Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (27 page)

I was talking about this to a young woman friend who told me about a time when, nearing a nervous collapse, she was confined to a mental institution.

“It was the most awful experience of my life,” she told me. “I was placed in an empty room with padded walls and a steel door. I had felt troubled and confused until that point, but right then and there I really cracked. I went nuts. Seeing that, the doctors fed me with drug after drug. I couldn’t keep track of what they were giving me. I went from one wild state into another, just trying to get on top of the drugs. I begged them not to drug me. I tried to escape. It seemed that they were trying to drive me insane. I felt like I’d been put into a sensory-deprivation chamber, locked up without anything to touch or smell or see or feel.

“The thing that got me out of there was this one woman, a nurse, sixty years old or so, big and fat, shaped like a house. She would come visit me, ostensibly to check me, but what she would do is get me to visualize beaches, the moon, nature. She would describe sunsets in really intimate detail. I would get all the way into these descriptions and though it sort of tore me up to be locked in this steel room, drugged, often bound up, she was able to take me out of that space and bring visions into my mind. It re-created old feelings in me. My heart felt like bursting at the sight of these imagined sun-sets, but most of all these visions created a calm that allowed me to beat those drugs. I learned how to let them by, and then I figured out that what those doctors wanted was for me to submit, so I faked submission. I stopped fighting and struggling and they let me out. It was the images of the sunsets, and the calm they created in me, which were my secret weapon. By holding those images, I could hold onto my sanity.”

Can you remember your childhood well enough to recall that you had certain favorite objects? Lately, in watching my own children, seeing that there are certain objects they seem to love for reasons which are totally beyond my ken, I have begun to remember similar objects from my own life.

There was a particular stone, for example, very dark in color with a few yellowish lines running through it. I kept it under my pillow, and when I was alone, I would look at it for amazingly long periods of time. I would caress it. Even now as I put it into writing, a flood of feeling invades me. I realize now that I had a physical relationship with that stone; I literally
loved
it. I loved its shape, its color, the way it felt. It also stimulated me, and does even now as I remember it. It made me think. And yet this is nonsensical.

There was also a small furry ball, and a kind of silly drawing of a bear on the wall. I don’t remember where it came from, but even now I can picture it in my mind. I remember it had voluptuous shapes, a round head, a large ovalish body. There was something profoundly comforting in that image. How could that be so?

Metaphysics to Physics

By all accounts, the great majority of the people of the world agree that image, color, form and symbol are concrete, physical and real, capable of affecting the viewer of them. It is only among Western technological cultures, an extreme minority of the world, that this notion is suppressed and ridiculed. But now, as with so many previousy rejected areas of knowledge, Western science is slowly beginning to catch up.

In
Seeing With the Mind’s Eye,
the Samuelses present some evidence that neurophysiologists are able to trace the pathways of images from the brain into the cells.

“It has been found that mental images have many of the same physical components as open-eyed perceptions. . . . Our bodies react to mental images in ways similar to how they react to images from the external world. The American physiologist Edmund Jacobson has done studies which show that when a person imagines running, small but measurable amounts of contraction actually take place in the muscles associated with running. The same neurological pathways are excited by imagined running as by actual running. . . . But anatomists have also been aware of pathways between the cerebral cortex, where images are stored, and the autonomic nervous system which controls the so-called involuntary muscles. The autonomic nervous system controls sweating, blood vessels, expansion and contraction, blood pressure, blushing and goose-pimpling, the rate and force of heart contractions, respiratory rate, dryness of mouth, bowel motility and smooth muscle tension. There are also pathways between the autonomic nervous system and the pituitary and adrenal cortex. The pituitary gland secretes hormones which regulate the rate of secretion of other glands; especially the thyroid, sex and adrenal glands. The adrenal glands secrete steroids, which regulate metabolic processes, and epinephrine, which causes the ‘fight or flight’ reaction.
Through these pathways, an image held in the mind can literally affect every cell in the body . . .
[My italics]

“The nervous innervation of voluntary and involuntary muscles is also associated with the physical expression of emotion. When an image or thought is held in the mind, there is neuronal activity in both hemispheres of the brain. Nerve fibers lead from the cerebral hemisphere to the hypothalamus, which has connections with the autonomic nervous system and the pituitary gland. When a person holds a strong fearful image in the mind’s eye, the body responds, via the autonomic nervous system, with a feeling of ‘butterflies in the stomach,’ a quickened pulse, elevated blood pressure, sweating, goose-bumps and dryness of the mouth. Likewise, when a person holds a strong relaxing image in the mind, the body responds with lowered heart rate, decreased blood pressure and, obviously, all the muscles tend to relax.”

So the image you carry in your mind
can
affect your actual physical body and your emotional state.

The Samuelses describe research done with yogic practitioners who can voluntarily control many of their autonomic (involuntary) body processes, from breathing rate to body temperature to heartbeat. It is not unusual for a trained yogi to be able to fluctuate heartbeats voluntarily from eighty beats per minute to three hundred beats. The research showed that “the techniques by which they were able to do these things were found to be made of detailed visualizations.”

The Samuelses provide nearly one hundred fifty pages of examples of the physical uses of images, ranging from athletes who use visualization to increase their performance to the dramatic growth in medical uses of visualization by doctors in aiding cancer victims to gain control of their own disease and by psychologists in easing the agonies of upcoming stressful situations.

The classic article on the effects of mental rehearsal is by Australian psychologist Alan Richardson, reporting on changes in performance among three groups of basketball players. Between test sessions, the first group physically practiced foul shooting, the second group practiced mentally, the third group didn’t practice at all. The results showed that between the initial test and the final test, the first two groups improved their performance by virtually the same percentage. The third group did not improve. “Similar studies involving dart throwing and other athletic activities show the same kinds of results,” say the Samuelses.

The image in the mind sends the autonomic nervous system through a rehearsal of impulses. When the real event comes along, it has been practiced. The image stimulating the autonomic nervous system is itself the practice.

Similar descriptions appear in an article by Dr. Richard Suinn in
Psychology Today,
July 1976. Suinn was asked to help some skiers who were training for the Olympics.

“I instructed the skiers to practice their athletic skills by using mental imagery. The technique has been used before. Jean-Claude Killy, a three-gold-medal skier, has reported that his only preparation for one race was to ski it mentally. He was recovering from an injury at the time and couldn’t practice on the slopes. Killy says the race turned out to be one of his best. . . . Without fail, athletes feel their muscles in action as they [mentally] rehearse their sport. . . . The imagery of visuo-motor behavior rehearsal apparently is more than sheer imagination. It is a well-controlled copy of experience, a sort of body-thinking similar to the powerful illusion of certain dreams at night.”

Suinn describes incidents where athletes in sports ranging from swimming and skiing to pistol shooting use mental imagery to rehearse the actual competition. It proved better training, in many instances, than practice runs in noncompetitive conditions. With imagery, the competitive conditions were more nearly simulated in the nervous system. So the imagery was more valuable rehearsal than actual physical practice.

“During one recent experiment, I recorded the electro-myography responses of an Alpine ski racer as he summoned up a moment-by-moment imagery of a downhill race. . . . Muscle bursts appeared as the skier hit jumps. Further muscle bursts duplicated the effort of a rough section of the course, and the needles settled during the easy sections . . . his EMG recordings almost mirrored the course itself. There was even a final burst of muscle activity after he had passed the finish line, a mystery to me until I remembered how hard it is to come to a skidding stop after racing downhill at more than 40 miles an hour.”

The image held in the mind produced measurable physiological responses. The involuntary nervous system is activated by the image. The image is itself training.

Modern psychology is making much of these techniques, but a sensible person will automatically evoke images in order to rehearse an event, without any therapist’s instructions. It could just be called “thinking through” an event beforehand, whether it is a speech or a difficult encounter. Every lawyer that I’ve ever met does it before every court appearance. Most business people do it. By giving time to the planning of the events, you are taking charge of them, preprogramming your body and mind.

Even more interesting perhaps are the increasing uses of visualization in modern medicine, techniques very similar to those used by “primitive” healers and medicine people. The idea is taking hold that, like the yogis, patients can control their own internal chemistry, the functions of the organs, the flow of the blood and so forth by way of the images held in the mind.

Prominent among the practitioners of medical visualization is a European neurologist, J. H. Shultz, who uses something called “autogenic therapy,” taking people through imaginary tours of their bodies, visually discovering their organs, the cells, and eventually picturing them as functional and healthy.

The Samuelses report: “Autogenic therapy is widely used in Europe and has been extensively researched. . . . A seven-volume work cites 2400 studies. Researchers examining the effects of the standard autogenic exercises have demonstrated an increase (or decrease) in skin temperatures, changes in blood sugar, white blood cell counts, blood pressure, heart and breathing rates, thyroid secretion, and brain wave patterns. . . . Autogenic training has been used in coordination with standard drug and surgical procedures in Europe to treat a broad range of diseases including ulcers, gastritis, gall bladder attacks, irritative colon, hemorrhoids, constipation, obesity, heart attack, angina, high blood pressure, headaches, asthma, diabetes, thyroid disease, arthritis and low back pain, among others.”

Dr. Carl Simonton, who is director of cancer therapy at Gladman Memorial Hospital in Oakland, California, and his wife, Stephanie Simonton, have been receiving acclaim lately for their amazing results in inducing what have been called “spontaneous remissions” in cancer by using techniques of meditation and attitude adjustment based on visualization.

The patient is instructed to picture his or her cancer and to imagine the immune mechanism working the way it is supposed to, picking up the dead and dying cells.

“Patients are asked to visualize the army of white blood cells coming in, swarming over the cancer, and carrying off the malignant cells. . . . These white cells then break down the malignant cells, which are then flushed out of the body.

“. . . The cancers may be imagined in the form of animals, snakes, armies, non-objective force-fields, whatever seems to have meaning in a particular patient.” The Simontons also use photos of cells, photos of cancers, X ray photos of the person’s own cancer to aid the process of imaging and at some point they ask patients to visualize themselves totally well.

Critics of the Simontons’ success statistics like to argue that it is not the visualizations themselves which have produced the results, but rather the belief in them, the placebo effect. But, of course, this is an absurd criticism, because the belief in the cure is itself likely to come in the form of a visualization of the healthy body. In either event, it is the image that effects the cure.

The Samuelses’ book is an amazing and fascinating work. They quote from virtually every religious discipline, every healing system in the history of the world about which any evidence exists. They quote from Sufis, Hindus, Gnostics, Rosicrucians, and Indians as well as from Christian and Hebrew texts. They quote from dozens of psychotherapies and nearly as many medical systems. They quote from artists about inspiration, scientists about “flashes of insight” (Einstein said that his relativity theory popped into his mind at a moment when he was imagining himself being carried along standing on a beam of light), but there are two notable absences from their work. They do not discuss the role of image emulation and they never once mention television.

Image Emulation: Are We All Taped Replays?

A few years ago, when my kids were six and seven respectively, they asked to see
The Towering Inferno.
I took them and a six-year-old friend of theirs, Veva Edelson, to see it. When we returned home, I heard the three of them playing in the next room and wrote down what they were saying. Here is a portion of it.