The Body-Mind Equation

The relationship between mind and body, although seemingly very fundamental in nature, has been an important question for centuries.  But what is that relationship? And why is it so important to understand it?

One of the most notable thinkers on this question lived in France during the colonial period of European history. His name was Rene Descartes, and he is famous for his assertion, “Cogito ergo sum,” or “I think, therefore I exist”. His argument was that the senses can deceive the mind, and that you can only be sure of your own existence so long as you are thinking.

But if senses are of the body and they can play tricks on the mind, then where is the mind? The separation of psyche and soma has been a question that has influenced science and medicine ever since Descartes wrote his first meditation in the mid-17^th century. It was an idea which came out when science was still in its infancy, and human anatomy was first being documented (often illegally, from corpses) by physicians.

Now fast forward to the 1970s. By then, medicine had reached a point where heart transplants had become routine operations. Literally, the heart of one person could be removed and placed into another person’s body, and continue to live. This is not a simple procedure, but it was one that scientists and physicians understood well enough to perform successfully.

It was during the 1970s that patients who had received new hearts began reporting changes in their tastes, personality, and their memories. There is some neural circuitry (brain cells, essentially) found in the heart that gets transferred with the rest of the organ. They have been shown to have memory. And it seems that between 5 and 10 percent of people who receive heart transplants report memories that are attributable to their donors.

To learn more about the real-life experiences of heart transplant patients and their families, watch this 50-minute documentary: Mindshock: Transplanting Memories. It explains that neural circuitry gets passed to the recipient from the donor, and that the recipient then has a piece of the donors mind in them afterwards. Along with the soma comes the psyche, and what gets transferred along with the organ are called memes.

Memes are essentially patterns of electromagnetic energy that light up in your body under different circumstances. They appear to us as thoughts. A meme could be the little voice that tells you not to have another chocolate bar because you’re trying to lose weight. So long as you are thinking, you are lighting up memes. And because they are lit up, they affect how you see the world. What you think affects what you sense, and what you sense affects what you think. And what you think guides your behavior.

In the early part of the 20^th century, another philosopher named Bertrand Russell stated what I like to call the Law of Reciprocal Causality: “A man’s philosophy is greatly influenced by his circumstances. However, conversely, a man’s circumstances are also greatly influenced by his philosophy.” In other words, how you think shapes your life as much as your life shapes you. It turns out that this is also true on the physical level – the level of your memes.

In different circumstances, some memes will get lit up while others will remain dormant. Whether it is another meme or something in the environment, the energy pattern that appears in the body makes changes to the body. They may be at the level of the cell, such as when a mood or an emotion sweeps over you. They may also be at the mechanical level, such as when you lift your arm. No matter the level, memes are responses and you have the ability to choose your own responses.

Particular circumstances light up particular memes. Since you cannot have patterns stored in your body for every specific circumstance, memes are more complex than the things that trigger them. This allows for a kind of generalization in which people apply responses to analogous and similar situations. Unfortunately, most patterns are dysfunctional in most circumstances other than the ones in which they worked. It is the contrast between the memes held in the recipient’s body and the memes carried in the donor’s heart that recipients (and people close to the recipients) notice.

So is a heart-transplant patient the same person afterwards? No. But pieces of two people survive, and therefore have the potential to pass on parts of their own memes to other human beings. Memory cannot be localized to just one neuron, or even a set of neurons. Memories are distributed throughout the neural system, and hence throughout the body. What the donor gives is an organ which contains pieces of many patterns.

Mental clarity is the result clarity in the body. Have you ever had a massage that left your muscles feeling like butter? One of the most effective treatments for anxiety is progressive relaxation, where you systematically go over each area of the body and let go of muscular tension. Where do you carry stress in your body?

And what happens to stress when you release the muscles that were carrying it?

The body-mind equation is simply that your body is your mind. When you cut a person up and look inside, it is impossible to find the seat of consciousness. The further into the brain we go with a scalpel, the less likely we are to find anybody home. When the meme that asserts the mind is somehow separate from the body is lit up, when it excludes competing memes from consciousness, it is impossible not to imagine that the mind is like a body part… and not the result of an entire body. Transplant patients teach us otherwise.