I am sure we have all wished we had true and full control over our own bodies. For example, I may want to tell my skin to just forget about that stuff on poison ivy that drives it so crazy. However, it is probably a good thing our conscience minds do not have full control since we would all be terrible managers (how often do you want to keep reminding your liver to filter your blood).
It struck me that there three categories of varying amount of control that our conscience minds hold over our bodies.
Ones which our conscience brains are pretty much the primary boss. In this group falls most of our movement muscles, eyeball movement, etc.
Ones which pretty much do their own thing, but we have “administrative” privileges to override them to some degree. In this group fall breathing, eyelid blinking, physical elements of arousal, etc.
Ones which our conscience minds have little to no direct control. Heartbeat, digestion, hair growth, swelling, etc. Sometimes these direct our future more than we would appreciate (uncontrollable pain, swelling in the brain).
Here is the factual question. Is there any real name for this in the medical community? Is this idea addressed much or is there much discussion on this?
NOTE: Since this is the Straight Dope, there is always someone itching to come up with exceptions. I’m sure there is some monk in Nepal that says he has control over his heartbeat. I’m not interested in turning this into a Great Debate over what exactly we have control over or not.
This is a complex subject and I don’t know what sort of term you’re looking for or if there is such a term. Conscious and unconscious processes are often intricately connected and the lines a lot blurrier than you think. Biofeedback, while not proven to actually treat pathological conditions, uses what you describe as “administrator” capabilities to manipulate parameters that are not under direct conscious control. Even something like taking slow, deep breaths and trying to consciously relax can reduce heart rate and blood pressure.
A related topic is the relationship between pain and healing. I don’t have a good cite handy, but uncontrolled pain, besides being more likely to lead to long-term pain syndromes, has physiological adverse effects and can increase the risk of certain complications. This is presumably mediated through complex interactions between your CNS, ANS, and endocrine and immune systems. This sort of interface between the conscious world and the seemingly unconscious “medical” world has been researched some but IMO has yet to reach its potential.
On things like heartrate, consider: When you read a particularly exciting book, your heartrate goes up, you sweat, and you exhibit various other such symptoms… But what’s the stimulus? Just squiggles of ink on a piece of paper. Without your conscious mind, those squiggles would be meaningless, and would elicit no particular response at all, but with your consciousness, you do get the response. How could that be, if the conscious mind didn’t have any control over heartrate?
I think the term you are looking for is “voluntary” (although it is not medical jargon, just regular English that doctors, or anyone else, can use). Actions over which we have conscious control are voluntary actions. Things we do without having any conscious control over them (even though, in some cases, they are being controlled from the brain) are involuntary. We also have partial or limited voluntary control over some things we do: this is your second category.
However, eyeball movements definitely belong in the second, and not the first category. Your eyeballs make a saccade (sudden jump) about three times every second, on average. Although it is possible to make such a saccade voluntarily, and to stop oneself from making any major ones for a few seconds, most of them take place without any conscious intention, or awareness that they have happened. Furthermore, even if you consciously try to keep your eyes still (which gets difficult quite quickly), small scale, unconscious movements of various types continue to occur. They are not just random jiggles either. Some of these small scale movements (and maybe all of them) are being controlled, in a purposeful way, by your brain, and make an important contribution to your ability to see. Nevertheless, you are not aware of making them, and you have no conscious, voluntary control over them.
Incidentally, “conscience” means a person’s sense of right and wrong. The word you are intend is either “conscious” (if an adjective) or “consciousness” (if a noun).