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suddenly become immediate and loud in a litany of threatening thoughts that hooked and persisted through sleepless nights. They taught me to see genuinely the delicate beauty of flowers and to know in my stomach that some forms of sadness felt hollow like homesickness. In medical school I found that that many of them were the clinic patients, women and men, with unusual sensitivity to chemical odors, think Gulf War Syndrome, and fibromyalgia, which I heard as unusually sensitive awareness of normal sensory information about posture and position coming in from the bones and muscles of the body but experienced as pain. This background of odorific and somatic information is usually repressed from consciousness by the rest of us. Their medical histories contained detailed accounts about how each of their organs was feeling at the time, sensations that the textbooks say we are incapable of consciously knowing. Internists and psychiatrists often dismissed their accounts as signs of somatoform disorder, psychological conflicts expressed in the language of body feelings.

In the psychophysiological laboratory, I learned these brains tended not to habituate. Each of a series of noises continued to elicit startle responses that could be picked up in brain wave recordings or in the running record of a psychophysiological, lie detector, machine. In psychoanalytic training, I learned that these brains remembered their dreams more richly than the rest of us and that treatment with over twice a week analytic sessions was potentially dangerous. The psychoanalytical situation-engendered fantasies and feelings could get too strong and exaggerated, too real.

Professor Iris Bell of University of Arizona’s Alternative Medicine Research Program has, studying these brains, found slower reaction times, defects in divided attention psychological tasks, longer latencies to the first dream, and unusual patterns of odor reception called cacosmia or dysosmia. Using brain wave and cardiac interbeat interval data as markers, Bell reports the increase in the amount of alpha awake brain waves and decreases in cardiac interbeat interval variation associated with increasing sensitivity, rather than habituation, with repeated exposure to a variety of smells over time.

In spite of these brains usually requiring what is known as high maintenance

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