Excerpts from http://www.ernestrossi.com/ernestrossi/keypapers/The%20Deep%20Psychobiology%20of%20Psychotherapy.pdf
How is it possible for thoughts, emotions, imagination and personal experience to influence physical health and vica versa? We know that our genes are expressed in our behavior, for example,but to what extent can we have a “psychobiological dialogue” with our genes to modulate how their information is expressed in self-creation and the process of physical healing?
the psychological experience of novelty and enriched environments was encoded as new memory and learning in the organic structure of the brain on a molecular level.
Yoga, Zen, spiritual and meditative exercises may likewise interrupt habitual associations and introduce a momentary void in awareness. In that fraction of a second when the habitual contents of awareness are knocked out there is a chance for pure awareness and an experience of new awareness or heightened consciousness. This fraction of a second may be experienced as a mystic state, satori, a peak experience or an altered state of consciousness.
The new that appears in creative moments is the basic unit of original thought and insight as well as personality transformation. Experiencing creative moments is the phenomenological correlate of a critical change in the molecular structure of proteins within the brain associated with the creation of new cell assemblies, memory and learning.
A major class of genes, sometimes called, “Immediate-Early Genes,” (also called “Primary Response Genes” or“Third Messengers”) are continuously active in responding to the hormonal messenger molecules signaling the need for creative adaptation to important changes in the environment. Everything from novelty, shock, surprise, touch, sexual stimuli, maternal behavior and psychosocial stress to temperature, food, physical trauma and toxins in the environment can be signaled to the genes via the hormonal messenger molecules that arrive from the limbic-hypothalamic-pituitary system (Merchant, 1965). Immediate-early genes (IEGs) are the newly discovered mediators between nature and nurture. Immediate-early genes act as information transducers allowing signals from the external environment to regulate genes within the internal matrix of the nucleus of life itself. Many researchers now believe that memories along with new experiences are encoded in the central nervous system by changes in the structure and formation of new proteins within the synapses between neurons (Eriksson et al., 1998). IEGs function as transcription factors regulating the “housekeeping genes” that make the proteins within the neuron that encode new memory and learning (Tölle et al., 1995).
When memory is encoded under conditions of high emotional arousal, novelty, sex, stress or trauma, it tends to become state dependent or statebound to that psychobiological condition. Memory and learning is state dependent on the original psychobiological conditions when it was first encoded. This state-dependent memory becomes dissociated or apparently "lost" after the person apparently recovers when the stress or sexual hormones are metabolized and return to normal levels. Reactivating stress or sex in another context, however, has a tendency to reestablishes the original encoding condition with varying degrees of emotion and memory of the trauma.
It appears as if nature has built in a natural but flexible and highly adaptive ultradian rhythm of activity, rest and healing, the “work cycle of life” mentioned above,every 90-120 minutes.
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