Conversation

It's always interesting what anecdote I share that the kids get very fascinated by.

During a hike, someone mentioned they were itchy, and when I asked if it was possibly a psychosomatic thing, they said no "because you can see a rash". After dealing with the situation I offhand mentioned that just because you can see physical evidence of something doesn't mean it's not psychosomatic, and described (1) phantom pregnancies, (2) stigmata, (3) the Sarno mindbody theory of chronic pain, and (4) the study they did where they asked people to just visualize doing exercises and then saw their muscles actually got stronger.

Friends, all three of these engendered a lot of curious follow-up questions. Yes, phantom pregnancies can result in even menses stopping. Yes, the Church does try to help people who get stigmata though that's quite rare these days.

And oh so many questions about the exercise-visualization study. I dug it up later to make sure I was getting the details right: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14998709/ is the study from Cleveland Clinic Foundation researchers but yes, visualizing finger exercises or bicep exercises can increase muscle strength (N=8 study for each exercise, 35% stronger fingers, 13.5% stronger biceps; the control study that visualized nothing had 0 increase in strength, the other control study that did real exercise had 53% stronger fingers).

Occasionally I say something that the kids get really interested in and that upon further research turns out to be either wrong or misremembered. Thankfully that's not the case here. It's hard to know if there's any lasting impact from learning about the power of the mind over the body, but I'm curious to find out.