It was important that I got in touch with a patient to cancel an appointment I had earlier given because I would not be available owing to unforeseen circumstances. My secretary had tried his number but didn’t get through. I decided to try it myself. After two attempts, a voice message came up, “The number you’re dialling does not exist. Please check the number and try again.” I had a look at the number, it was correct. After a few more attempts, I gave up.
Just then, my phone rang. And who was at the other end? The patient I had been trying to call! My number had somehow shown on his handset during my attempts despite the error message relayed to me.”
Why do these things malfunction? I thought to myself. The cell phone is a unique piece of equipment. Information from the cell phone is relayed wirelessly to a central station computer which processes it and relays it, again wirelessly, to its destination which is the handset of the number called.
At one end, millions of people are talking into the air and at the other end, an equal number receiving their calls without any mix up. Tons of documents, books, pictures and videos are carried in air and received specifically at the other end with the pictures and all exactly as in the original. What an amazing engineering feat!
If you find this intriguing, even more intriguing is the brain with its network of one hundred billions of neurons and criss-crossing nerve fibres controlling different areas and organs of the body, interpreting and initiating movement and other actions in the body daily even before you were born!
With the brain, things sometimes go wrong too. Once in a while messages from the eye fail to get to the brain for interpretation. Sometimes, the mind causes the message to be wrongly interpreted and the deductions are different and often stunning. Thus the mind can exert considerable influence over the body.
“You are right,” said my colleague, a mental health physician (psychiatrist) who had been listening quietly to my discourse. “Vision is of prime importance in everyday life. And because most occupations are essentially a combination of visual and cerebral cooperation (visuo-cerebral) it is not surprising that disturbances as a result of the influence of the mind on the body, on account of some mental conflict, are probably more common in the eyes than in any other organ of the body.”
UNGA video: Buhari’s remark was within context ― Presidency
“Do you recall the case of the 21-year-old student nurse who suddenly went blind? She was just about a month away from her final examinations. She woke up one morning and announced that she couldn’t see. Her eyes were normal in all respects and all investigations were normal. She was a good student and everyone was concerned about her plight.
Surprisingly, she showed no signs of anxiety and her attitude could be interpreted thus: “Doctor, I can’t see, period! It is your problem. Do something about it if you can.” Her close friend narrowed down the onset to two days after she had been jilted by her boyfriend. It would appear that her reaction stemmed from this episode.”
“Doc, aren’t you describing malingering again?” asked my lawyer friend. “No. This condition is called hysteria. The similarity between hysteria and malingering is only to the extent of the complaint. The patient with hysterical blindness believes subconsciously that he cannot see.
The mind influences the brain to ignore the message from his eyes. Thus a patient with hysteria is “malingering” on a subconscious level, whereas a malingerer is “malingering” on a conscious level. If you try to poke your finger into the eye of a malingerer without any previous warning, he will blink rapidly and move back quickly away from it whereas a patient with hysteria will not blink at all.
Patients with hysterical blindness are amenable to treatment. The first step is to gain the patient’s confidence and get to the root of the problem. Hysteria is essentially not an eye problem and is better managed by the mental health physicians.
and then