Psycho-Immunology: Patient Heal Thyself.
The title alone gave it away--rats could be trained to make their immune system respond.
"No way, Pete!" I shouted skeptically over the phone, but nonetheless eager to hear more.
"Oh yeah, it's true!" Pete yelled excitedly, "I didn't believe it either. But I kept reading and reading. I went over this with a fine tooth comb...wait'll hear what they did."
Rats have a keen sense of taste and prefer mildly sweet water, they also don't like water made bitter with quinine, but will drink it they have to. These two flavors, sweet and bitter, were used as discrimination cues. For some rats sweet water made them sick because it was radioactive, for others it was the bitter water that was contaminated.
After ingestion of the water the rats became very sick and their immune systems reacted appropriately. (That the invader was radiation and not a typical pathogen, e.g., bacteria, is irrelevant--the immune system still tries to fight the disease and its increased activity can be measured by a change in ratios and amounts of different types of white cells and increases in serum levels of certain proteins.) Eventually the rats recovered to normal health, although the illness was lengthy.
The test of whether rats learn to augment their immunoresposiveness came when the recovered rats were again given water with the same flavor the once made them sick--this time, the water had no radiation, it was safe. nevertheless, the rats showed the immune responses they had shown upon their initial exposure to the radiated water. The conclusion was that the brain had learned that a specific flavor heralded illness and, moreover, as a result, signaled the immune system to get to work.
As a result of Peter's phone call and his exuberance, I paid close attention thereafter to the releases of new research in the literature having anything to do psychology and autonomic responses. I never found one that was exactly like that described to me by Peter, maybe the research proposal was not funded--I don't know.
In 1975, however, there it was: the research that formally established psychoneuroimmunology (PNI) was a now-famous report by Robert Ader of learned Psycho-Immunology using Pavlovian conditioning in rats.
Recall that in the Classical or Pavlovian conditioning, dogs were given food (e.g., meat powder) immediately after a bell was rung. The biologically salient stimulus, food, caused the dogs to salivate. The neutral stimulus was the bell's
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