Mind or Matter?
A woman is attacked on her way home one night. She survives the attack, but is terrified to leave her apartment. Even going near the door makes her very nervous, and any time someone walks up the stairs to another floor, her heart pounds. If it wasn’t for the telephone and friends and family stopping by to drop off food and her mail, she’d have no contact with the outside world. That’s just natural psychology right?
Except for a couple of things: first, the police have caught the attacker and he’s going away for a while. Also, she lives in a very safe area. She wasn’t even attacked near her home: the incident happened miles away, and she certainly has no plans to return to that area for any reason. So why is she afraid of even going out?
The answer may not be psychological, but physiologicial.
Elsewhere, a man walks out of a service station after dropping his car off. As he approaches the intersection, three younger guys walk up to him and block his path and his retreat. They demand money, and one pulls out a knife. Without really thinking, the man punches the knife-wielder hard in the jaw, dropping him instantly. The other two hesitate, and he slugs one of them in the chest. The three panic in response, and run as fast as they can. The man’s heart pounds, and he goes home. That night, he can’t fall asleep: he tosses and turns and wakes up in a fright every hour or so. The next day, he feels unusually sore and tense. He picks up his car without incident, and he isn’t even afraid to do so. His friends, co-workers, and family who hear the story are complimentary, and he feels proud of himself. But he still can’t sleep the next night, and the aches and pains linger into the second day. He seems sad, anxious, and irritable all at the same time. What he needs is a drink, but that seems to make it worse for some reason. All he wants to do is sleep, so he calls in sick the next day...even though he’s feeling better now.
A friend mentions that this is understandable: he was through a violent trauma, and now he feels a mixture of guilt and fear along with aggression and frustration. Which, the man thinks, is odd—because he doesn’t really feel that bad about what happened. So why is he mixed up?
Again, the answer may be that he isn’t mixed up, but there’s something in his physical make up.
There are real physiological effects to violence, that result in physical symptoms or sensations that are quite real (even measurable).
Consider the first example about the woman afraid to leave her apartment. During the attack, the amygdala in her brain registered the fear and terror of the incident: the heart pounding, the desperation, the loss of breath, and the sweating. Her brain has effectively recorded not just the incident, but the physical response to it. As she approaches her apartment doorway, the hippocampus in her brain associates this with going outside...but the amygdala kicks in, and she finds herself suffering from the affects of fear and terror—even through she rationally is not afraid at all. But because her body is responding in the same way, it’s understandable that she thinks she is afraid to go out.
The problem is that a memory cannot be easily un-remembered. This becomes a physical response—like gagging at the memory of eating something spoiled—and it is not something that she can just “get over.” The physiological processes in her brain need to be reconditioned to associate going outdoors with happier reactions rather than painful, scary ones.
A more mundane example of this effect is quite common: there are millions of people who despise flying in aircraft. Any number of them have “happy” experiences flying, and can lecture at length about the safety of flying. Yet, the very thought of getting on another airplane is distinctively unpleasant to them: they will look for any alternative to flying, or may even opt out of a trip-of-a-lifetime simply because it would involve air travel. When they do fly, they feel terrible: the palms sweat, the heart pounds, they get painful headaches. Why would they be afraid to fly?
The fact is that they are not afraid to fly: they suffer a physiological reaction to flying: their brains and bodies instantly recall the air pressure, the claustrophobia, the noise of the engines and children crying, the stress and tension of catching the flight, the expense of parking, the physical discomfort of turbulence, and the mindless waiting. All of this causes the heart rate to go up, the headache to start, the blood pressure to rise, and the muscles to tense up. Add to this the recently increased security requirements, and it’s no wonder that this phenomenon increased since 2001, when (ironically) flying is even safer still. In short, the combined memories of something unpleasant produce real—and measurable—physical effects.
In the second example, we have a different situation. Here, the man appears to suffer the effects of some post-violence trauma...the symptoms are specific, and indeed he’s losing work-time because of them. But his memories of the attack are different: he took charge, and it was the three thugs who were frightened. Why should he have an unpleasant memory of something that, quite frankly, he didn’t realize was happening until it was over?
What he’s experiencing is chiefly physiological. During the attack, his brain responded accordingly. His amygdala responded to the attack by fighting back: epinephrine (commonly called adrenaline) dumped into his blood stream, increasing his heart rate, his respiration rate, and gearing his body for possible pain and injury. After the fight, the ephinephrine remained in his blood stream, causing him various and obvious drug-like side effects: restless sleep, higher blood pressure, depression, and anxiety. His muscles, primed to fight, are now sore from the tension. Within 24 hours, the epinephrine is out of his body, but the physical effects carry over as irritability and fatigue. Not surprisingly, sleeping helps soothe the fatigue and pain, which caused his irritability, and so on.
Everyone’s effects to ephinephrine are different, but there are always physical effects. These effects are real, but they may not be psychological at all: a few researchers are beginning to suspect that standard psychological treatments for “post-traumatic stress disorder” may provide little benefit, and may lengthen a natural physiological process unnaturally. Drugs, medicines, and alcohol may treat neither symptom or cause: there may be a smarter approach. Individuals who suffer from PTSD-like symptoms often interpret this idea as “your symptoms are imaginary,” but it’s stating quite the opposite: they’re quite real, but they’re not the result of a damaged psychology—just the result of ordinary physiology.