The brain is "bicameral" or two-sided. The two-sides (called hemispheres) communicate via a super-powerful connector called the corpus callosum. The left hemisphere is specialized in verbal-linguistic tranduction of speech and analytical thinking (logic, math, cause & effect, language, & sequential thinking). The right side plays more of a role in holistic-metaphorical information transduction such as imagery (art, dance, intuition, subjective, spontaneous, holistic, & dream imagery). The primary role of creating imagery is carried out by the right side.
Roger Sperry won a Nobel Prize for his brain research. Basically feeding different information to each side of the brain at the same time. His research concluded that each hemisphere could work independently of each other at the same time.
Researchers have come a long way toward understanding the mind. They have discovered, for instance, that under stress the brain will convert nerve signals into "messenger molecules" who then in turn direct the endocrine system to produce steroid hormones, that can reach the nucleus of various cells and cause them to change how the body’s genes are written out. These genes will then direct the cells as to how to make a variety of molecules which are used in growth, metabolism, sexuality, and the immune systems. In other words, the mind can rewrite genetics.
Barbara Brown, a physiologist at Veteran’s Administration Hospital (in Sepulveda) wrote a book New Mind, New Body. Barbara Brown’s research was government funded. Her book got the public interested in biofeedback. Because of repeated success at getting patients to control such things as their heartbeat, Dr. Brown is convinced that a person’s heart rate, breathing, muscle tension, glandular responses are all subject to a person’s will.
The abilities of the human brain to control the body have been seriously underrated by people. Bio-feedback researchers in the 1960s were surprised to find out that if a single nerve cell’s activity is placed upon a screen so that the subject can see its activity graphed, the subject will be able to mentally identify that cell apart from any other nerve fiber cell, and will be able to have voluntary control over that single cell apart from any other. Just to show how complex the body is, a single nerve fiber cell will have 600 connections. This mental feat is simply mind-boggling for researchers.
The heart is controlled by the mind and works with the emotions of a person. There have been people who have literally died from a "broken heart." This is a historical fact. It has been well-documented that the mind can control the blood flow to various tissues and in this way change temperature in various different parts of the body.
