Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Body or brain

So I keep thinking about which is stronger. The body or the brain. My high school math teacher once told us of a top secret study that was conducted by the US military on this. Apparently they had a volunteer convict on death row do this.

Instead of the chair, they had him sign an agreement to an alternate end. They told him they were going to bleed him to death for a study that was going to aid medical research. They put him on a chair in a white room (why white?), and had him put his arm through a hole in the wall so he could not see what was being done to his arm on the other side. But he could hear what was going on and someone on the other side would narrate what was happening.

So they had him sitting all comfortably on the chair, with his arm unseen through a wall. Then they cut his hand and told him that he was slowly bleeding. He could hear the dripping of his own blood into a container of some sort. The narrator on the other side kept score of how much blood he was losing and at what level should he begin to feel drowsy, pale and faint.

Apparently they didn't really cut him enough to really bleed all that much. But they had a drip on the other side filled with some sticky liquid dripping into a pail and it sounded like his blood. A few hours later, the man, having truly believed he was bleeding to death just stopped breathing. He just died, from sheer belief that he had bled to death.

We all believed my math teacher. Nobody thought to question how he knew about this top secret study if it were so top secret. Boy were we gullible.

Or were we?

Maybe the brain can overcome the body. It's just mind over matter, folks...mind over matter.

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