時代週刊報導靜坐 (English)

 

Your Mind Your Body

TIME, Edition: U.S. Vol. 161 No. 3 Monday, Jan. 20, 2003

If you close your eyes and think about it for a while, as philosophers have
done for centuries, the world of the mind seems very different from the one
inhabited by our bodies.  The psychic space inside our heads is infinite and
ethereal; it seems obvious that it must be made of different stuff than all
the other organs.

Cut into the body, and blood pours forth.  But slice into the brain, and
thoughts and emotions don't spill out onto the operating table. Love and
anger can't be collected in a test tube to be weighed and measured.

 

Rene Descartes, the great 17th century French mathematician and
philosopher, enshrined this metaphysical divide in what came to be known
in Western philosophy as mind-body dualism.  

Many Eastern mystical traditions, contemplating the same inner space,
have come to the opposite conclusion.  They teach that the mind and body 
belong to an indivisible continuum.

 

In the past, doctors and scientists have tended to dismiss that view as
bunk, but the more they learn about the inner workings of the mind, the
more they realize that in this regard at least, the mystics are right and
Descartes was dead wrong.

 

Mind and body, psychologists and neurologists now agree, aren't that
different. The brain is just another organ, albeit more intricate than the
rest. The thoughts and emotions that seem to color our reality are the
result of complex electrochemical interactions within and between nerve
cells.

The disembodied voices of schizophrenia and the feelings of worthlessness
and self-hatred that accompany depression, although they seem to be
based on reality, are no more than distortions in brain electrochemistry.

Researchers are learning how these distortions arise, how to lessen their
severity and, in some cases, how to correct them.

 

Scientists are also learning something else. Not only is the mind like the
rest of the body, but the well-being of one is intimately intertwined with
that of the other. This makes sense because they share the same
systems--nervous, circulatory, endocrine and immune. What happens in
the pancreas or liver can directly affect brain function.

Disorders of the brain, conversely, can send out biochemical shock waves
that disturb the rest of the body. The pages that follow, our annual special
report on health, take you to the cutting edge of mind-body research,
where scientists, having left Descartes's great mistake far behind, are
exploring how the brain works, how it malfunctions, and what can be done
when it goes awry.

--By Michael D. Lemonick

TIMES 封面故事 http://www.time.com/time/magazine/0,9263,7601030120,00.html

封面故事內容 http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1004082,00.html