A post by John F. DeCarlo

Bachelard notes the history of science has been hampered by unconscious epistemological obstacles such as the division of body/mind, but that times of traumatic disruption have often been opportunities for insight and growth. Amidst our current global rupture, there is certainly an urgency for an enhanced understanding of our immune systems. Fortunately, Homo sapiens are poised on an evolutionary cusp, with ecological-cultural forces exerting pressures to strengthen our healing capabilities, and scientific and medical advancements enabling us to better understand and supplement our natural immune systems. But - how – best to proceed?

Victor Frankl, best known for his Logos Therapy, was an Austrian trained psychiatrist, who was later taken prisoner and sent to German concentration camps during WW II. There, amidst the horrific absurdities, he observed extraordinary examples of existential willingness to live, and also how the existential will can shrink and die away. Interestingly, not unlike computerized cameras that currently observe psychiatric intake interviews and offer diagnostic interpretations, Frankl later noted that as a trained observer, he could discern from someone’s overall affect, whether they would struggle and defy the unimaginable circumstances, or succumb to them.

In this respect, I invite us to imagine an emerging personal medicine, whereby the individual is prescribed a ‘dosage’ of symbolic art which assists in establishing not only biological, but also existential homeostasis.

Let’s first step back to the origin of the saga, emanating from pre-historic cave dwellers who would artistically pictorialize the perilous hunt in which members of the cave were often fatally wounded by a wooly mammoth or saber tooth tiger. Such an artistic impulse can be extended to the cathartic plays of the Ancient Greeks poets, and then to Shakespeare, who intertwines the Nordic saga of Hamlet into the Elizabethan revenge drama in which the protagonist not only calls his command into question, but engages in philosophical meditations of life and death.

Why this anthropomorphic fascination with art? According to Morris Weitz, art can’t, in principle, be defined in light of the multifarious forms it has manifested throughout human history, but we can think about the practices and meanings of art. On one level, art is recreational, on another it is therapeutic, and on others, it is exploratory and spiritual in nature. It is compelling how the Navajo sand painting ritual embodied all these features and dimensions: the patient would sit with a medicine man, and creatively conjure up a colorful and symbolic mandala that would correlate with the person’s physical-mental-emotional malaise, enabling them to transcend it - to a healing state.

Healing states have perplexed the modern medical mindset. Even more than use of bloodletting, magnetism and hypnosis, or hands on healing, the Western medical model has been rivaled by the placebo effect, whose clinical utility has long hinged on physicians deceptively administering a placebo treatment to their patients. Owing to its ‘mysterious’ effects, Big Pharma stills needs to out-perform the placebo effect in order to gain approval from the FDA.

Actually, Crum has uncovered the neurobiological underpinnings of the placebo as activated by three independent and yet related psychological processes.  These consist of: non-conscious implicit learning, such as classical conditioning and the associations of certain symbols and rituals; conscious expectations, in terms of specific beliefs about future events; and mindsets, which are lenses or frames of mind that orient individuals to particular sets of associations and expectations. Moreover, empirical evidence now demonstrates that placebo effects are both significant and measurable in clinical or laboratory conditions, including: pain, depression, Parkinson’s disease, fatigue, allergies, and immune deficiencies. Studies of stress, diet and exercise also indicate that mindsets guide patients’ attentional and motivational processes and affect both subjective and objective measures of health and well-being via markers of blood pressure, weight loss, cortisol response, and hormone secretion (Crum, 2007, 2011, 2013, 2017; Crum & Zion, 2018).

It has also been uncovered that the immune system supports the brain not only during times of psychological stress, but during times of infections and injuries. Both immune cells and lymph vessels are present in the brain’s meninges, in addition to carrying cerebrospinal fluid. The lymphatic vessels also reveal how the human immune system receives information about tissue damage in the central nervous system, including brain infections and injuries to the immune system (Kipnis, 2018). Moreover, there is an inverse relationship between mental and emotional issues and the immune system; a decrease in immunology leads to an increase in mental malaise, and a decrease in mental malaise, associated with an upcoming medical care, for example, leads to an increase in immunology.

More specifically, unlike sympathetic states of stress which trigger a chain reaction from the amygdala, to the hypothalamus, to the posterior pituitary and then to the adrenal glands – culminating in their negative secretion of the stress hormone cortisol – states of parasympathetic relaxation induce neurological-mental states, ranging from: alpha: wakeful relaxation, theta: daydreaming, delta: deep dreamless sleep, with their corresponding decrease of electro-magnetic brain waves. Accompanying these relaxed neurological states is the causal link between the hypothalamus, the posterior pituitary gland and then the thymus gland, which conversely secretes thymosin hormones responsible for the production and maturation of T lymphocytes.

While the exact nature of the linkage between the psycho-neuro and the bio-chemical is not clear, survivors of the concentration camps have cited artistic pieces as inspirational sources, as they played melodic phrases from Chopin, Mozart and Schubert, and other composers – in their minds, in order to survive. In other words, a symbolic existential homeostasis was established on the psycho-neuro level, which in turn, established a resilient healing state of biological homeostasis, even when the body was severely physically deprived.

As per such an artistic switch between the psycho-neuro and bio-chemical, my prior research has explored how the structural dynamics of the brain extensively coincide with the principles of both the poetic and the rhetorical arts. I have drawn on cutting-edge neurological insights explaining and illustrating how the poetic, in a broad artistic sense, both reflects an array neurological perceptual, linguistic, interpretative, cognitive, and non-linear and regulatory structural dynamics, as well as reflects on them as both mediums interacting with the external world (DeCarlo, 2019). By the same token, I have explored how, similar to the structural brain-mind functions of integrated consciousness as formulated by Koch and Tononi, the classical principles of rhetoric not only involve the parameters of integrated consciousness, including: framing a focal point, schematizing content, maintaining concentration, combining and sequencing data, and determining borders, but also further develop states of integrated consciousness (DeCarlo, 2018). Based on this deep-seated structural harmony of the arts and the psycho-neuro, artistic forms can be refined and carefully selected to maximize the excitation and purging of emotions in proper measure, so as to positively affect the regulation of the immune systems.

A possible complication is the qualitative multiplicity of the human mind/imagination. While we can - only - consciously concentrate on a single thought, second to second, at semi-conscious and/or unconscious dimensions we can scan a multitude of neurological-psychological interpretative ‘data’. However, symbols tap into the non-conscious, pre-verbal, and instinctual energies of not only brain-mind, but the physiological aspects of the immune systems.  In this way, symbols evoke and harmonize conscious and unconscious levels where we encounter the shadow side of our awareness, complete with what we feel we do and do not deserve, and both our faith and doubt about the healing process. Also, whereas the brain recognizes patterns, as evident in sociological stereotyping, behavioral representing, linguistic shading, and psychological priming, the symbolic image lies between perception and understanding. In this way, negative and ambiguous emotional patterns on both the conscious and unconscious levels, that might interfere with the healing process, can be integrated and transformed so as to activate existential homeostasis, effecting a healing biological homeostasis.  

As per the emerging synthesis of bio tech and neuro tech, brain scans can recognize momentary moods and emotional reactions to a particular name, face, or object, as well as read thoughts relative to verbal prompts and activities; and deep learning AI is increasingly predictive in reading words and ideas. On the bodily level, routine blood tests can measure blood cell counts, enzymes and proteins – all metrics for health, infection, inflammation and disease, as well as indexes of progress in treatment of specific disease markers and T cell strength. The advent of diagnostic Nano technology can also be used, in real time, to measure and evaluate the efficacy of the artistic therapeutic modality, compensating for any quantitative limitations, on either level.

In sum, artistic symbols can continue to play a historical-cultural role as the pivotal switch between the psycho-neuro and the bio-chemical dynamics of the immune systems, joining and enhancing both dimensions of the reciprocal equilibrium. Thus, we can imagine the advent of personalized medicine carefully calibrating bodily and neurological metrics, and a corresponding library of artistic works of various mediums classified algorithmically as suited to the individual’s overall state of being, promoting both existential and biological homeostasis.

References:

Crum, Alia & Zion, Sean, International Review of Neurobiology, Chapter Eight - Mindsets Matter: A New Framework for Harnessing the Placebo Effect in Modern Medicine, Volume 138, 2018, Pages 137-160

DeCarlo, John F., The Imaginative Scope and Anatomy of the Human Brain, THE JUNKYARD: A Scholarly blog devoted to the study of the Imagination. November 13, 2019.

DeCarlo, John F., “Writing With & For Integrated Consciousness” at NYS COW Conference, Fall 2018

Kipnis, John, The Seventh Sense, Scientific American Magazine, Cover Article, August, 2018