Any truth to this concept?  I guess there are degrees of anything.  I was thinking recently how your brain can play tricks on you, like if you take a drink of what you think is milk and tast beer or juice instead, your body can convulse because it really thinks you’re tasting sour milk, even if you enjoy juice and beer a great deal.

Is this a little bit of mind over matter?

What are your thoughts on this so-called phenomenon of overcoming the physical with the mental?

Mind over Matter

Any truth to this concept?  I guess there are degrees of anything.  I was thinking recently how your brain can play tricks on you, like if you take a drink of what you think is milk and tast beer or juice instead, your body can convulse because it really thinks you’re tasting sour milk, even if you enjoy juice and beer a great deal.

Is this a little bit of mind over matter?

What are your thoughts on this so-called phenomenon of overcoming the physical with the mental?

sounds like a plausible theory to me.

The phenomenon you bring up is interesting, but it isn’t really ‘mind over matter’ in the conventional sense of telekinesis. ‘Telekinetics’ claim to be able to move physical objects simply by action of the mind. That, of course, is impossible, and many claimed telekinetics have been unmasked as frauds.

The phenomenon you raise is perhaps better described as ‘mind over mind’, where one thought you have (“this is milk”) influences an experience you have (“yuck!”). It sounds basically like a kind of cognitive illusion.

Re: Mind over Matter

[quote author=“thakkus”] I was thinking recently how your brain can play tricks on you, like if you take a drink of what you think is milk and tast beer or juice instead, your body can convulse because it really thinks you’re tasting sour milk, even if you enjoy juice and beer a great deal.

Is this a little bit of mind over matter?

I agree with Galileo—I mean, Dougsmith—it sounds more like a “cognitive illusion”.  What happened is that your brain didn’t recognize the taste right away, made the (erroneous) decision “spoiled milk—bad” and triggered the gag reflex.  There’s still a physical mechanism involved, right?

Here’s another nifty experiment you can try.  Get a yo-yo (or any relatively heavy object suspended from a string) and hold it at arm’s length.  You can make the heavy object swing back and forth (or forward and backwards, or around in circles) simply by concentrating and imagining that it’s moving.  Try it!

Psychosomatic illness. Mind over body anyway.

[quote author=“cgallaga”]Psychosomatic illness. Mind over body anyway.

Well yes, but again, that’s your mind over your body ... and since your mind is a manifestation of your brain, it’s perhaps more accurately described as your brain over your body. And all of a sudden it isn’t so hard to understand ...

:wink:

Of course, I don’t mean to pick on you in particular. Psychosomatic illnesses (or the placebo effect, which is kind of a reverse-psychosomatic-illness) can happen to anyone.

I think there is something to be said for a positive mental attitude aiding recovery via the immune system. Pain threshold is another aspect of internal mind over matter. The idea that it is possible to control material things externally by mental focus or concentration is very difficult to prove.

Every time I’ve read about tests of that sort that have good double blind features they fail. The mind reader, who if I recall was a young Canadian girl, is an example.

On the other hand I remember back when I was a child a life magazine experiment, or a life magazine report of an experiment that involved dice, a pool table and alcohol.
A person was told to concentrate on the number 7 and was given a dice box with two dies in it. They tested the person for 1000 throws. The result every time came far outside the expected number of 7’s. Then the person was given two ounces of alcohol and asked to do it again; the result began to approach the number predicted by chance. As the experiment continued with more alcohol and more throws the result after some 5000 throws met the number of 7’s pure chance would predict. Is anyone able to discover a report of that experiment? It would have been in the late 40’s or early 50’s?
Jim