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Show Family Weekly/ october 11, 1970 Can You Control Your Heart’ By JAMES C. G. CONNIFF Improbable as it seems, you can control your heart if you need to, many doctors are saying after 12 years of specialized research. Andnot only the heart. A rare breed of medical researcher has demonstrated beyond question that learnable—and lasting—‘mind over matter” disciplines can actually enable you to control the organs of your body, to modify their functions. Humansare enabled to utilize littleappreciated “mind-body” faculty they possess after going through a process called “operant conditioning” o. “visceral learning.” Convinced that if the mind can make the bodyill (as it can in psychosomatic disorders), it should also be able to help it get better and stay well, a handful of pioneers began groping their way along unexplored avenues to find out how. Now they have developed a simple, Yoga-like technique—which they are the first to admit they themselves do not yet fully understand—and are teaching it to selected patients at half a dozen major medical centers. These patients do not just imagine they’re sick: they really are sick. But by applying the new techniqueto their afflictions, many of them have begun to experience successfully a kind of “psychosomatic illness in reverse.” Thatis to say, they literally think themselves well again. Once they have mastered the method, they can go on usingit to help themselves stay that way. Usually within the first couple of hours of “type II conditioning,” as the method is also known, the patient can slow or advance his own heart rate at will, lower his blood pressure, regulate an erratic pulse, or soothe a spastic colon. Until this research frontier was breached,all these inner functions were supposedly under the exclusive control of the “autonomic nervous system.” That meant they were thought to be involuntary, and the central nervous system’s higher centers—the mind itself—could therefore have no direct influence on new, as yet imperfectly understood bu harmless set of “mind cuntrols,” on wide range ofafflictions—including di: gestive disorders, insomnia, obesity, and even asthma. § In the wake of studies that iaughi rats and cats to modify such a far-oul phenomenonas brain waves, the runawa bursts of electricity in the human brain whichtrigger epileptic seizures may alsq one dayyield to the emerging technique! For those who suffer from therela tively minor discomfort of chilly e tremities, it will be less amusing than reassuring to learn that medicine care them. enough to use the new method to d The recent dawn of operant corditioning has changed that pat assumption something about even cold feet. B actually “training” people to raise th temperature in their icy soles and toes the medical profession stands to earn special vote of gratitude trom many married couple. radically. So much so that research medicine is already moving in with this Professor Neal Miller with apparatus used in experiments on mentalcontrol cf body functions. Zany as some of this may sound, if} is all going on in earnest at such prestigi ous sites as Cornell University Medica College in New York, the Massachusettiy Mental Health Center in Boston, th Gerontology Branch of the NationalI stitute of Child Health and Human De velopment in Baltimore, the Universit} of California School of Medicine in Sa Francisco, Boston City Hospital’s Chart ning Behavioral Medicine Laborato and the Rockefeller University in Ne' York. ‘ In leading medical journals, the froq tiersmen involved have continued to re port their findings for this non-dru non-surgical approach to physical dite orderc—and have done so with appr@ priate restraint. Nonetheless, the pos$ ble implicationsof those findings for tlie future of medicine—especially in a n tion beset with increasing, and increa ingly expensive, health-care problem: are inescapable. The path was blazed more than decade ago by the fertile, not easily d couraged brains of such idea-men 45 ites search psychologist Neal E. Miller, thi at Cornell and now at the Rockefe! University. He has applied successful to people with too rapid heartbeat know-howhe and his associates deriva from some milestone studies with ra Anxious not to confuse their res with Yoga, which is thought to achiel a trancelike state by muscular control § the skeleton, the Miller team knocks |