“Mind-Body Medicine: An Overview” is one of five background papers on the major areas of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM). The series was prepared as part of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine’s (NCCAM’s) strategic planning efforts for the years 2005 to 2009. These brief reports should not be viewed as comprehensive or definitive reviews. Rather, they are...

A core requirement of human-like intelligent agents is the ability to create and dynamically maintain mental models of other agents. We suggest that such modeling capabilities must extend beyond traditional notions of “mindreading” to include inferring unobservable features of other agents’ bodies and emotions as well. We describe the modeling of agents endowed with a mind, body and emotions wi...

“Mind-Body Medicine: An Overview” is one of five background papers on the major areas of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM). The series was prepared as part of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine’s (NCCAM’s) strategic planning efforts for the years 2005 to 2009. These brief reports should not be viewed as comprehensive or definitive reviews. Rather, they are...

Body and mind are involved in the development of a heart attack. As far as the body is concerned, the analysis of heart activity shows a defective PNS. On a mental level, psychosomatic research has produced hard facts that show that suppressing feelings and depression, social isolation and constant negative stress, accompanied by an exaggerated desire for recognition, all play an important role...

When Fechner (1860/1966) introduced the new transdisciplinary research program of “Psychophysik”, his goal was to present a scientific method of studying the relations between body and mind, or, to put it more precisely, between the physical and phenomenal worlds. The key idea underlying Fechner’s psychophysics was that body and mind are just different reflections of the same reality. From an e...

Insulin can get a bum rap. Although a mainstay of diabetes treatment, when secretion increases in response to a low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet or insulin resistance, insulin has been purported to raise blood pressure, potentiate cardiovascular risk, and, to make matters worse, promote weight gain (1,2). But many in the lay public, popular media, and health care are not aware (or choose not to ...