Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 67.djvu/610

604 example, let us say that two men of equal strength are pulling with all their might on a thick stick. As long as the pull is the same on both sides, the stick won't move. How the mind can exert such an influence we do not know. This same idea of the counter-action of various muscles applies to the whole body as well as to one arm. Yet some one may ask how these muscles can have the power to stand more strain than they do in the waking state. It is only that as our normal selves we never use our full muscle power. This is because not enough stimulation is ever given to the muscle to make it work to its full extent. But in cases of great excitement or danger, even the weakest seem to have superhuman strength.

The loss of the sense of pain or anesthesia can also be accounted for by the brain. When we say we have a pain in our finger, we don't really mean that. The cut is in the finger, but the pain is in the brain, and consciousness is necessary for us to have pain. Suppose a man is going to have an operation on his finger and is made unconscious. Now the finger is there, but the pain has disappeared, showing that pain is not located in various parts of the body, but in the domain of consciousness. So if, under hypnotic influence, you tell the patient that he will have no pain, he thinks the pain away, so to speak—knocks it out of his consciousness.

How we can run needles into people and produce no blood seems still more remarkable, but physiologically it can be explained. Let me say here that if any one should pierce a large artery with a needle, serious consequences might result. Let us say that we penetrate the skin in a place where there are thousands of little capillaries. Each one of these vessels is connected with the nervous system by two sets of nerve fibers—those which can dilate the vessels, those which can constrict them. Now, suppose I give the suggestion that I am going to run a needle through a certain part of the arm. An impulse, sent from the brain, constricts the blood vessels at this spot, inhibits the sense of pain, and the needle comes out again wthoutwithout [sic] a drop of blood following it.

The explanation of the dizziness from water supposed to be whiskey and the cure by salt supposed to be sugar is that both are the result of an unexplainable force whereby the patient takes every word of the hypnotizer as gospel, though it is contradictory to his own ideas. For example, in one case a patient told me that he knew the glass contained water and yet it tasted like whiskey, and he also knew that the sellar contained salt and yet it tasted like sugar.

The cure of the finger-nail habit and all the post-hypnotic suggestions may be summed up briefly. All we should do is to refer back to the perfect or subjective mind where all these suggestions are stored up and say that the objective mind draws nutriment from it, and in