The Hindu Business Line : It is all in the mind... or is it?

Chennai March 8 There is a question in one of the Upanishads. `They say the eye is the organ of sight; and the ear the organ of hearing? So how is it that when the mind is otherwise occupied, the eye sees not, the ear hears not?'

A good question. And a useful one. For distracting the aggrieved. Or pacifying the anxious or fearful; by keeping them otherwise occupied, whether this serves any purpose or not.

But the story did not begin with that Upanishad, and it certainly does not end there. In his mini-bestseller, Phantoms in the Brain the US-based neurologist V.S. Ramachandran tells the story about a man who came to him complaining of a pain in his arm; a man who HAD no arm. It had been amputated months ago. But the nerves in the brain relating to that arm were still in place!

Puzzled over this curious case, Dr. Ramachandran got the idea of treating his patient by making him stand him in front of a mirror whenever he was in pain.

Gradually the treatment had the desired effect.

But the ending is not always a happy one. In one of Thomas Hardy's delightful stories, he tells of a doctor working on his experiments late into the night, in his little cottage in a deep forest.

A knock on his door. He has a patient. Seems there is an old man in a nearby village who suffers from a morbid anxiety. When a dying tree outside his window dies, he says, so will he. The intensity of the old man's belief distresses his relatives. His property is `entailed'. On his death, it will revert to the person who had given it to him for use during his lifetime. His near and dear ones will then be left without a roof over their head.

The young doctor agrees to visit, fascinated by the oddity of the case; and by the charms of the old man's young daughter who had been sent to summon him.

A little bit of hemming and hawing beside the old man's bed, and he had it all worked out. Turning to the daughter, he requested her to wait till the old man was asleep and then draw the curtains. No lamp was lit in the doctor's cottage that night. He was away, outside the old man's window, quietly sawing away what was left of the decrepit tree.

He walked into the house the next morning and, pausing only to smile at the lovely lass, went rapidly upstairs. Finding the old man awake, he went to the window, and drew the curtains apart with a grand flourish.

Look, he exclaimed. The tree is dead, but you are still very much alive. He was right, but only momentarily. The next moment the old man gasped, "Oh, my God, its gone." And then he too passed away.