THINKING IS A BODILY FUNCTION

How many of your best ideas have come to you in the shower? While brushing your teeth? While walking or jogging? How often have you experienced strange, surreal, and creative images flowing through your mind as you were falling asleep or coming out of sleep? Have you had an important idea or a realization come to you in a dream, or while daydreaming? Has the solution to a problem flashed into your mind while you were doing something completely unrelated to the problem? The very first principle of practical intelligence to be understood is that you think with your whole body, not with some individual circuit somewhere in the cortex of your brain. In fact, your brain is not really a whole computer—it’s one key part of an extended computer, your biocomputer, which includes your whole nervous system, various information-processing subsystems located in your organs and muscles, and even your chemical messenger systems such as your hormone systems and your immune system. Case in point: controlled clinical studies have shown that, immediately after test subjects meditated for as little as fifteen minutes, concentrations of an immune-system chemical known as Immunoglobulin A (IgA) in their saliva registered significantly higher than before meditation. These changes were not observed when the subjects merely rested or slept.The particular nature of any mental activity potentially has a corresponding physiological impact on the body. Case in point: controlled clinical studies have also shown that listening to counter-classical types of music such as hard rock, grunge, rap, and other strident acoustical patterns induced a significant drop in salivary IgA levels.Working in very high-noise environments tends to have the same debilitating effects on immune function. In Chapter 5 we’ll explore further the effects of environmental stressors on mental health and wellness and discover some strategies for managing our sensory environment and filtering out a major part of the toxic input. Clearly, mental activity of any kind is expressed throughout the body, down to the level of individual cells. In some sense, we can even say that the cells themselves have intelligence—they “think” at a microscopic level. Certainly the individual organs do. A mountain of scientific and anecdotal evidence supports the conclusion that mental activity can make a person sick or well, a point we hardly need debate here. The emerging scientific field of psychoneuroimmunology reports astonishing instances of remission of cancer and recovery from a host of diseases using meditation, intensive imaging, and even prayer, where conventional medical treatment strategies have failed. A thought—any thought— is a whole-body event. It might arise from within an organ, say with a change in blood glucose level, which you sense as a changed feeling, or mood.That change in mood will have a subtle—or significant—effect on the conscious aspect of your mental process, which is only a part of the whole of what you’re “thinking” about. What you decide, what you say, and how you perceive what’s going on around you are all moderated by these bio-information events that are constantly flashing throughout your body.Your brain is usually involved, but may not necessarily be controlling the process.What we think of as “moods,” for example, are actually bio- informational states that pervade the body. You think—in the broadest sense of the term—even while you’re sleeping. Even in the deepest level of sleep, classified as Stage 4 sleep, you can still respond to signals from your environment. How does a sleeping mother’s biocomputer tune out traffic noises, barking dogs, and a snoring mate, and yet wake her instantly when her infant cries? What enables you to wake up five minutes before your alarm goes off? Sleep researchers report incidents of lucid dreaming, a dream state in which the dreamer somehow “knows” that he or she is dreaming. This seems to be a paradoxical state of consciousness that incorporates aspects of waking thought and vivid dream images. Every one of those countless thought-events that continually flash through our bodies makes us a different person—physiologically, psychologically, and informationally.We may be conscious and aware of some of these bio-informational events, which we specifically refer to as “thoughts,” only vaguely aware of others, and incapable of experiencing others at a conscious level. Nevertheless, we’re continuously “thinking.”