Can belief kill? - Exploring the mind-body connection

Written by Robin Marie in News, Opinion, Review, Science at September 29, 2011

Several years ago, I was dozing in and out of an afternoon nap in the back of my car. While chatting away with the endless dialogue that often typifies my dream experience, I realized that my eyes were open, and I could see my arm and my hand and the back of the front seat in front of me. I tried to move – but nothing happened. I tried again, and yet I remained unable to budge. It felt as though I was trapped inside a rock.

My first thought was that I was dying. For a brief moment this seemed like a mere interesting observation, “Huh, maybe I’m dead” but then as the seconds ticked away my inability to move started to build up panic inside me. Finally, I focused all my energy on being able to move and in one final push, was able to suddenly burst awake, sitting straight up. That was my first experience with sleep paralysis.

Visitations from witches are another traditional interpretation of sleep paralysis.

Anyone who has experienced sleep paralysis knows it is a deeply terrifying experience, especially the first time it happens. However, once I looked up what had happened to me, and learned it is a universal, and perfectly normal, experience, my future encounters with sleep paralysis were not nearly half so bad. True, they were still frightening and frustrating, but at least I could think calmly to myself in the midst of them, “this is sleep paralysis, and it will pass.”

But what if you didn’t know what sleep paralysis was? And even worse, what if the explanation you did have understood sleep paralysis as a visitation from an evil spirit, or a demon? Traditionally, this is how cultures of various stripes have accounted for sleep paralysis – in the Christian tradition it is often known as “the devil sitting on your chest.”[1] Now this is an explanation that is likely to make the experience of sleep paralysis not less, but considerably more horrifying. Indeed, perhaps this could even contribute to your horror so much, that it might actually kill you – that, at least, is the argument of a new book by Shelley Adler, called Sleep Paralysis: Night-mares, Nocebos, and the Mind Body Connection.

Adler looks specifically at a rash of deaths among young Hmong men in the 1980s. The Hmong have a particular explanation for sleep paralysis, believing it to be a visitation from tsog tsuam, an evil being that gets especially active when ancestors are not properly honored. Adler argues that while the Hmong men who died in the 1980s probably all suffered from a genetic heart defect, the additional terror produced by belief in the tsog tsuam pushed them over the edge from sleep paralysis to being, well, frightened to death.

Not surprisingly, many are skeptical of this claim. As Alexis Madrigal of The Atlantic explains, “Results like these seem improbable, or anti-reason, or something.” However, “Adler’s book is an attack on the ‘Oh, come on!’ form of argument,” and I do think it is worth reviewing the evidence in Adler’s book before making up our minds about her argument.

However, I am biased – I believe the mind-body connection is quite considerable, and does not receive the kind of plebian acceptance that the scientific evidence, in my opinion, justifies. But this perhaps has much to do with my own experience – as a high anxiety and just generally highly emotional person, my mind-body connection has always been a little out of control. Excitement, nervousness, sadness and fear all seem to lodge themselves right into my muscle and my bone, and what is causing what is very rarely obscure as the sequence of cause and effect is usually quite clear. So while I am not sure that a belief in the tsog tsuam could kill Hmong men, I do not immediately dismiss it as out of the range of possibility.

However, whether or not the supernatural belief of the Hmong men helped kill them, the issues raised here are fascinating and important. Is there a degree to which belief is self-fulfilling? The tsog tsuam does not exist, of course, but believing that it does can perhaps nonetheless harm those who believe. And once you think about it, human history is full of such examples – experiences and events that we did not know how to interpret and thus ended up living in fear of or, even making worse through our flawed assessment of their causes.

Moreover, the fact that our bodies respond intensely to what our brains are believing is yet another reason not to trust either our bodies or our brains too much – engaged in an endless feedback loop as they are, our bodies and brains are not reliable barometers of what is actually Out There, but extremely subjective interpretations of what we think is Out There. If we can believe ourselves into being frightened to death, it is certainly not very difficult to accept that we believe ourselves into religious and mystical experiences, or that we believe ourselves into remembering that slight shadow we saw in hallway as a fully formed human ghost.

Finally, the story of the Hmong deaths is yet another great example of how different, and yet how similar, we all are. The tsog tsuam is an example of belief interacting with culture - the particular historical context shaping what and how belief arises. And yet, while the story of the tsog tsuam might be particular to the Hmong, cultures across the globe have come up with very similar explanations for sleep paralysis, because everywhere around the globe, human beings are trying to explain this shared biological phenomenon. The fact that until recently, all these cultures felt compelled to come up with a supernatural explanation tells us something about our own nature – and advises us to be skeptical about the interpretations we form in the absence of empirical evidence.