Science of the Magical

From the Holy Grail to Love Potions to Superpowers

Matt Kaplan

• Publisher: Scribner
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781476777139
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Folklore & Mythology
• Index: Social Sciences

"Filled with cool cocktail-party tidbits, Matt Kaplan considers how things that were once the stuff of legends could one day become reality" ( The Atlantic ) in this fun scientific inquiry into the mystical places and magical objects of ancient and contemporary lore—from the fountain of youth, to love potions, to Super Mario's mushrooms. Can migrations of birds foretell our future? Do phases of the moon hold sway over our lives? Are there sacred springs that cure the ill? What is the best way to brew a love potion? How do we create mutant humans who regenerate like Wolverine?"In Science of the Magical, Matt Kaplan takes us on a journey spiced with the wonders of myth, history and art, leavened with impeccable research, endlessly fascinating. And the result is both a compelling read and a deeply thoughtful exploration of the world around us and the ways we seek to understand it" (Deborah Blum, author of The Poisoner's Handbook ). Like Ken Jennings and Mary Roach, Kaplan serves as a friendly armchair guide to the world of the supernatural. From the strengthening powers of Viking mead to the super soldiers in movies such as Captain America, Kaplan explores cultures and time periods to point out that there is often much more to these enduring magical narratives than mere fantasy. Informative and entertaining, Science of the Magical is "a sprightly survey" ( The Wall Street Journal ) and "a joy to read…highly recommended" ( Library Journal, starred review).

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HEALING

Prayers, Sacred Pools, Regeneration, and Holy Eyeliner

The healing power of the Grail is the only thing that can save your father now. It’s time to ask yourself what you believe.

—WALTER DONOVAN, INDIANA JONES AND THE LAST CRUSADE

Entering our bodies, viruses and bacteria multiply rapidly. Our immune systems often take action fast enough to thwart their spread, but sometimes the pathogens get the upper hand and we fall ill. While symptoms vary, they are universally unpleasant. Gastrointestinal infections leave us heaving in the bathroom. Upper-respiratory bugs cause sore throats, blocked-up noses, plugged ears, and hacking coughs. Influenza leaves us sapped of energy, feverish, and racked with pain. Yet we have it rather easy.

Today we have effective tools at our disposal ranging from Tylenol and aspirin to antibiotics and antivirals that allow us to fight back against pathogens. True, bacteria that are resistant to our antibiotics are evolving, and our antivirals are still limited in their effectiveness; but we are far better off now than we were sixty years ago.

Shortly after getting back from the South Pacific at the end of World War II, my grandfather contracted polio. Talk about rotten luck. He’d survived two years of bombs and bullets only to be taken down by a virus just as the vaccine started being distributed. Fortunately, his doctors were able to keep him alive with an iron lung as the paralysis took temporary hold of his respiratory system, but what a horror to know that the virus was spreading with no way to fight it. A couple thousand years ago our ancestors had it even worse.

Centuries ago, humanity not only had few treatments for diseases but also had little idea why people became ill in the first place. Every bout of sickness was scary. While the very young and very old were the most at risk, being in the prime of life did not come with the sense of invulnerability that it does today. With everything from smallpox to tuberculosis running rampant, anyone could die at any time.

The sheer randomness of it all drove frightened people to seek explanations, and this search led to an exploration of the supernatural. We know that ancient populations made sacrifices and prayed to the gods when they sought healing. As unscientific as these actions might seem, they did have a sort of logic.

Seizures baffled our ancestors for centuries. If a patient was seen to be imitating a goat during a seizure by grinding his or her teeth or having convulsions on the right side, it was deemed that Zeus’s mother, Rhea, was responsible for the affliction, and attention was given to the goddess to help alleviate her wrath.^I If a patient passed feces that were thin, like those made by a bird, prayers were made to Apollo, the god of the sun and the skies, where birds fly high.¹ A foaming mouth or frantic kicking of the feet indicated that Ares, the god of war, was behind the seizure. Delirium? No problem. It had to be a spell cast by Hecate, the goddess of sorcery.² The list went on and on.

It is easy to sit back and smile in amusement at the behaviors of our ancestors, but ask yourself, were the Greeks really behaving all that differently from many people today? When I was doing rounds in the emergency room as a trainee emergency medic back in 1998, I heard more than a fair few people say, “I’ll be praying for you,” as their loved ones were wheeled off to the operating room. According to the New Testament, Christ brought sight to the blind, gave movement to those suffering from paralysis, and even cured patients suffering from the disfiguring bacterial disease leprosy.³

Jesus was hardly alone. Dozens of deities in human form and prophets from the Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Hindu, and Buddhist faiths are said to have performed similar deeds. Could there actually be something behind all of this mythology? Can belief or faith have any measurable effects on human health?

THINKING YOURSELF WELL

The link between mind and health is an academic minefield that many researchers, fearing ostracism, have dared not tread. Yet much is worth studying in this murky territory. Best known is the placebo effect, in which the mere belief by a patient that he or she is being treated leads to improvements in health, even if the treatment is nothing more than an injection of saline solution or a tablet of sugar. In the past decade, however, researchers have also studied the relationship between positive emotions and the body.

One study, conducted in 2006, showed that experiencing warm and upbeat emotions resulted in patients experiencing fewer colds.⁴ Another study, conducted in 2007, discovered that such positive feelings were connected to reduced systemwide inflammation.⁵ A 2012 paper even provided evidence that frequent happiness correlated with reduced cardiovascular disease.⁶ The message seemed clear. But were these studies really finding that being happy led to improved health? It seemed prudent to speak with an expert. So I soon found myself sitting in an office at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

“We were curious if these were just correlations,” explained psychologist Barbara Fredrickson, an expert on positive emotions. “Nobody has been sure whether people who were naturally inclined to be happy tended to experience fewer colds, less inflammation, and less heart disease, or if the actual process of being made happy had this effect.” Keen to explore this, she ran an experiment and found that individuals randomly assigned to generate positive emotions reported experiencing fewer headaches and less chest pain, congestion, and overall weakness.

This was interesting, but it didn’t explain why being happy could affect health. “We needed an experiment that accurately measured the ways in which positive emotions were actually altering how the human body functioned,” explained Dr. Fredrickson. With this in mind, she designed a new experiment that concentrated attention on the vagus nerve.

The vagus nerve starts in the brain and runs, via multiple branches, to numerous vital organs.⁷ One of these organs is the heart. Among the vagus nerve’s many jobs is to send signals that tell the heart to slow down when no danger is in the surrounding area. Generally, the vagus nerve is considered to be healthy if the heart rate subtly increases while one breathes in and subtly decreases while one breathes out.⁸ The difference between these two is called the vagal tone. High vagal tones are associated with overall good health and few cardiovascular complications, while low values are linked to inflamed tissues and heart attacks.⁹

Interestingly, those with a high vagal tone were known to be better at keeping their negative feelings from getting overblown than those with a low vagal tone.¹⁰ High vagal tone also seemed to be connected to the presence of more positive emotions overall. Armed with all of this information, the researchers measured the vagal tones of sixty-five participants at the beginning of the nine-week experiment and then divided them into two groups at random. Half were taught a meditation technique known to create feelings of goodwill both toward others and oneself and asked to meditate daily.¹¹ All participants went to a website every evening to rate, on a five-point scale, whether, and how strongly, during the day they felt nine positive emotions, such as hope, joy, and love, and eleven negative ones, including anger, boredom, and disgust.¹² At the end of the experiment, all had their vagal tone measured once more.

While the team was unsurprised to see that positive emotions increased among those participants who meditated, they were surprised that the participants’ vagal tone went up too.¹³ In contrast, emotions and vagal tone remained unchanged in the group that did not meditate.¹⁴ These findings, published in the journal Psychological Science, hinted that something about the feelings of hope, love, and joy was having a physical impact on health.

The findings provided more questions than answers. Beyond vagal tone, what was happening to the study participants at the biochemical and molecular levels? Did all positive emotions have the same biological effects, or were some more powerful than others? Eager to explore these questions more closely, Dr. Fredrickson designed an experiment in collaboration with a team of genomicists led by Steven Cole at the University of California, Los Angeles.

The experiment took aim at the two types of happiness: eudaimonic happiness, which stems from doing virtuous things, such as feeding the hungry, helping the elderly, donating to charity, and just generally being a good person, and hedonic happiness, which is the happiness that one gets from spending a weekend in Las Vegas. Dr. Fredrickson and Dr. Cole wondered if these forms of happiness functioned differently at the biological level.

The researchers asked eighty-four healthy volunteers a series of questions like “How often did you feel satisfied in the past week?” and “How often did you feel that your life had a sense of direction or meaning to it?”^II All participants provided the researchers with twenty-milliliter blood samples, which were analyzed for gene expression.¹⁵ The results were astonishing.

Dr. Fredrickson and Dr. Cole reported in 2013 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that, biologically, the two forms of happiness could not be more different.¹⁶ Participants who scored high on eudaimonic happiness and low on hedonic happiness showed 10 percent greater expression of the genes associated with the production of interferons, proteins that support communication during immune system responses, and a 30 percent greater expression of the genes associated with the production of proteins that defend against pathogens.¹⁷ In contrast, participants who scored high on hedonic happiness and low on eudaimonic happiness showed 20 percent greater expression of inflammation-causing genes in their blood samples and 20 percent less expression of genes associated with the production of proteins that defend against pathogens.¹⁸ To put it more simply, the happiness that arises from being a noble soul brings improved immune system response and better protection against pathogens, while happiness associated with selfish pleasures brings less protection against pathogens and greater inflammation.^III

In fairness, the experiment looked at the gene activity of people who were rather extreme, i.e., very eudaimonic and not very hedonic, or the other way around. For most people, who regularly experience both forms of happiness, it is likely the two effects cancel one another out. It is also theoretically possible that causation runs in the opposite direction, and that people with particular patterns of gene expression are healthier, take a longer-term view of life, and are thus living more noble and charitable lives. Dr. Fredrickson’s research with vagal tone and gene expression in association with happiness was replicated twice in 2015, but more work is still needed to tease such complex questions apart.¹⁹ Nevertheless, it looks increasingly likely that the link between the mind and physical health is more important than we ever realized.

After conducting his many miraculous healings, Jesus Christ often said, “Your faith has healed you.”²⁰ Whether these healing events actually happened is not for me to say. I wasn’t there and am neither a historian nor a theologian. However, I wondered whether there could be a kernel of truth here. Fascinated and unsure, I gave Dr. Fredrickson a call.

“Might there be something real to these biblical stories? Could the act of praying to a god or engaging in some sort of sacred act have actual physiological effects?” I asked.

Dr. Fredrickson sighed quietly on the other end of the line. I could almost hear her mind pondering. She knew my science writing in the Economist well. We’d collaborated on a couple of stories over the years, and she knew I wasn’t going to twist her words into something outlandish. I was bringing up a delicate topic and knew she was choosing her words carefully.

“Taking your last bit of life, directing it toward something socially important, making a pilgrimage, pinning your fate to this fabric of gods and people that was so much larger than yourself . . .” She paused and took a breath. “There wouldn’t have been any instant healing, like what you read about in the myths, but you would expect some real immunological effects from all this deeply meaningful stuff.”

She explained that this relationship between emotion and health is actually encouraging. While our ancestors believed the gods held their lives in their hands, the reverse is the case. “There’s this idea that emotions just rain down on us, but that’s not really true. While some people are genetically predisposed to be negative, they still have the power to make themselves happy and gain health benefits; it just takes them more effort to get there.”

Did our ancestors, while they made their sacrifices and prayed with all their hearts, have any sense that the positive emotions associated with noble, community-directed behaviors played a part in boosting their immune systems? We can’t know that for certain. But the fact that gods, temples, pilgrimages, faith, and laying-on-of-hands rituals have been tightly connected to healing for centuries leads me to suspect that our ancestors were aware of far more than we realize.

PROTECTIVE PIGMENTS

Magical healing was not strictly limited to gaining the attention of the gods through prayer. It sometimes involved other practices, such as a...