Salus Forum: May 2025

Jeremy

I’d add my understanding of what has emerged in the area of pain research. Psychological pain and physical pain in our brains are actually studied through functional MRIs, PET scanning, and various other imaging devices. We now know more about how the psychological and physical interact. As a result, the term psychosomatic is now being used in a new way. The new terminologies that emerge and the evolution of our language in healthcare reflect an increasing possibility for people to overcome things in ways that we couldn’t in the past.

I think one of the breakthroughs related to this new view of psychosomatics relates to a better understanding of and appreciation for a technique called visualization. My understanding is that high-performance athletes do a lot of visualization. You can actually improve your tennis stroke by visualizing it, getting better, or watching other people’s tennis stroke. We do a lot of our learning in that fashion. It doesn’t require that you have to go through the same motions every time. That’s really fascinating.

As Joe brought up, neuroscience, neurobiology and neural networking are becoming very sophisticated. Furthermore, imaging is becoming precise and biological activity is becoming compelling. We’re learning a lot more objectively about the brain. Functional disorders actually have neurobiological and networking realities. There are physical and biological sources, which we used to identify as functional.  That’s how I was trained. You have organic and functional brain disorders.

Bill B

Let me answer Bill G in another way. There’s the extraordinary work done by Mihali Csikszentmihalyi about the Flow experience. Flow is that threshold experience that you had, On the one hand, Bil G, you can be overwhelmed with anxiety, and that’s not pleasant. On the other hand, it can be boring because you’ve done it many times before. So when you were going to that peak in the Cascades, it was challenging for you, but you felt that you could do it.

That’s obviously what occurs for the ballet dancers, that’s what occurs for the football players and all. What’s interesting, Bill G, is what we know about the Flow experience. While we can visualize a peak experience, the Flow experience typically involves physical as well as mental and emotional. They’re all linked together. Somehow, they come together in the experience of Flow.

There’s something called micro flows. There is micro flow, for instance, during a boring meeting, when you’re twirling the pencil around in your fingers. That’s called a micro flow because you’re determining if you can do the twirling. Can I flip that pencil around? It’s a physical and mental activity combined.