Mind over Matter

[RamesesII]

Mind over Matter, does it really exist?

Lets have a look at it, firstly lets look at some amazing feats that the mind can do.

Phantom pregnancies- The ability for a female mind to produce symptoms of pregnancy but with no evidence of fertilization.

Placebo effect- The ability for the human mind to mend and/or heal illness and disease while using a placebo medication ( a medication that is usually a sugar tablet or that has no medicinal properties given to a patient with no knowledge of it being fake)

I could name a few more like, Memory of previous lives, premonition, you could even put in some forms of hallucination in there.

My main question is, if the mind and body is capable of achieving these incredible acts is it possible to trick the mind into other things like time travel or telekinesis.

For example using the placebo effect theory if you were to trick someones mind into thinking that it was traveling through time could it be possibly for it to actual to travel through time for real. Of course we have it implanted into our minds that time travel is pretty much impossible to happen so the test subject would have to be someone that has never heard of it for it to be possible.

[Padraic]

I think that it does because when you expect to be hit, it doesn't hurt all that much, but when you stub your toe it hurts like a bitch.

I had my apendix removed around halloween time, it hurt a lot more when I was at home, but when I was trying to convince my mother to let me go out trick or treating, or to a party, I felt completely fine, same with when I went to the hospital and they said I needed to have it removed, I convinced myself that I was fine because I didn't want to be cut open.

Also how do believe that people can walk on coals barefeet without flinching, because they convince themselves that its not hot.

Telekeneses, and time travel seems rather impossible, maybe you could trick your body into not waking up for many hours, (maybe even days) But all the affects of time would still occur on your body, you'd probably have to wake up to drink and eat, or else you would die.

[Sinister]

Mind over Matter? What's the difference? Mind is matter. No wait...*chants to self that he will not take a Zen approach.*

But honestly, the brain regulates all the functions you describe in your examples. They are the domain of the mind and nervous system, autonomic or not. Now, bending spoons with your mind would be more "mind over matter" for my tastes. But either way and my personal beliefs aside, any claims of that kind are stubborn to prove, if not impossible.

If you're talking about placebo effect and etc... Faith takes a large hand at healing. People who don't want to get better or who don't believe they will have been 'observed' to heal more slowly. I remember one quote that said "Medicine was the act of entertaining the patient while he heals himself."

Make of that what you will.

-Sin

[Furore]

Some of the stuff you mentioned is merely the mind ignoring/blocking shit.
I've found it's VERY handy to ignore pain when in a fight with multiple opponents. Give in and you get the floor wiped with you and these days some of the little bastards keep digging into ya even when knocked out/half dead whatever... but now I'm seriously digressing.

I think the mind has a lot of power over the body of the person with the mind (some of the feats/oddities associated with this have had credible evidence shown), but I do not believe that the mind can have an effect on things external to the mind/body unless you include the obvious commanding your body to interact with something through the mind. I'm not saying it's impossible, merely that I haven't seen any credible evidence and have looked into such things many times in the past out of interest.

[Heartless Angel]

Mind over matter only really works on things the mind controls, like the body. Telekinesis and time travel, not possible by simple mind over matter, simply because, though the brain may believe it's doing that, it has no way to actually do it.