This blog's Jeffrey Schwartz gave a talk today in Dublin, Ireland; "The Mind and the Brain, Are They Related?" was the title. Excerpt from Irish news article "Mind over matter is not fanciful, says psychiatrist" (IrishTimes.com):
THE FANCIFUL notion of "mind over matter", where the mind can exert influence over the body, is not so fanciful after all. It is possible for the mind to impose lasting physiological changes on the brain to overcome psychiatric problems such as obsessive compulsive disorder.
So argues Prof Jeffrey M Schwartz, one of the world's leading proponents of mind over matter in a psychiatric sense, who was in Dublin yesterday to deliver a lecture at St Patrick's Hospital.
. . .
Prof Schwartz is a research psychiatrist in the school of medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, and has spent years studying conscious awareness and the idea that the actions of the mind can have an effect on the workings of the brain. "I use obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) as a model for the issue of the relationship between the mind and the brain," he said yesterday evening before the lecture.
The brain is the organ that controls our experience of the world via the senses, while the mind is our ability to be self-aware. ...
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