The Latest Wound Healing Research is Evidence Against Materialism

Image credits belong to: Greg Rakozy (@grakozy) | Unsplash Photo Community

“In Him we live and move and have our being.” ~ Acts 17:28

The connections between the subjective aspects of the mind and the solid states of the body are hotly debated within materialism (i.e., mental states are the results of material interactions) and consciousness studies.

It seems to me that some or many materialists may be able to reconcile their non-spiritual philosophy of mind (an emergent property of physical processes) with the reciprocal influences of the mind on the body and the body on the mind. As a non-materialist, I am unpersuaded by that, because I find the materialistic paradigm to be greatly challenged by the research into the psychological influences on persistent pain, emotion, physical well-being, and the placebo effect (i.e., symptomatic improvements prompted by belief in a treatment that involves no active ingredients). 

One of the latest examples is a study published by Nature in December 2023, involving the theory of mind-body unity. A “standardized procedure” was obeyed in the analysis of people who were mildly wounded by the use of cups on a small area of skin. Negative pressure was applied to the skin, blood vessels were enlarged, and blood flow was increased to bruise the skin. 

People participated in this for 10 to 14 days while healing was measured across three conditions. 28 minutes was the clock time measured consistently across all three conditions. But the perceived time varied across all conditions. 

Those who believed that time passed slowly, in fact perceived 14 minutes to have passed. Those who believed that time passed at a normal pace, in fact perceived 28 minutes to have passed. Those who believed that time passed quickly, in fact perceived 56 minutes to have passed. 

Normal clock time was used as the unchanging reference point that could be compared to any changes that were made, testing for real effects. There were 3 lab sessions. During the first, the cup was used on the upper part of the non-preferred forearm. During the second, the cup was used on the middle area of the forearm. During the third, the cup was used on the lower part of the forearm. 

The Harvard Institutional Review Board Committee on the Use of Human Subjects was responsible for evaluating and authorizing the research methods. 

Participants were asked to do “at-home exercises” in addition to the lab sessions. This involved applying the cup on the forearm and squeezing a vacuum pump 5 times, followed by a 30-second wait before removing the cup, taking a photograph, and completing a survey. Then, the participants would wait for 30 minutes before repeating the same procedure that was also done during the 3 lab sessions. 

The exercises were designed to condition the participants to anticipate recovery within a 30-minute time span that was roughly close to the 28-minute period of observed healing during their 3 lab sessions.

Participants were asked to rate the intensity and discoloration of the disfigurement of the skin. They were requested to evaluate their amount of healing, happiness, unease, and stress based on a 6-point Likert scale, which consisted of questionnaires with responses ranging between “strongly disagree” and “strongly agree.” 

The authors Peter Aungle and Ellen Langer reported:

“These results support the hypothesis that the effect of time on physical healing is directly affected by one’s psychological experience of time, independent of the actual elapsed time.”    

Compared to the slow time condition, healing in the normal time condition was noticeably greater. Compared to the normal time and slow time conditions, the fast time condition involved more healing. This occurred in spite of the consistent 28-minute elapsed time during all three conditions.

A “wisdom of crowds” approach was used to fairly evaluate healing. The wisdom of crowds approach involves the use of the combined viewpoints of a group of people with diverse backgrounds, knowledge, and perspectives, who made their judgments of the topic without influence from peers. This approach offers a particular insight distinguished as more accurate than the insight of a single member of a group. 

25 master workers on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk were recruited in the wisdom of crowds approach. Amazon’s MTurk master workers are a class of people perceived to have exceptional accuracy and efficiency in completing tasks. They were used for swift data gathering at low-cost for this study. They rated the amount of healing based on comparison of the second photos taken during each lab session with the first photo taken. According to the Amazon MTurk master workers’ ratings, more than a third of participants had almost completely healed in the 56-minute fast time condition, which doubled above the number of healed participants in the 14-minute slow time condition. 

The marriage between the measurable effect of time and the psychological experience of time has an impact on physical healing that flies in the face of traditional/standard medical thinking. This moves the researchers to inspire other professionals to further explore the impact of bidirectional mind-body influences on well-being and health. 

Evidence is building in defense of “abstract psychological precepts” impacting our perception of time and physical health. “Abstract psychological precepts” are the terms used by the researchers to describe the phenomenon, which, to me, appears to be very mindful and not fitting nicely into a bottom-up materialistic model of the mind emerging from the workings of non-qualitative, mindless mechanics and blind determinism. 

Two other studies from their lab seem to corroborate this.  

In one study, 47 participants with type 2 diabetes mellitus were randomly placed in one of the fast, normal, and slow conditions. They were asked to play video games for 90 minutes and switch games every 15 minutes as a way to check the transition of time. They recorded their blood glucose levels (BGLs) prior to and after every meal for one week. The fast condition involved running a timer at 2 x in real time and the slow condition involved running a timer at 0.5 x in real time, resulting in a greater decrease of BGLs among those who believed more time passed and a lesser decrease among those who did not believe the same. 

The other study used electroencephalography (EEG) and psychomotor vigilance tests to measure memory recall in response to perceived sleep versus actual sleep. Sixteen healthy participants slept for 8 hours on the first night and 5 hours on the second night. A manipulated clock was used while randomly assigning some participants to a group that was made to believe they got 8 hours of sleep while the other group was made to believe they got 5 hours of sleep. It was revealed that the participants could have better reaction time and better cognitive performance when believing they had more hours of sleep than they actually got. According to the EEG data, fluctuations in delta power during wakefulness occurred alongside perceived sleep duration.  

Now back to “abstract psychological precepts.” 

The term “abstract” refers to what is conceptual, such as love, justice, or time, instead of what is concrete or tangible. “Precept” refers to a fundamental guideline for behavior and belief. Such terms characterize a conscious process instead of an unconscious process, implying further that consciousness, and not matter, is fundamental to reality.  

Consciousness that is fundamental to reality seems to be a fancy or indirect way of saying there is an omnipresent conscious mind working behind our human minds, and furthermore, behind the universe. This parallels Acts 17:28 that says, “In Him we live and move and have our being.” 

Consciousness that is fundamental to reality or existence may parallel the words of German American Christian philosopher, Paul Tillich, who said that God is the “ground of being” itself. Such a statement may appeal to existentialists wanting to avoid anthropomorphic depictions of God.

Although existentialism is more allied with atheism than Christianity, God's self-identification as “I am” spoken to Moses at the burning bush (Exodus 3:14-15) can easily have an existential interpretation related to Yahweh's explanation of self-existence or aseity, which is an understanding dating back to the Greek translation of the Pentateuch in the 3rd Century B.C.

The “eternally self-existent Being who always was and always will be” seems consistent with Yahweh's words to Moses: “This is my name forever, the name you shall call me from generation to generation.”

The author of this blog post is Matthew Sabatine, who was born in the United States and raised as a Christian but left the faith in his early twenties. He returned to the faith midway through 2022. Matthew has some experience in the mental health field as a direct support professional, caring for people with intellectual and development disabilities and people who were in long-term residency/rehabilitation programs. Though Matthew has no formal undergraduate or graduate degree, he has experience co-facilitating therapy groups under the supervision of licensed counselors. Matthew currently works in sales/marketing by day and blogs on his free time at night.

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