Hacker News Reader

Just to add some context about how extreme psychosomatic stuff can be, one of my friends experienced significant pain at seemingly random parts of his body throughout college, and almost dropped out because it interfered do strongly with his studies. He had physical bruising, which I saw. We did an internship as a team one year, because we had similar interests and I could “be the hands”. It was a long arduous saga. Turns out it was all in his head, he has to just ignore it and convince himself it wasn’t real. He still has occasional pains that he is very suspicious of, it’s very hard to tell when he’s really unwell or his mind is just tricking him.

Another example/generalization of this is the opposite of the placebo effect, the nocebo. [1] A person is able to suffer real and measurable effects, up to and including death, based on their belief and expectation of such effects. A well studied example of this is in terminal cancer where patients will die of no clear cause long before the cancer, or any other related effect, could have killed them. The mind is extremely powerful.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nocebo

A commonly disregarded possibility is that it is self-inflicted while asleep: https://sleep.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s41606-019-...

Yes exactly my point - I'm not sure what it was that caused these experiences. I fully believe that he experienced them and they're affecting him, though. I also believe him when he says they were external.