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I was thinking about two blog postings, one about the effect of placebos and the other about “mind over matter” and overcoming different levels of pain, simply by telling yourself it doesn’t hurt all that bad.  While I truly believe in these two phenomena, because I have experienced it myself, and seen it around me, I began to wonder about just how powerful the mind can be, and I got stuck on one thought: if the brain can overcome severe pain, or help to heal the body just because it thinks that is what should be happening due to medication that is in fact a placebo, why can’t it seem to fix itself? Thinking about people with quadriplegia or any other kind of neurological disorder, or even mental disorders and disabilities, part of me wondered why the mind cannot fix these things as well.  A more scientific part of me says that of course that’s impossible, if a person severs their spinal cord, the brain has no way of overcoming that obstacle, and my rational self understands this fact.  But still, since we are nowhere near discovering the limits of the human brain (mind?), a more whimsical and philosophical part of me wonders just how much the brain/mind is capable of, and we just don’t know it yet.