I do tend to latch on to things and get enthused. My latest fixation is a blog called This Gives Me Hope by Cathryn Wellner. She is a woman determined to locate 1001 things that, well, give her hope, and then to tell me and you about them.

Thing #585 doesn’t sound terribly hopeful at first. Cathryn had a friend tell her that folks with multiple personality disorders sometimes have better or worse eyesight depending on which personality is in charge. That seems odd. She did further research and [I quote directly from Ms. Wellner’s wonderful blog]

“Her comment about visual acuity and MPD sent me on a search. PubMed has a link to research that appeared in the 1996 Journal of the American Optometric Association. The New York Times still has a copy of a 1988 article online that says, in part:

For more than a century clinicians have occasionally reported isolated cases of dramatic biological changes in people with multiple personalities as they switched from one to another. These include the abrupt appearance and disappearance of rashes, welts, scars and other tissue wounds; switches in handwriting and handedness; epilepsy, allergies and color blindness that strike only when a given personality is in control of the body.”

The very idea of rashes, welts and scars appearing at the mere behest of the personality currently in charge has an almost eerie feel of demonic possession to it, until you think about it more. What this tells us is that the human mind is a powerful thing, certainly in terms of the control it wields over the body to which it is connected .

In my novel x0, I join countless others in postulating that our minds are capable of far more than we generally acknowledge. A brain that can create a scar can also reduce one. If a rash can be created, a rash can be eliminated. And so on. If you think about it, there is tremendous hope in this message.

The wonderful poster above is from the Facebook page of Raising Ecstasy, and it makes me wonder if what weighs us down the most is often the negative thoughts that we foist upon ourselves. Thanks Ms. Wellner for passing along the hopeful message that  research and observation support the theory that each one of us is in charge of our own bodies, and we can do far more good for ourselves than we realize.