was on no medicatio ns other
than digitalis, which he took to stabilize his heart rhythm. Considering the patient’s age, a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s
disease seemed imminent. However, the internist consulted a neurologist to read the
patient’s CAT scan. Nothing abnormal appeared on it, but
the neurologist said, “I bet this man is hallucinating from
the digitalis. ” In thirty years of practice, the internist, who
is also a professor of medicine in New York City, had never
seen this side eﬀect, altho ugh he had heard of it, barely. He
reduced the digitalis, and within ten days the patient
returned to normal. It seems quite freakish that a highly
speciﬁc heart medication should lead to insanity. If thispatient had hallucinated a few decades ago, when the desk
reference did not list such a bizarre side eﬀect, no doctor
would have believed it; today, the internist believed it only
after an extensive battery of tests ruled out everything else. What this case teaches is that you can never tell what the
body is thinking, or where. It is entirely  possible that the
man’s heart went insane, in the sense that it toppled the
ﬁrst domino and triggere d the onset of his paranoia. The
brain and the heart share  many of the same recep tor sites;
more important, they share the same DNA, which implies
that a heart cell can beha ve like a brain cell, a liver cell, or
any other kind of cell. After open-heart surgery, patients
sometimes have psychoti c breaks and begin hallucinating. Flat on their backs, groggy from deprivation of oxygen to
the brain, and locked into the blank sterility of an intensive
care unit, they suddenly  think that little green men are
marching up and down the sheets—such is the accepted
explanation for their episodes. Could it be that in fact it is
the heart that is hallucinating here. Simply the trauma of
the surgery could make the heart think that reality has run
wild, and that is what it tells the brain. —
The discove ry of neurotransmitters, neuropeptides, and
messenger molecules of all kinds has vastly extended our
concept of intelligence. But if every cell has an endless
number of messages it can send and receive, it is also clear
that only a small fraction are activated at one time. Who or
what controls the messages. That turns out to be an
explosive question. In a chemistry lab, reactions will run
automatically as soon as the experiment starts; it is just a
matter of mixing one chemical with another. Yet, someone
has to take the chemicals oﬀ the shelf to begin with. Medicine has traditionally preferred to ignore this fact as
it applies to the human body. Now we see that withthousands of chemicals on its shelf, a cell has not only to
choose some, mix them together, and analyze the results. It
has to make the chemicals in the ﬁrst place, ﬁnding
thousands of ways to create new molecules out of basically
a handful of elements— carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and
nitrogen. To do that requires a mind. So, by follow ing the
story of neuropeptides, we have ultimately arrived at a
dramatic shift in worldview. For the ﬁrst time in the history
of science, mind has a visible scaﬀold to stand upon. Before
this, science declared that we are physical machines that
have somehow learned to think. Now it dawns that we are
thoughts that have learned to create a physical machine. EXPANDING THE TOPIC
Placing mind before brain, the main point of this chapter,
remains very hard for some people, in particular the
researchers who devote their entire careers to exploring
the brain. By developin g ever more sophisticated brain
scans, such as fMRI, which can look at brain activity
“lighting up” in real time, neuroscience has entered a kind
of golden age. New ﬁndings emerge literally by the month,
and in some circles it is conﬁdently promised that very
soon the mystery of the mind will be completely solved. This is a promise that will never be kept if science
proceeds by assuming that brain = mind. Think about
music. A piano sonata is written by Mozart, using a
completely mental process. He writes the notes down on
paper, and the sonata can be performed on the piano. Now
imagine that a scientist comes along and says, “I’ve been
examining how pianos work. I’ve looked at the keys and
strings down  to the mole cular level. I can tell you how the
piano’s mech anism registers the ﬁnest nuances of Mozart’ssonata. Very soon we will know exactly how he composed
everything he ever wrote. ”
The claim is nonsense, because dissecting a piano tells
you nothing  about how music is composed. Likewise,
examining the human brain down to the subtlest chemical
reactions inside neurons and across the synaptic gaps that
separate them says nothing about where thoug hts come
from. This is the simplest refutation of materialism one can
oﬀer, and yet it has profound consequences. Let’s ask the most basic question. How does the brain
produce the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and textures of
the three-dimensional world. In other words, when you see
a red apple, where does its redness come from. Your brain
is completely dark inside;  there is no light anywhere in any
part of the visual corte x, much less the color red. This
mystery doesn’t bothe r most scientists, even brain
scientists. They would simply respond that apples are red,
and how the brain registers this fact comes down to
chemical reactions in the visual cortex. But the notio n that
the color red exists “out there” in Nature is simply wrong. Light is transmitted by photons, which are colorless; in
fact, they are invisible. There is no brightness “out there”
as photons sweep from the stars and certainly no
brightness inside the brain’s total darkness. So if light’s
brightness is neither “in here” nor “out there,” why is the
sun so bright that you can’t look at it with the naked eye for
more than a few seconds. Light’s brightness and color, along with everythi ng else
we perceive, come from “conscious agents,” a term coined
by the farseeing cognitiv e scientist Donald D. Hoﬀman of
the Universi ty of California, Irvine. He proposes  that the
only reality we can know is the reality created by
consciousness. If there is anything that is real but beyond
the human mind, then it won’t be accessible. A conscious
agent doesn ’t have to be human. Every animal speciesexperiences a reality that conforms to its nervous system,
so that a dog’s image of sound reaches much higher than
the human ear can perceive, while the hearing of a
humpback whale reaches much lower (whales can hear one
another’s songs for hund reds of miles underwate r). Some
snakes, inclu ding pytho ns and rattlesnakes, can detect
infrared light through specialized “pit organs” located in
their jaws, and so they “see” into a dimension entirely
closed oﬀ to human perception. Conscious agents fascin ated me because the ancient
Vedic rishis were in complete agreement with the notion
that consciousness is the source of reality. They didn’t push
the everyday world of the ﬁve senses completely out of the
picture. Instead they gave it a lower status known as Maya,
a Sans krit word usually translated as “illusion”—it comes
up later in this book. Maya is the apparent reality “out
there” that all of us naïvely accept at face value, but which
turns out to be no more real than the movie projected on
the screen in a cinema. Consciousness serves as the
projector whose light casts these images while itself
remaining pure light, with no images at all. Let me go into this subject a little more philosop hically
than I did in the original Quantum Healing. The ancient
sages of India, and all philosophers since then, explored the
mind by going inward. But in a scientiﬁc age, we have to
ask: How can thinking about the mind be better than
gathering hard facts about the brain. Because data only has meaning given a certain way of
seeing it. This point was made in the one book almost every
college stude nt reads (if they read any) in the philosophy of
science, Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scien tiﬁc
Revolutions,  published in 1962. Kuhn shattered the notio n
of objective progress in science by arguing that given their
starting assumptions, every scientiﬁc scheme for explainingNature—what he called a paradigm—is right on its own
terms. This groundb reaking insight went back to 1947, when
Kuhn, then a graduate student at Harvard, was wrestling
with how wrong Aristotle had been. Aristotelian physics
was the ﬁrst systema tic explanation of Nature in
mechanical terms, the cornerstone of Western science that
made Copernicus, Newton, and Einstein possible. And yet a
brilliant mind like Aristo tle’s arrived at complete ly wrong
conclusions about such basic things as why objec ts fall to
earth or what heat is. Suddenly Kuhn had an epiphany:
What we call Aristotle’s mistakes in fact weren’t mistakes
at all. If you accept the starting assumptions behind
Aristotelian physics, its description of Nature was valid. Kuhn seemed  to be saying that Aristotle was just as right
as Newton, which to most people, including probably every
physicist, makes no sense. In our time, the accepta nce of
scientiﬁc progress is all but universal, and the triumphs of
modern technology are undeniable. Yet no one has rebutted
Kuhn’s point that we view Nature through our own
paradigm, our worldview. The history of science is a
constant stream of shifting paradigms, one after another. There is no way to step outside the paradigm you totally
believe in. But what if the current paradigm happens to be
absolutely right. A Theory of Everything has been on the
horizon for decades, and we are told that it’s only a matter
of time before the theory  is complete. Kuhn’s point is that
an absolutely correct theory, no matter how much data you
feed into it, cannot be achieved. All you can achieve is the
fulﬁllment of the paradigm you believe in. Eventually
problems will arise that cannot be solved without
shattering the present paradigm so that a new one can be
formed. To a doctor, spontaneous remission from cancer  posed
just such a problem. As long as your medical paradigm
separated mind and body, no way existed for consciousness
(including beliefs, expec tations, fears, wishes, faith, and
hope) to inﬂuence the daily life of cells. Looking beyond
medicine, we have to consider consciousness as a whole. If
the mind can inﬂuence the body, what do we mean by
mind. If brain = mind, the answer to all ills should be a
host of super-pills that alter brain function, steering it in
the direction we want it to go. In eﬀect, this is where
neuroscience thinks it’s heading, because the old paradigm
says so. There is literally no room for consciousness being
the agent of change. In the years since Quantum Healing  was ﬁrst published,
my own thinking has become more sophisticated about the
so-called hard problem of connecting mind and brain. Anyone who ﬂatly says that brain = mind is turning their
backs on what the philosophy of science teaches. 1. Theories are right about what they include and wrong
about what they exclude. 2. No model of reality is big enough to explain reality. 3. Data has no meaning unless it is interpreted, and
interpretations are bound by the observer’s starting
assumptions. In a word, everyone has a story, and everyone believes
their story. Even contradictory stories can be valid and ﬁt
the same data. This startling conclusion applies to everyday
life all the time. Competing stories are told in divorce court
when marriages break apart, in criminal court when
prosecution and defense do battle, and in the corridors of
medicine when two doctors have diﬀerent concepts of
healing. Sticking to your story convinces you that you’retelling the truth when in fact you are just defending a way
of seeing. —
The story told by neuroscience, that brain = mind, is
particularly weak. There is absolutely no data to indicate
that neurons  can think; they merely light up on an fMRI as
thinking occurs, which isn’t the same thing. You could
construct a setup so that a 100-watt bulb lights up over
your head every time you have a bright idea, but that
doesn’t mean  the light bulb caused  the idea. Neuroscience
ignores this obvious ﬂaw when it arrives at the same false
conclusion, using neurons instead of a lightbulb. The current state of total conﬁdence in neuroscience
requires thick blinders. Brain scientists don’t see the dead
end they are walking toward when they promise that
neurons are going to explain where thoughts come from. Not just thoughts, but no color, shape, sound, taste, and
smell will ever be locate d in neurons, and what isn’t in a
neuron isn’t in the brain, either. It would be pointless to tear down the old paradigm
without having somethin g better to oﬀer. In that regard,
Quantum Healing  pointed in the right direction. All the
things the brain is credited with actually should be
assigned to the mind. Once this shift is made,  enormous
untapped potential becomes available. Neuroscience will
continue to do valuable things, in particular ﬁxing the
abnormalities and disorders of the brain connected to a
wide range of diseases. You can’t play Mozart on a broken
piano. Yet the mystery of Mozart’s genius, like all mysteries
of the mind,  must be solved on a diﬀerent plane, beyond
the physical. OceanofPDF. comRecently a young woman in her late twenties, a part-time
model, came  to my oﬀice  in Boston. After years of hiding
the fact that she had an eating disorder, her family had
ﬁnally persua ded her to seek treatment. Since adolescence
she had been obsessed with her ﬁgure, and over time this
concern had become more and more abnormal until it
blossomed into a double sickness, anorexia nervosa and
bulimia. Looking at this attractive, bright woman, who to all
appearances was normal, I was not lulled into thinking that
her problem was easy. Despite extensive resea rch and
publicity in recent years, both anorexia and bulimia remain
highly puzzling. Why should young wome n, many of them
well educated and from high-income backgrounds, nurture
an uncontro llable obsession with diet and weight. Anorexics develop a fear of food and a horror at the act of
eating. Conﬁned to a rigidly ritualized pattern of behavio r
that leads them to voluntary starvation, they will deny that
they are too thin, even to the point of death. The companion disease, bulimia, can be separate from
anorexia or can coexist with it, as in this woman’s case. In
bulimia, the horror of food takes a weird turn in the form of
bingeing. The secret food binges that a bulimic goes on are
often enorm ous—anywhere from 2,000 to 50,000  calories
at a sitting (2,000 calor ies is enough food to sustain a
vigorous 150-pound perso n for a day). This huge amount of
food is then vomited back up, causing tremendous stress on
the digestive system and the body as a whole. This particul ar woman’s  disorder had advanced to the
point where she was vomiting every day in order to
maintain the normal but still low weight needed  for her
work. The very sight of a dessert, she told me, caused her
to break out in a cold sweat and sent her heart racing. She
was extremely intelligent and listened closely when I said
that at the root of her disorder was a mistake in her self-
image. Because our society is obsessed with the ideal of
thinness, many women try to live up to an inner image of
their bodies that is simply not right for their physical
makeup. In her case, however, the image was not saying, “I
have to be thin. ” It was saying, “I can never be thin
enough. ”
To explain this paradoxical illness, one has to drop the
distinction between mind and body and think of one
system, the “bodymind. ” This is because an eating disorder
is a holistic disease, the cruel opposite of holistic health. In
anorexics, the distorted idea, “I must be thinner,” takes
over the bodymind like a malevolent and elusive phantom. Even after long hospitalization and exhaustive psychiatric
treatment, the patient rarely eats like a normal person. A
normal person would have to struggle to starve himself—
once the body went past a certain point of deprivation, its
hunger signa ls would take precedence over everyt hing else
in the bodymind, until the desire for food became
overpowering. For someone with anorex ia, the same thinghappens but in reverse—the compulsion to avoid eating is
all but irresistible. As I was talking about this, the young woman looked at
me sorrowfully and whispered, “So there really are such
things as ghosts, aren’t there. ”
I was startled, and after a moment I answered, “It’s true,
but this ghost can be exorcised. ” What we were talking
about is a ghost of memory, a memory picked up and stored
in the body. Memory sounds very abstract, while food is
very concrete. But the memory is far more real in this case. Whether a person is compulsively too thin or too fat does
not depend primarily on how much food he takes in. This is
true for conditions that are less bizarre than anorexia. For
centuries, obesity has been seen as a ﬂaw in character,
which religious ages called the sin of gluttony. The
implication was that if fat people were just strong enough
and used a little self-discipline, they could be as thin as the
rest of us simply by eating less. Now it is generally recognized that for the chronically
obese, diets  do not solve the problem (just as, at the
opposite extreme, ﬁlling an anorexic with food does not
solve that problem), because the brain of a fat person is
actually sending out overpowering signals for too much
food. How these messages are triggered and how to turn
them around  are open questions. Unless some  degree of
control is gained at a very deep level, obese people can
spend their whole lives forcing themselves to diet, a self-
defeating tactic that only makes the mental distortion
worse. The loss of 10 pounds is registered in their brains as
a famine, and the next time food is oﬀered, the brain will
not stop until 15 pounds is put back on, adding an extra 5
as a safety margin against the next famine. Obese people
have been known to gain weight on diets where no extra
calories are oﬀered beyond the bare minimum to sustain
basal metabolism. The reason for this is that the brain canactually alter the metabolism in such a way that the
calories are stored as fat instead of being burned up as
fuel. No one knows why the intellect is so powerless to change
these distortions in self-image. The ghost gets stronger the
more you ﬁght it. Although anorexics will persistently deny
that they have a proble m, once the doctor pierces this
defense, it is clear that a profound split in the bodymind is
involved, with one part of the system struggling to maintain
rationality while another sends up wildly irrational
impulses. I once spent an hour counseling another anorexic woman
in her thirties who weigh ed less than 80 pounds, had given
birth at that weight, and was going into rapid physical
decline (10 percent of anorexics die from deliberate
starvation or from causes related to malnutrition). Her case
was made particularly bizarre by the fact that she loved
nothing better than going home to cook for her large Italian
family, doling out pasta and olive oil to a dozen brothers,
sisters, cousins, aunts, and uncles. Our conversation had been rather eerily reasonab le until
she suddenly snapped at me, “Do you really think you can
talk me out of this. I alrea dy understand the whole thing
perfectly, you know, and it hasn’t done me a damn bit of
good. Leave me alone. This is how I have to eat. ”
She glared at me with unconcealed hostility. “Tell me,”
she demanded, “how many people do you cure of smoking
by talking to them. They know what nicotine  does and the
danger of lung cancer and all that. It doesn’t do them any
good to talk, and you won’t do me any good, either. ”
I sat back, feeling the cold blasts of despair and the hot
blasts of hatred in what she had said. How horrible to have
to live with both, in a weird, poisonous tangle. “The real question isn’t whether I can help you, is it. ” I
pointed out after she calmed down. “It’s whether you canhelp yourself. ” She started to soften just a little, and I
added gently, “You know, you’re not hurting me by not
eating. You’re not hurting anyone real at all, but someone
who is an image. It is all inside you, and that is the part
that is so tough, both for you as a person and for me as
your doctor. ”
This story does not have an immediate happy ending. Certainly my patient was right about the futility of talking
about her disease. She remains  a very hostile, confused
person, and my best hope  is that joining a peer group with
other anorexics and bulimics will help. To get her to
exorcise the ghost of memory, she will have to reach the
level where the ghost lives. Until the ghost is gone, patients
like her do not feel that they have a disease—they  are their
disease. I mean this quite literally. What happen s to you when you
see a snake  and jump out of its way. The frightened
thought, Look out, a snake. comes  to mind at exactly the
same instant  as adrenaline makes you jump. Usually the
thought and the action are so closely tied together that the
conscious thought doesn’t even have time to say its words
—you just see the snake and you jump. So there is no space
where you can drive in a wedge between the two. In the
case of an anorexic, the mere sight of food sets up a wave
of revulsion. Perhaps the sight and smell of a fresh loaf of
bread sends the thought, Ugh, I can’t eat this, while at the
same time the stomach turns, the salivary glands dry up,
and the whole digestive tract is alerted not to function. Naturally, this is a twisted reaction, but the thought and
the reaction come packag ed together, and there is no place
to drive in a wedge betw een them. What is at work here is
something we can call an “impulse of intelligence,” which
means a thought and a molecule tied together, like a two-
sided coin. Once the impulse starts to rise, there is no
turning it back. The thought is the molecule; the moleculeis the thought. At the time it takes place, an impulse of
intelligence constitutes the patient’s whole inner reality. When an anorexic is repelled by food, her reaction is all
there is (at least for that instant)—she is her disease at the
moment. The same holds true for the obese person trying
to resist food, the smoker trying to resist another cigarette,
and so on. You cannot change a thought after you have had it—the
entire inner struggle of such patients is totally futile. But
there is another component to an impulse of intelligence
besides the thought and the molecule. The third component
is silence; this is the unseen component. Like all of us, the
anorexic must fetch thoughts from the region that lies
deeper than thought, and it is there that a cure might be
found. The anorexic’s dreaded realization, I am my disease, may
be true, but it is not the ﬁnal truth. If the anorexic could
transcend her compulsions, looking on them without
involvement, her disease would end. Becoming a silent
witness would be enough to disentangle her from the
ghost. Archimedes said that if he had a lever long enou gh
and a place to stand on, he could move the Earth—
presumably, he would have to stand in outer space. The
anorexic needs just such a place; unfortunately, a human
being is conﬁned to inner space. No one has a spare
nervous system hanging in the closet in case his primary
one gets strange ideas. Sadly but inevitably, there is no
place outside to stand on. —
Without realizing it, we count very heavily on the fact that
our thoughts  will trigger the right chemicals in our bodies;
the mind and its messen ger molecules are automatically
and perfectly matched. But this process can break down,
and then the resulting confusion is like running twoprograms on the same computer—when the input is
scrambled, it is no wonder that the printout, your body,
becomes garbled. For example, one of the most ambiguous
drugs ever devised is V alium. Valium belongs to a class of chemicals called
benzodiazepines, which are used as both tranquilizers and
sleeping pills. These substances were greeted in their day
as revolutionary. Their predecessors, the barbiturates, had
many notorious drawbacks: they were highly addictive;
they induced  poor-quality  sleep because they blocked REM,
or dream sleep; and overdoses could prove fatal. Valium
and its relatives, on the other hand, produced better sleep
with less hangover, were  much harder to overdose on, and
at ﬁrst seemed nonaddictive. At the height of its imme nse
popularity, Valium was said to account for one-quarter of all
new prescriptions written in America. Now it is known that Valium is itself addictive, that it
produces sleep irregular ities of its own (interfering with
the third and fourth stages of deep, dreamless sleep), and
that serious withdrawal symptoms occur after prolonged
use. If you look at the level of the receptors on the cell wall,
none of this is surprising, because Valium acts by
outcompeting the body’s own neurochemicals and taking
over their receptor sites. This kind of interference would
perhaps be advantageous if Valium competed only with the
neuropeptides responsib le for causing the feelings of
anxiety (called octadeca neuropeptides). But the calming
eﬀect of the drug does not come by itself; Valium confuses
the nervous system as a whole. Moreover, it was recently
discovered that the monocytes of the immune system also
are attracted to Valium. So when a doctor gives what he
thinks is a sleeping pill or a tranquilizer, he is aﬀecting the
immune system at the same time, adding more confusion at
the level of the receptors. No one knows if this has caused any harm, largely
because the ﬁnding about  the immune system is too new. In
all likelihood, we will discover that nature has already
provided our bodies with an exact internal analogue to
Valium, which means that we are clumsily reproducing
something that already exists in nearly perfect form. If I
ask myself whether I like the idea of plugging the same
chemical into my immune cells every day, in the
indiscriminate fashion that Valium was doled out to millions
of patients, primarily women, for thirty years, the answer is
obvious. The immune cells have a reason for each receptor; they
use them to think, act, perceive, and respond in precise
ways. A person uses the same two eyes to view the whole
world; a cell, however, has a diﬀerent eye for each thing it
needs to see. In other words, a constantly ﬁlled receptor
renders the cell blind to one speciﬁc thing. At a time when
the incidence of many cancers, such as breast cancer, is
still rising, sending unkn own messages into the immune
system seems very risky. —
Currently there is a “chem ical revolution” under way in the
treatment of mental disease, and it seems as miraculous as
Valium did thirty years ago. Doctors now widely give their
mental patients mind-altering, or psychotropic, drugs to
clear up the overt symptoms of their sickness, mainly
depression, mania, and hallucinations. The symptoms are
often relieved, sometimes quite dramatically and suddenly,
although many patients cannot tolerate the mental
numbness and fatigue that are common side eﬀects (not
that the side eﬀects are simple: certain antidepressants can
make the patient’s depression worse for the ﬁrst few
weeks, or swing it in the opposite direction until it turns
into wild mania). Critics of drug therapies call them “chemical lobotomies”
and charge that they strip the patient of his huma n dignity. Doubtless there are many abuses, particularly in large,
understaﬀed public hospitals for the insane. It takes very
careful ﬁne-tuning to stabilize the correct dosage of any
psychotropic drug, and horror stories abound of depressed
patients who reacted so badly to their medication that they
committed suicide rather than endure the cure. Still, the
success in this ﬁeld impli es that drugs will be used to cure
schizophrenia and depression altogether, if not today, then
in the future. A “cured” schizophreni c does not yet exist through
chemical means. This is because there is more to being
normal than not having hallucinations. Once you suppress a
schizophrenic’s bizarre visions or the strange voices he
hears in his head, you do not ﬁnd a normal person facing
you, but a shell. Altering the chemical level of dopamine,
even if it could be done a hundred times better than it is
done today, will not lead to a cure. The reason is contained
in the lesson learned from the neurotransmitters
themselves: for every chemical breakthrough, there is also
a chemical barrier. The good news about neurotransmitters is that they are
material. A thought, whether sane or mad, is hard to grasp
because it is so intangi ble; it is not something you can
touch or feel. The neurotransmitters, however, are certainly
tangible, although they are extremely tiny and often short-
lived. It is the neurotransmitter’s role to match up with a
thought. To do that, its molecules must be just as ﬂexible as
thoughts, just as ﬂeeting, elusive, changeable, and faint. Such ﬂexibility is a kind of miracle but also a curse, in
that it throws  up a barrier that is almost impossibl e to pass. No man-made drug can duplicate this ﬂexibility, either now
or in the foreseeable future. No drug actually pairs up with
a thought. This is apparent just by looking at the structureof the receptor. Receptors are not ﬁxed: they have been
accurately described as looking like lily pads that have
ﬂoated up from the depth of the cell. Like lily pads, their
roots sink downward, reaching the cell’s nucleu s, where
the DNA sits. DNA deals in many, many  kinds of messages,
potentially an inﬁnite number. Therefore, it makes new
receptors and ﬂoats them up to the cell wall constantly. There is no ﬁxed number of receptors, no ﬁxed
arrangement on the cell wall, and probably no limit to what
they are tuned in to. A cell wall can be as barren of lily
pads as a pond in winter, or as crammed as one in full
ﬂower in June. The only thing constant about a receptor is its
unpredictability. Researchers recently discovered, for
example, that a neurotransmitter called imipramine is
produced abnormally in the brains of depressed people. While looking for the distribution of imipramine receptors,
they were startled to ﬁnd them not just on the brain cells
but on skin cells. Why should the skin create receptors for
a “mental molecule”. What did these skin receptors have to
do with depression. One plausible answer is that a depressed person is
depressed everywhere—he has a sad brain, sad skin, sad
liver, and so on. (Likewise, researchers have examined
patients who complain of feeling jittery all the time and
discovered abnormally high levels of two chemicals,
epinephrine and norepinephrine, in their brains and
adrenal glands. However, high concentrations were then
found in their blood platelets, meaning that they had
“jittery blood cells,” too. ) It has been frustrating for doctors to realize how complex
the whole business is becoming. Hopes for a quick cure of
schizophrenia, depression, alcoholism, drug addiction, and
other disorde rs were dashed in the mid-1970s, just a few
years after the original endorphins had been isolated in1973. Now the chemical barrier is stronger than ever, as
the true ﬂexibility of the messenger molecules is being
divined. —
Thinking about this probl em, I have to ask myself a deeper
question: Can a drug really exorcise the ghost of memory. My medical experience says no—I have seen too many
depressed patients who were “cured” by drugs and yet who
still radiate a feeling of hollow sickness. Instead of trusting
drugs, one needs to ﬁnd out how the patient’s sick memory
got into his chemical system to begin with. For it is
absolutely clear that the nonmaterial memory is there. It
may be taking a ride on a molecule, but its life does not
depend on that. The following case serves as an example. Walter grew up on the streets of south Boston in the late
1960s; he felt the edge of hatred that greeted black people
who moved into that neighborhood. To escape this and the
poverty that had dogged  him all his life, Walter joined the
Army at 18. Within six months he found himself in Vietnam. He fought in combat and survived, but when he bounced
back onto the street again two years later, he was hooked
on heroin, which many soldiers used to make the war less
traumatic. Unlike most soldiers, Walter had no reason to
quit when he got home. Eventually the police caught him,
and by order of the court he came under my care at the V. A. hospital for his addiction. Section summary: 

* Recent biomedical advancements reveal significant interactions among neural transmitters

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    * Neurological events influence multiple physiological systems
    
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Biomedical innovations unveiled novel insights on interacting neuromediators [(approx. ] <20% reduction]. Additional assistance requested. Review Time Remaining.
The discovery of neurotransmitters has revolutionized the field of biomedicine, as it has revealed the intricate and complex interactions between the mind and body.
What is the significance of the discovery of neurotransmitters in the 1970s?
Endorphins and enkephalins are internal painkillers produced by the brain, which helps to regulate the sensation of pain.
What is the primary function of endorphins and enkephalins?
The main issue is that the brain is not just a simple machine that can be fixed by altering its chemical composition, but rather a complex, highly adaptable system that cannot be fully understood by simply manipulating its chemistry.
What is the main problem with the concept of using drugs to treat mental illnesses?
The discovery of receptors in the immune system implies that the immune system is capable of complex communication and thought processes, and that the distinction between the mind and body is no longer tenable.
What is the implication of the discovery of receptors in the immune system?
The author suggests that the mind and body are not separate entities, but rather interconnected systems that are deeply entwined, and that the concept of a "chemical revolution" in the field of neuroscience has led to a profound shift in our understanding of the human body.
What is the author's perspective on the relationship between the brain and the immune system?