Book Reviews
Molecules of Emotion by Candace B Pert, PhD
Schribner pb, NY, 2003. ISBN 10:0684846349,
pp 368. Rrp US$16.00.
Reviewed by Maggie Helass
Dr Candace Pert found God through her work in the laboratories of psychoneuroimmunological research – and earned notoriety as the scientist who suggested that God was a peptide.
Personally I have no theological problem with that – if God could become incarnate as a baby, why not a peptide?
In 1996 Pert was on the set of a US PBS program called Healing and the Mind, where she had explained the ways that our bodies’ chemicals communicate with one another.A television cameraman (normally a cynical breed) approached her and asked quietly,“You were talking about the Holy Spirit, weren’t you?”
It is worth wading through the first 148 pages of this book, which chart the course of Pert’s own journey in the sciences of neurology, immunology, endocrinology and psychology, in order to understand why this veteran of hard science had to answer the cameraman by admitting “Yes, maybe I was”.
Her research has taken place in the crucible of the late 20th Century breakdown of Western concepts of the separation of body and mind which she suggests dates back to Descartes, but I would place the beginnings of that rift much earlier, with Aristotle.
Quantum physics pulled the rug out from under that worldview and post-modernism is still grasping at new ways of expressing the reality emerging from the smashed concepts of the past few centuries.
The neologism Pert uses is ‘bodymind’ to denote the reconciliation of body and mind as a union, informed by a complex biochemical information network.
She describes this work as “putting back what was taken out three hundred years ago,” to reveal that we are far more than the sum of our parts.
“What we had seen in our research was that the brain, the glands, the immune system, indeed the entire organism, were joined together in a wonderful system coordinated by the actions of discrete and specific messenger molecules.”
“I see the process of communication we have demonstrated, the flow of information throughout the whole organism, as evidence that the body is the actual outward manifestation, in physical space, of the mind.”
“In summary, the point I am making is that your brain is extremely well integrated with the rest of your body at a molecular level, so much so that the term mobile brain is an apt description of the psychosomatic network through which intelligent information travels from one system to another….
the sum of these sounds would be
the music we call the emotions
“Every second, a massive information exchange is occurring in your body. Imagine each of these messenger systems possessing a specific tone, humming a signature tune, rising and falling, waxing and waning, binding and unbinding, and if we could hear this body music with our ears, then the sum of these sounds would be the music that we call the emotions.”
At this point in her thesis a basic understanding of biochemistry becomes indispensable and one is grateful for the slog through the first half of the book.
“Using neuropeptides as the cue, our bodymind retrieves or represses emotions and behaviors…. (Eureka!) biochemical change wrought at the receptor level is the molecular basis of memory” (my italics).
The infinitesimal objects of Pert’s research she describes lyrically thus:“Peptides are the sheet music containing the notes, phrases and rhythms that allow the orchestra – your body – to play as an integrated entity.”
This startling new science proceeded to reveal that the reach of our biochemistry is not confined to the body but vibrates in time and space.
“I also started to become aware of synchronicity, to see connections between events and people happening simultaneously and to act on this awareness instead of out of the more familiar linear cause-and-effect model.”
C G Jung described synchronicity as “The coincidence of events in space and time as meaning something more than mere chance”.
Armed with this groundbreaking research Pert’s journey into medical research was a much more bumpy ride, fraught with the commercial realities of Big Pharma and the hostility of a paternalistic medical establishment.
She coolly explains the Mars/Venus phenomenon, with a remarkable lack of bile in view of her difficulties with the male-dominated realm of scientific research:“Because women have a thicker corpus callosum – the bundle of nerves that bridges the left and right brain hemispheres
– they are able to switch back and forth from the rational, or left brain, to the intuitive, or right brain, with relative ease.With fewer nerves connecting the hemispheres, men tend to be more focused in one hemisphere or the other”.
Once in the sphere of medical research Pert “was beginning to think of disease-related stress in terms of an information overload, a condition in which the mind-body network is so taxed by unprocessed sensory input in the form of suppressed trauma or undigested emotions that it has become bogged down and cannot flow freely, sometimes even working against itself, at cross purposes”.
The mindbody, she found, had all the resources necessary to heal itself, once its biochemical pathways were cleared. However, this finding did not interest the pharmaceutical industry and funding for her research was withdrawn.“Since …natural substances are not patentable, there is no incentive for drug companies to study their benefits…” she concludes.
Pert broaches the crucial subject of information theory in a conversation with Bob Gottesman, a medical doctor with an impressive pedigree in both western and eastern medical traditions.
“It seems to me that the way to heal the split between body and mind is to change metaphors,” Gottesman suggests.
The discourse runs thus: Information theory is an advance on Einsteinian physics, the older metaphor of matter, force, energy (E=mc2).
“While these terms are useful for building locomotives and bridges, even atomic bombs, they are not so useful for understanding the human body,” Gottesman says.
“Physical processes aren’t things, they are dynamic and take place in an open, fluid system, and therefore fit better with the metaphor of information than that of matter and force.”
“Information is not dependent on time or space, as is matter and energy, but exists regardless of these limits!”
“…(S)ince information in the form of the biochemicals of emotion is running every system of the body, then our emotions must also come from some realm beyond the physical.”
Information is the missing piece that allows us to transcend the body-mind split This discussion gives Pert the inspiration to take a leap into previously uncharted waters of psychoneurobiochemical research, which has enormous potential for bodymind health.
“Information… is the missing piece that allows us to transcend the body-mind split of the Cartesian view, because by definition, information belongs to neither mind nor body, although it touches both.We must accept that it occupies a whole new realm, one we can perhaps call the “inforealm”.
The bottom line is that physiology and emotions are inseparable: — “As a culture, we keep our feelings hidden, afraid to express them honestly for fear others will be indifferent to our sorrows or alienated or hurt by our anger. Better to deny feelings, to suppress them, we tell ourselves, go through the motions of happiness and pretend to have fun – until the day the bottom falls out and the family physician hands us the diagnosis: depression.”
“Many ancient and alternative healing methods refer to a mysterious force we cannot measure with Western instruments, that which animates the entire organism and is known as “subtle” energy by meta-physicians, prana by Hindus, chi by Chinese. Freud called it libido, Reich called it orgone energy, Henri Bergson called it élan vitale. It’s my belief that this mysterious energy is actually the free flow of information carried by the biochemicals of emotion, the neuropeptides and their receptors.”
This subtle energy is portrayed in the ancient Christian tradition as halos round the heads of saints.
What we need is a larger biomedical science to reintegrate what was taken out three hundred years ago.
The journey of this book concludes at a Wellness Conference in northern Winsconsin in the summer of 1996.Although considered a conservative region, the alternative health movement of California had by then penetrated the Midwest of the USA.
The healing power of touch was back on the agenda at this meeting.“Just as we harness the power of our minds for physical healing, so can we do physical things to help heal our feelings,” Pert told her audience.
“It’s true, we do store some memory in the brain, but by far, the deeper, older messages are stored in the body and must be accessed through the body.Your body is your subconscious mind, and you can’t heal it by talk alone.”
