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Complex Numbers #960971 added June 18, 2019 at 12:37am
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Heartbreak
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-47440622
Your heart can be damaged after a sad event and it may be your brain's doing, experts believe.
Teen angst, vindicated!
Dr Jelena Ghadri and colleagues at University Hospital Zurich looked at what was happening in the brains of 15 patients with broken heart syndrome.
Brain scans showed up noticeable differences compared with scans from 39 healthy, control patients.
There was less communication between brain regions involved with controlling emotions and unconscious or automatic body responses, such as heartbeat.
The more I learn, the more I think that the commonly stated dichotomy between mind and body is bogus.
It started with my mother. (Cue Sigmund Freud.)
Mom was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis before I was born. They treated her for that for decades. And then another doctor looked at her and said, "It's not ulcerative colitis; it's Krohn's Disease."
As I understand it, they present with similar symptoms, but the treatment is different. But it was too late for her; she'd been damaged.
Why is this relevant? Because it also affected her mind. Maybe it was the stress of living with a difficult condition, or maybe it was the treatments, or perhaps a combination, but as she grew older, she just wasn't right in the head. Eventually, this led to dementia and her ultimate death.
Now, today, I just read that scientists are investigating a possible connection between streptococcus infections and certain types of mental illness. And then, of course, there's this.
And yet, people continue to treat mind as something separate from the physical. I know it certainly seems that way sometimes, but to me, what goes on in one's brain is undoubtedly influenced by what's going on in the body. The reverse is more clearly true, but it's rather obvious that chemical and electrical processes can influence one's thoughts just as surely as they can damage organs or make changes in one's body - adrenaline prodding muscles into action, for example.
Anyway, back to the actual article I linked.
Dr Ghadri said: "Emotions are processed in the brain so it is conceivable that the disease originates in the brain with top-down influences on the heart."
The idea of the heart as the seat of the emotions is ubiquitous in our culture. It predates the advent of modern medicine. There's some poetry in that - every cliché starts is life as profound poetry - but it's clear that, from a purely medical standpoint, it's all in one's head. And yet, according to this study at least, there's a connection there; everything in the body is interconnected.
I'm far from an expert at medical matters, and even farther from an expert at issues of emotion. So, really, I don't know how to interpret all of this. It's just something to think about - if you can stomach it.
Consequently, I'll just post the literal video version of Total Eclipse of the Heart.
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