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Candace Pert, Ph.D., is a Research Professor at Georgetown University Medical Center. Her book The Molecules of Emotion, published by Scribner, will be out in September.

Bill Moyers is an accliamed author and television journalist, widely respected for his work at PBS and CBS News.

Yet Another Point of View, by Joseph Campbell from The Power of Myth.

This is an excerpt from Healing and the Mind, the best-selling companion volume to the PBS series. © 1993 by Public Affairs Television, Inc., and David Grubin Productions, Inc. Published by Doubleday, NY, NY.

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Moyers: As a research scientist, how did you get interested in the connection of mind and body?

Pert: Well, I started out being a very basic molecular biologist working on the receptors of psychoactive drugs, particularly the receptors for the opiates — you know, opium, heroin, codeine, Demerol. There’s a chemical in your brain, almost like a keyhole, that receives all of these opiates, and that’s called the "opiate receptor." As a student, I developed ways to measure these receptors, which had been hypothetical up until that time. That led to the discovery that the brain makes its own morphine, and that emotional states are created by the release of the chemicals called endorphins, which is shorthand for "endogenous morphines."

In the beginning, like many other neuroscientists I was secretly interested in consciousness, and thought that by studying the brain I would learn about the mind and consciousness. And so for most of my early research I concentrated from the neck up. But the astounding revelation is that these endorphins and other chemicals like them are found not just in the brain, but in the immune system, the endocrine system, and throughout the body. These molecules are involved in a psychosomatic communication network.

Moyers: "Psychosomatic communication network"?

Pert: Information is flowing. These molecules are being released from one place, they’re diffusing all over the body, and they’re tickling the receptors that are on the surface of every cell in your body.

Moyers: Are the receptors like satellite dishes?

Pert: Very much so. That’s a good image of it if you can imagine millions of satellite dishes all over one cell. The cells are being told whether they should divide or not divide, whether they should make more of this protein or that protein, whether they should turn on this gene or that gene. Everything in your body is being run by these messenger molecules, many of which are peptides. A peptide is made up of amino acids, which are the building blocks of proteins. There are about 23 different amino acids. Peptides are amino acids strung together, very much like pearls strung along in a necklace. If you can imagine twenty-three different-colored pearls, you can see how you could have information capable of making extremely large numbers of peptides. Some peptide strings are quite short. For example, the peptide enkephalin, which is the brain’s own morphine, is only five amino acids long. Others, like insulin, are a couple of hundred amino acids long.

Moyers: Where are they?

Pert: They’re everywhere and that’s what really shook everybody up. After the brain’s own morphine turned out to be a peptide, many scientists began searching to see which peptides they had known in other contexts could be found in the brain. The answer was, just about all of them. And then in the 1980s we began to find peptides in the immune system and everywhere else.

Moyers: Why are they important?

Pert: They seem to be extremely important because they appear to mediate intercellular communication throughout the brain and body.

Moyers: How are they related to emotions?

Pert: We have come to theorize that these neuropeptides and their receptors are the biochemical correlates of emotions.

Moyers: But we think of emotions as psychological.

Pert: Yes, psychological — in the realm of "psyche," or "soul." But I’m saying that we’ve actually found the material manifestation of emotions in these peptides and their receptors. These receptors floating around on the surface of the cells put out their little antennae and receive what’s coming in. There’s actually a physical attachment process between the peptide and the receptor. And once that binding process occurs, the receptor, which is a big, complicated molecule, wiggles and changes in such a way that things start to happen. Ions start pouring in, and other changes happen, and eventually the brain receptors perceive what’s happening as emotions.

Moyers: For example, if I’m at a football game and somebody steps on my toe, I first feel pain, and then almost instantly I feel anger. How dare you do that! Is that a neuropeptide saying, "Feel angry, buddy!"?

Pert: Well, the pain is conducted along a nerve and all the way up into the brain. Those pain pathways through neurons are extremely well worked out in scientific studies. The anger response is not so well worked out, but we think it involves the release of a neuropeptide somewhere. We don’t know which neuropeptide. You notice the anger is a little slower because the neuropeptide has to be released, and there has to be a diffusion to the receptors.

Moyers: But is the anger mental or is it physical?

Pert: It’s both. That’s what’s so interesting about emotions. They’re the bridge between the mental and the physical, or the physical and the mental. It’s either way.

Moyers: So, to carry the metaphor forward, the peptides are sort of like radar coming from the brain, and these receptors are taking them in.

Pert: I like the image of the radar because it starts getting out of the mechanistic model of lock and key that most people use, and it reflects the energy aspect of all of this. We’re not locks and keys, and we’re not clocks; we’re living matter. And living matter is not the same as nonliving matter. Right within the brain itself there are about 60 of these neuropeptides. The endorphins are one.

Moyers: Are you saying that the mind talks to the body, so to speak, through these neuropeptides?

Pert: Why are you making the mind outside of the body?

Moyers: It’s been knocking around the West a long time — the notion that the mind is somehow distinct from the body.

Pert: Well, that just goes back to a turf deal that Descartes made with the Roman Catholic Church. He got to study science, as we know it, and left the soul, the mind, the emotions, and consciousness to the realm of the church. It’s incredible how far Western science has come with that reductionist paradigm. But, unfortunately, more and more things don’t quite fit into that paradigm. What’s happening now may have to do with the integration of mind and matter.

Moyers: We journalists are often guilty of missing the answer by posing the wrong question. I asked, "Is the mind talking to the body?" and you caught me on that. So if you were posing the question appropriately from your research, how would you phrase it?

Pert: I would ask, "How are mind and matter related to each other?" But remember, I’m a scientist, not a philosopher, and I get a little frightened if I’m pushed too far out of my realm. I think, though, that we have sufficient scientific evidence to hypothesize that these information molecules, these peptides and receptors, are the biochemicals of emotions. They are found in the parts of the brain that mediate emotion. They control the opening and closing of the blood vessels in your face, for example. They allow the systems of the body to talk to each other.

Moyers: They’re agents of information?

Pert: Exactly. They carry messages within the brain, and from the brain to the body, or from the body to the body, or from the body to the brain. The old barriers between brain and body are breaking down. The way scientists like to work is to have the immunology department over here and the neuroscience department over there. People from these departments don’t talk to each other that much unless they’re married to each other. But in real life the brain and the immune system use so many of the same molecules to communicate with each other that we’re beginning to see that perhaps the brain is not simply "up here," connected by nerves to the rest of the body. It’s a much more dynamic process. I once went to a meeting in Rome called "Opiate Endorphins in the Periphery." The "periphery" — that’s anything except the head. But the old emphasis on the brain is breaking down now that we’re discovering, for example, that cells of the immune system are constantly filtering through the brain and can actually lodge there. We’re discovering things that are shocking even me!

When people discovered that there were endorphins in the brain that caused euphoria and pain relief, everybody could handle that. But when they discovered they were in your immune system, too, it just didn’t fit, so it was denied for years. The original scientists had to repeat their studies many, many times to be believed. It was just very upsetting to our paradigm to find mood-altering chemicals in the immune system — and not just the chemicals, but the receptors as well.

Moyers: These messenger molecules you’re talking about are also called neuropeptides, are they not?

Pert: Right. I call them neuropeptides because I’m neurocentric. I started as a neuroscientist. But in a way that’s a silly word, too, because there’s more endorphin in your testes than there is in some parts of your brain. One way to think of neuropeptides is that they direct energy. You can’t do everything at every moment. Sometimes the energy needs to go toward digesting food. At other times more blood needs to flow through your spleen. If you’ve been challenged with a bug that can cause a fever, then you’ve got to put more energy into your spleen and less energy into digesting your food. Something needs to tell you, "You’d better not eat right now."

Moyers: Why do you call these neuropeptides "biochemical units of emotion"?

Pert: Well, it took us 15 years of research before we dared to call them that. But we know that during different emotional states, these neuropeptides are released. It looks like emotion in the broadest sense. Let me give you an example. A peptide called angiotensin is connected with thirst. You can take an animal that’s sated with water, but if you inject it with angiotensin, it will just drink and drink. The peptide binding to that receptor makes the animal’s mind feel thirst. That same peptide binding to the lung makes the lung conserve water. That same peptide binding to an identical molecular entity in the kidney makes that kidney conserve water. The molecular entity is the same. It’s like a brick that can be used in the basement of a house or in the attic of a house — it serves different functions in different locations, but it’s the same brick. And overall, there’s an integration process affecting the behavior at the whole-animal level so that everything in the animal’s mind and body is saying, "I want water, I want to save water, I don’t want any water to be lost."

Moyers: I can see that, but what makes me say "I’m sad" or "I’m happy"?

Pert: It may just be some peptides in your intestine. In other words, it goes both ways. If you accept the premise that the mind is not just in the brain but that the mind is part of a communication network throughout the brain and body, then you can start to see how physiology can affect mental functioning on a moment-to- moment, hour-by-hour, day-to-day basis, much more than we give it credit for.

Moyers: So instead of saying the mind is talking to the body, you would say "I’m talking to myself," because these neuropeptides are regulating the emotions that I feel.

Pert: Yes, through receptors in the parts of the brain that we’ve long known are associated with the experience of emotions. Years ago it was shown that when surgeons electrically stimulated the brains of people undergoing epilepsy surgery, they would laugh or cry or be in ecstasy — in other words, the patients would emote just from electrical stimulation of certain parts of the brain. We now know that those parts of the brain are loaded with virtually all of these peptide-information substances and their receptors.

Moyers: And so they send these messages like little canoes down into the body, where they find waiting ports of call.

Pert: Well, it gets weirder than that. The message doesn’t literally have to go from the brain into the body. It can happen almost spontaneously.

Moyers: But what’s happening?

Pert: We don’t know, but I feel that the person who will figure this out is going to be a physicist, because clearly there’s another form of energy that we have not yet understood. For example, there’s a form of energy that appears to leave the body when the body dies. If we call that another energy that just hasn’t been discovered yet, it sounds much less frightening to me than "spirit." Remember, I’m a scientist, and in the Western tradition I don’t use the word "spirit." "Soul" is a four-letter word in our tradition. The deal was struck with Descartes. We don’t invoke that stuff. And yet too many phenomena can’t be explained by thinking of the body in a totally reductionistic fashion.

Moyers: And by "reductionistic," you mean —

Pert: That it’s just chemical and electrical gradients, and that one day everything will be explained without invoking some other energy.

Moyers: But what you’re describing with neuropeptides seems to me essentially a chemical reaction. You call these neuropeptides chemical messengers. As they go from one place in the body to another, the body creates a physical response.

Pert: You’re right — and that’s what makes it all so fascinating, that emotions are in two realms. They can be in the physical realm, where we’re talking about molecules whose molecular weight I can tell you, and whose sequences I can write as formulas. And there’s another realm that we experience that’s not under the purview of science. There are aspects of mind that have qualities that seem to be outside of matter. Let me give you an example. People with multiple personalities sometimes have extremely clear physical symptoms that vary with each personality. One personality can be allergic to cats while another is not. One personality can be diabetic and another not.

Moyers: But the multiple personality exists in the same body. The physical matter has not changed from personality to personality.

Pert: But it does. You can measure it. You can show that one personality is making as much insulin as it needs, and the next one, who shows up half an hour later, can’t make insulin.

Moyers: So in the person with multiple personalities, the brain is releasing different messengers.

Pert: That’s one possibility. We just haven’t done the research to know that yet.

Moyers: On the basis of the research you have done, what do you think is going on when I get a "gut reaction"?

Pert: Well, your mind is in every cell of your body. We know that because so many cells of the body contain these molecules that we’ve been mapping.

Moyers: So this gut reaction is a mental act?

Pert: Yes, it’s a mental act — the wisdom of the body. We don’t have to sit here and say, "Okay, stomach, it’s time for you to move that food along. Okay, spleen, we need a few more white cells for these viruses." All that is going on beautifully on a subconscious level that we don’t need to deal with. Someone stepped on your toe, and before you even thought, "Someone stepped on my toe," you felt anger. Your body was alerting you. These things have survival value.

Moyers: Just the other day I stepped out into the street, and a cab came down almost on top of me. I immediately stepped back. I didn’t tell myself to step back, my body just took me back. After the taxi had passed, I got angry at the driver, and I wanted to curse. All the same thing?

 

Pert: Sure, that’s the wisdom of the body. It’s not as if your head is thinking up things and telling your body what to do. Your body is knowing what to do.

Moyers: The danger was instant and then the anger at the driver was instant. And all of this is physical, chemical?

Pert: Of course. And it’s also emotional and in this other mental realm, too.

Moyers: So you’re saying that my emotions are the same as my physical reactions, and that they occur when a particular molecule hits a particular receptor?

Pert: I believe that’s true, yes.

Moyers: You’ve seen the molecule hit a receptor?

Pert: Absolutely. I’ve measured it.

Moyers: But have you seen the emotion it carries with it?

Pert: I’ve seen animals behave as if they had that emotion. Scientists who study rat and monkey behavior have seen animals behaving and have measured increases and decreases in the amounts of the neuropeptides being released.

Moyers: You know from scientific research that certain reactions occur when the neuropeptide hits the receptor. But there isn’t any way to identify the emotion that emerges from that, is there?

Pert: We’re really in the very early stages of being able to figure out which peptide mediates which emotion or whether combinations of peptides are involved. We have a few that we know pretty well because we have psychoactive drugs that give a certain effect. For example, we know that cocaine is a euphoriant, and we know what receptor system it interacts with in the brain.

Moyers: When you snort cocaine, you immediately get a rush, or a "high," as it’s called.

Pert: Right. And the reason you get this high is that the receptor for taking up and inactivating one of the messenger molecules gets blocked by cocaine. It binds to that receptor and interferes with the normal destruction of the chemical that causes euphoria.

Moyers: But euphoria is a physical response to a drug. Grief is something else, is it not?

Pert: You bet, but I’m sure there are chemicals that mediate grief. If there were a plant that made us feel grief, nobody would have cultured it, and so nobody would know about it today. It might be growing down there in the Amazon right now, but who would know?

Moyers: But you haven’t identified the grief peptide, have you?

Pert: I haven’t, but maybe one of the peptidologists has, and we might know it under another name. We might not realize yet that it causes grief because if we dropped that molecule into a rat’s brain, we couldn’t tell if the animal was feeling grief.

Moyers: The existence of peptides is not conjecture, you’ve seen that.

Pert: Me and 10,000 other scientists.

Moyers: But isn’t it conjecture that from the reaction of peptide to receptor comes an emotion?

Pert: I think we’re on firmer ground with some peptides than we are with others. There’s a lot of work to be done, and the killer experiment that will link mind to matter, and peptides and receptors to emotion, has not yet been done. But we do know that not all the emotions are up in your head. The chemicals that mediate emotion and the receptors for those chemicals are found in almost every cell in the body. In fact, even one-celled animals have these peptides.

Moyers: But simple organisms have no critical faculty. My big toe may feel something, but it can’t tell whether it’s feeling fear or anger or happiness or sadness. My mind has to come into play.

Pert: To say, "I am feeling this," and to analyze that, your brain is of course coming into play. But there are many emotional messages that don’t percolate up to your level of knowing them. Even so, they are used to run everything in your body.

Pert: Absolutely. You didn’t realize that?

Moyers: No, I didn’t realize it. I’m not even sure what I mean by that. What’s down there?

Pert: Peptides, receptors, cells. The receptors are dynamic. They’re wiggling, vibrating energy molecules that are not only changing their shape from millisecond to millisecond, but actually changing what they’re coupled to. One moment they’re coupled up to one protein in the membrane, and the next moment they can couple up to another. It’s a very dynamic, fluid system.

Moyers: And every time they couple, every time they connect, every time they respond one to another, chemical messages are being exchanged. And my body responds differently according to what cell is getting what chemical.

Pert: Absolutely. You got it.

Moyers: Then are you saying that we’re just a circuit of chemicals?

Pert: Well, that gets to be a philosophical question. One way to phrase it would be, can we account for all human phenomena in terms of chemicals? I personally think there are many phenomena that we can’t explain without going into energy. As a scientist, I believe that we’re going to understand everything one day, but that this understanding will require bringing in a realm we don’t understand at all yet. We’re going to have to bring in that extra-energy realm, the realm of spirit and soul that Descartes kicked out of Western scientific thought.

Moyers: But I can’t think of information being elsewhere other than in the cells of my body. That’s all I can experience.

Pert: Yes, I used to say that neuropeptides and the receptors are the physical substrate of emotions. Then someone yelled at me and said, "What do you mean, ‘physical substrate’? That makes it sound as if they’re the foundation of emotions. How do you know the foundation isn’t in another energy realm? Why don’t you say neuropeptides are the biochemical correlate?" It’s tricky. I don’t have the right language because I’m not quite sure. I can say that what it looks like to me is that the currency with which mind and matter interconvert might be emotions. Emotions might actually be the link between mind and body — although I hate the word "link," because it’s mechanical and Newtonian, and it suggests fences.

Moyers: But we do know that body events occur when my cells receive these messages from the neuropeptides. So are you saying that it’s the body’s reaction that creates the emotions?

Pert: The body’s and brain’s reactions, yes. The body’s everyday physiological functions, both normal and pathological, are creating emotions.

Moyers: So you are not just speaking metaphorically when you say that the mind is in the body?

Pert: Not at all. I think it’s physical, and I think it’s real. There are hundreds of scientists who’ve found these molecules in the various parts of the body.

Moyers: I’ll take your word for it that we can see the molecules in the laboratory, but can we see the emotions carried by those molecules?

Pert: Well, that’s where we have the problem. Those pesky emotions. They have a nonphysical as well as a physical reality, so they’re hard to study in a laboratory. Hypnotherapy, for example, shows that people can re-experience strong emotional states from their past and then experience physical changes in their bodies, such as pain going away.

Moyers: So like the sperm meeting the egg, you can see the chemical interaction take place, but you can’t really see the life in that matter.

Pert: That’s right. We can measure the chemical reaction that gives rise to an emotion, but we can’t look under a microscope and say, "That’s grief." We can say that a particular peptide, for example, can create euphoria not only in humans, but also even in rats and simpler animals. In other words, we can measure behavior. In fact, using the laboratory approach, all we can do is measure behavior. My work has been interesting because the receptor is the interface where behavior meets biochemistry.

Moyers: What does that have to do with emotion?

Pert: Well, why else do you think you behave? Everything you do is run by your emotions.

Moyers: And your emotions are in that reaction in the receptor when the molecule arrives with its information?

Pert: Yes. Remember, though, there are millions of these interactions going on. Like a house made of bricks, your body is made of millions of cells, every one of which is covered with these little satellite dishes.

Moyers: I understand that in terms of my behavior. For example, if I step into the street, and then I see a car coming, instantly there are messages about danger and I step back. The brain is talking to me through this reaction in the receptor.

Pert: You’re still thinking it’s your brain, but it’s the wisdom of the body. Intelligence is in every cell of your body. The mind is not confined to the space above the neck. The mind is throughout the brain and body.

Moyers: So the mind is more than the brain?

Pert: Definitely.

Moyers: The brain is just three pounds of meat?

Pert: No, the brain is extremely important. It is our window to the outside of the body, through the eyes, the ears, the nose, the mouth.

Moyers: Then what is the mind?

Pert: What is the mind? Gosh, how frightening! I’m a basic scientist, and I’m having to answer, "What is the mind?" The mind is some kind of enlivening energy in the information realm throughout the brain and body that enables the cells to talk to each other, and the outside to talk to the whole organism.

Moyers: And what does all of this have to do with my health?

Pert: Everything. Look what’s happening to me — I’m becoming a health nut because the implications of this work make you think more and more about the nature of health and disease. The word "health" itself is so interesting because it comes from a root that means "whole." Part of being a healthy person is being well integrated and at peace, with all of the systems acting together.

Moyers: Have you changed your notion of health because of your research into peptides and molecules?

Pert: I have changed so much from my research that it’s frightening. I’ve been transformed by my research. For example, when I had my first child, I didn’t know that the body makes its own pain relief, its own morphines. When I had my second child, I had learned about these endorphins, and so I thought it was logical that they would play a role in childbirth. Why would they be there? It must be a natural analgesic system. So I went natural with the second child because I had more faith and confidence in my own ability to release the drugs that I needed.

Moyers: But what about our emotions? Can our moods and attitudes physically affect our organs and our tissues?

Pert: I believe they can, because moods and attitudes that come from the realm of the mind transform themselves into the physical realm through the emotions. You know about voodoo death — in some cultures, if you tell people there’s a death hex on them, they’ll die.

Moyers: But what about healing? How does your research help us understand the process of healing?

Pert: Recent discoveries suggest that the surface of the monocyte, which is one of the prime cells in the immune system, is covered with receptors for peptides, these biochemicals of emotion I’ve been talking about. If you cut your finger, in seconds these monocytes come out of your bone marrow, go right to the site of the injury, and begin to remanufacture and restructure the body fabric.

Moyers: And that happens instantly?

Pert: It happens all the time. It’s happening now. We’ve probably had five little things happen in the last ten minutes while we were talking, where monocytes went to the rescue.

Moyers: I see how these monocytes can help to heal a wound, but I have a hard time seeing how that is connected to the emotions. As a Westerner, I think of illness as being caused by a bacterium or a virus. If I pick up a bacterium, I’m likely to get sick.

Pert: Well, of course your immune system responds — but, just to take one example, viruses use these same receptors to enter into a cell, and depending on how much of the natural juice, or the natural peptide for that receptor is around, the virus will have an easier or a harder time getting into the cell. So our emotional state will affect whether we’ll get sick from the same loading dose of a virus. You know the data about how people have more heart attacks on Monday mornings, how death peaks in Christians the day after Christmas, and in Chinese people the day after Chinese New Year. I never get a cold when I’m going skiing. Another example: the AIDS virus uses a receptor that is normally used by a neuropeptide. So whether an AIDS virus will be able to enter a cell or not depends on how much of this natural peptide is around, which, according to this theory, would be a function of what state of emotional expression the organism is in. Emotional fluctuations and emotional status directly influence the probability that the organism will get sick or be well.

Moyers: But will we ever be able to put our minds and our bodies in a certain state so that we affect our immune system positively?

Pert: Theoretically, that should be possible, and some people believe they’re finding ways to do that. I certainly don’t have the answers, though.

Moyers: You’re modest in not claiming more than your scientific work allows you to claim, but a lot of people are speculating that the next step will be to try to create the emotion that will help direct our health.

Pert: It’s clear to me that emotions must play a key role, and that repressing emotions can only be causative of disease. A common ingredient in the healing practices of native cultures is catharsis, complete release of emotion. Positive thinking is interesting, but if it denies the truth, I can’t believe that would be anything except bad.

Moyers: So a part of health is letting these true emotions of grief and sorrow and anger and fear work their way through to catharsis. Is there anything in your research that suggests that repressing emotions is bad for us?

Pert: Not in my research, because that is on the molecular level. But there is a growing body of literature, much of it European, that suggests that emotional history is extremely important in things like the incidence of cancer. For example, it appears that suppression of grief, and suppression of anger, in particular, is associated with an increased incidence of breast cancer in women. This research is controversial, and there are always methodological issues to address — but it’s very interesting.

Moyers: You’ve said that we’re on the verge of a scientific revolution. What’s the nature of that revolution?

Pert: We’re well into the revolution, which has to do with incorporating the mind and emotions back into science. The implications for medical practice, of course, are enormous.

Moyers: So if medicine begins to incorporate mind and emotion, the field might be retrieved from the hucksters, and the charlatans, and the pop psychologists.

Pert: Yes, but just because the hucksters are out there doesn’t mean that we should ignore the possibility that there are some very real and valid aspects of what they’re doing. We’re too presold on the high-tech, highly unemotional approach. Dean Ornish’s work has shown that a combination of stress-reduction exercises, meditation, group therapy, and a vegetarian diet can actually reverse damage to the heart muscle. That’s very surprising to doctors.

Moyers: What your research suggests is a physical, biological ground for the effect of emotions on health, right?

Pert: Exactly. The knowledge of these molecules and where they are can provide a possible rationale for the mind and emotions affecting health. Our experiments won’t prove that they do, but the rationale is there. Of course, I have to be careful, because I can’t be responsible for somebody setting up shop somewhere and saying, "I’m going to tease your peptides and heal you." But if you want my opinion, I think the pendulum has swung much too far in the other direction. We’re sold on high-tech, incredibly expensive medicine that’s bankrupting the country. Why not try a little prophylaxis? Let’s begin to appreciate simple, less expensive therapies that deal with releasing emotions, and let’s get some sound scientific studies to see what works better. For example, the Spiegel study shows that women with breast cancer who met with other women in a support group lived twice as long as women who had the same chemotherapy but didn’t get together to talk. I think in Western medicine we’ve come to the point where we’re ignoring what’s obvious. I think we need to go back a little.

Moyers: But researchers and doctors do want to know if there’s some physiological basis for this, and that’s what your research is trying to suggest. Is your work finding acceptance among your more traditionally minded colleagues?

Pert: They don’t disagree with my basic work on any level. Of course, the theoretical ramblings I’m allowing myself here are not really in the scientific literature so nobody is likely to get me on them.

Moyers: What would you like me, a layman, to know about healing and the mind?

Pert: Norman Cousins said something to the effect that having the confidence to believe that almost anything is possible can translate into being able to heal. If telling people about my work can provide them with a scientific rationale that gives them greater confidence in themselves, and in their own mind, throughout their body, to heal themselves, then I feel that I’m making a contribution.

Moyers: But isn’t there a danger in that? Now, if I have a cold, I assume it’s because a virus entered my body, and so I don’t feel guilty. But if I believe that thinking positively can keep me well, then I blame myself for my illness.

Pert: That’s part of the tension around this paradigm shift. If it’s true that emotions are critical in health and disease, then people shouldn’t feel guilt, they should just start to take in this new information. People need to open up and learn not to feel guilty but to learn new ways of being and thinking, new therapies, and new strategies.

Moyers: What is the research of the 1990s? Where is it taking us?

Pert: I think we’re going to see more applications to health and disease. Knowing that viruses use the same receptors that we’re talking about opens up new forms of specific kinds of antiviral therapies where peptide drugs from the outside can block the ability of viruses to enter cells, and can slow the spread of infection. We’re going to start using all this theoretical background to come up with new drugs. Parallel to that will be more responsibility for your health using the natural drugs in our own brain. Was it Norman Cousins who said that the biggest and best pharmacopeia is your own brain? It’s got every drug in there that you could ever need.

Moyers: So perhaps in that ancient wisdom there was some real truth — "Physician, heal thyself." Do you really think that we have within us a large capacity for self-healing through our emotions?

Pert: Absolutely.

Moyers: And you say that as a scientist?

Pert: No, I say that as a human being who’s traveling through life and has had some interesting experiences with it.

Moyers: But where does this trail lead us in regard to emotions and health?

Pert: It leads us to think that the chemicals that are running our body and our brain are the same chemicals that are involved in emotion. And that says to me that we’d better seriously entertain theories about the role of emotions and emotional suppression in disease, and that we’d better pay more attention to emotions with respect to health.

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It is part of the Cartesian mode to think of consciousness as being something peculiar to the head, that the head is the organ originating consciousness here in the body. The whole living world is informed by consciousness.

I have a feeling that consciousness and energy are the same thing somehow. Where you really see life energy, there's consciousness. Certainly the vegetable world is conscious. And when you live in the woods, as I did as a kid, you can see all these different consciousnesses relating to themselves. There is a plant consciousness and there is an animal consciousness, and we share both these things. You can eat certain foods, and the bile knows whether there's something there for it to go to work on. The whole process is consciousness. Trying to interpret it in simply mechanisitic terms won't work.

Joseph Campbell
The Power of Myth
© 1988, Doubleday

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