The Body: Controlling the Inner Man

Controlling the Inner Man

Through the cerebrospinal nervous system, the mind is able to dominate much of the body: how a man walks, talks, or wiggles his fingers is controllable by reason and will. But the body’s glandular and visceral processes—run with sovereign independence by what scientists call the autonomic nervous system—have long been considered beyond the reach of conscious control. The only exceptions, it was thought, were bizarre and inexplicable cases, such as the Indian yogis, who can regulate their heart beat and their breathing. Now, though, experimental psychologists have proved that the body’s autonomic system can, in fact, be taught—although as yet they are not sure how or why.

Internal Vocabulary . The results of such experiments tend to support the the ory of mind over matter, so long ridiculed by modern science. “People are re-examining old concepts like mind-body dualism,” says Dr. Bernard Engel of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development in Baltimore.

Engel’s work in “autonomic shaping” has enabled him to alter heart rates and rhythms to alleviate irregular heart beats and high blood pressure in cer tain patients. Other researchers are proving—contrary to expert opinion of the past—that man can learn to control even such functions as sweating, blood pressure, intestinal contractions and brain waves.

Though the exploration of autonomic control is still in its infancy, the vistas it opens are staggering. Dr. Joe Kamiya of the Langley Porter Neuropsychiatric Institute in San Francisco, who has experimented with conscious regulation of brain waves, looks for ward to the day when man will have “an internal vocabulary, a language he can use to explain more effectively and completely how he feels inside. In time, we should be able to talk fluently about feelings such as brain-wave production, blood pressure and so on.”

Kamiya’s experiments are typical in several respects of all autonomic-research methods, which employ what is known as operant conditioning or instrumental learning. A monitoring device (Kamiya frequently uses an electroencephalograph) is attached to a subject, who is told that a tone will sound when he is in a certain “state” and that the tone should sound for as long as possible. But the subject is not told the nature of the state, or how to attain it.

Kamiya then sets the monitor to sound when the subject’s brain waves are in the alpha range of eight to twelve cycles per second. In one test, eight of ten subjects were able to control the tone, emitting or suppressing brain waves as requested. They Were unable to say exactly how they gained such control; they simply wanted to keep receiving the proper feedback from the tone.

Learned Response. Dr. Peter Lang, research professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin, has applied autonomic learning to control the human heart rate. Attached to a monitor, a subject is told to watch a TV-like screen and to make the moving lines on it shorter, corresponding to a slower heart rate. Without any conscious effort or muscle tensing, the lines shorten, the rate slows, the subject becomes able, as Lang puts it, “to drive his own heart.” Lang has not probed for an explanation beyond showing that the changing heart rate is indeed a learned response. The unconscious nature of the autonomic system is such, says Lang, that subjects might do better if they were unaware of what exactly is happening to them or what is being demanded of them.

Another researcher, Dr. David Shapiro of the Harvard Medical School, has trained subjects to raise and lower their blood pressure in response to a tone feedback. Shapiro is hopeful that persons suffering from chronic high blood pressure may one day learn to lower it at will, but clearly much more will have to be known about the autonomic system itself. Theoretically, man may someday be able to control his internal processes to relieve insomnia, regulate constipation and improve sexual response. But, warns Dr. Neal E. Miller of Rockefeller University, who has done much of the seminal research to date in this field, “the question now is whether autonomic learning can be effective enough to be of real therapeutic value, whether it can alter functions permanently and quickly enough to help. We don’t know yet.”