It is just nonsense, a poor metaphor for what you are actually supposed to do because there are no real words to describe how exactly it works. You can have some limited control over the lower responses of your nervous system, e.g. tell it that it should deal with infection or that it should rather digest and rest than be alert and fight. This is all you can do, with a certain kind of intelligence to it instead of just blind physical responses (i.e. you know you caught the flu but your immune system is not really triggered yet you could possibly speed it up by increasing sensitivity - with either external tools or power of will so to speak). You can train this by simply trial and error over the decades. It is just like you can learn to move your hands or wiggle individual toes given enough practice, just that you never really get the practice with this and no unambigious simple feedback about what happens. But it is not like your body has the ability to e.g. heal specifically a cut on your arm and nothing else, or to fight cancer cells specifically unless by freak chance they somehow fit into the scheme that your immune system or whatever physical inevitability is naturally able to respond to. All you have is your immune system and regenerative factors and those work pretty well by themselves usually, unless we fight against their normal operation (e.g. by ignorantly pushing ourselves to go to work instead of staying in bed - which is really the main culprit here who is making you more sick: your consciousness).
Also there are psychological tricks so to speak, opposed to directly taking influence. E.g. being emotionally exited simply releases noradrenaline and being asleep or (for those who can) experiencing ASMR increases vasodilation and decreases metabolism. This is how you could additionally control your heart rate. Similarly perhaps if you seriously imagine yourself to be in a filthy disgusting environment it might increase immune response (or you actually do something you perceive as dirty and disease promoting, but which actually is not, like licking the toilet seat)? I can't confirm this but I suppose whatever caused us evolutionarily to experience disgust could very well share this causal connection. I can assure you that no more complicated interactions between "body and mind" exist than this. We are simply not evolved enough and intelligence is a bit too recent for some functionality that would allow "imagine body part healing -> body part heals". Just not how it works.
Edited by Aolministrator, 11 November 2014 - 11:16 AM.
