I was fascinated to read that some folks who suffer from epilepsy can be trained to think themselves out of the seizures, as NewScientist (10 February 2018, paywall) reports:
SOME people with epilepsy can be trained to boost their mental alertness to avoid having a seizure. The technique may work by strengthening nerve pathways that can damp down overactive parts of the brain.
Epileptic seizures happen when brain cells become too excitable and start firing out of control. This sometimes starts in just a small region – most often one of the temporal lobes, at the side of the head – and then spreads.
Medicines can keep epilepsy under control, but they don’t work in around a third of cases. This has prompted interest in psychological approaches such as yoga or mindfulness training to control or alleviate the condition – not least because it can be exacerbated by stress.
Several studies have suggested that seizures can be reduced by a form of biofeedback training: techniques that give people information about their body, such as their blood pressure, to help them try to control it. But the use of such training in medicine is controversial, with some suspecting it works mainly through a placebo effect.
It’s fascinating, both from a functional perspective and from the placebo-effect perspective – and, for that matter, it deals another blow to the mind-brain dualism theory (is that dead yet?).
Because scans of the brain indicate it changes in response to the training, it suggests that the physical matter of the brain is influenced by how it is used, much as our muscles grow or become flabby depending on whether or not we exercise, and do it properly. This, in turn, suggests such an undeniable link between mind and body to render the entire theory that the two are distinct as so much rubbish.
And the ever mysterious placebo effect, how does it play into this? I’m not sure. One must assume the placebo effect is some change rendered by the brain to the rest of the body, whether palliative or curative, but I don’t think I, or anyone else, has ever really understood just how it works. And now we’re essentially discussing a treatment of the brain, which in turn may be using the attention it is receiving to modify the body, of which the brain is a part. It sounds like a feedback loop in some ways, but just how that might play into this entire scenario, physically and ethically, is not in the least clear to me.
