You may be familiar with research showing that highly trained Tibetan monks are able to control their body temperature by using the power of their mind, even to the point they are able to dry wet blankets with their body heat. This was first recorded by Dr. Herbert Benson, one of the world’s leading scientists in mind body medicine who I interviewed for my film The Connection. In the 1980s Dr. Benson showed that meditating monks could increase the temperature of their fingers and toes by as much as 8.3 °C and other researchers have since found similar results.
The findings are an extraordinary demonstration on the complexity of the mind body connection. It indicates that the systems we think of as automatic in our body such as the heart beating or our lungs breathing may be able to be influenced by conscious thought. I suspect it’s been largely overlooked because the intense mental training the monks have undergone would be difficult to apply to ‘real world’ settings…
