We still don’t understand the extend of the mind’s power over the body, nor do we understand why there should be such power. All we can say for certain is that the mind does have power over the body in very many different ways. If a man is told that he is at the North Pole and he believe what he is told, he’ll show physical signs which suggest that his body is reacting as though he were at the North Pole. He’ll go pale and shiver. If a hay fever sufferer is shown a photograph of the sort of plant to which he is allergic, he’ll sneeze. When the film Lawrence of Arabia was shown, cinema managers around the world reported that the sales of ice cream rocketed. The endless desert scenes bad made the patrons fee uncomfortably hot. Hypnotists use the power of the mind over the body in order to exert their influence. The hypnotist must only convince the patient that something is true, and the patient will act accordingly. If he convinces the patient that his arms are as heavy as lead, then the patient will be unable to life his arms. If he convinces the patient that a piece of ice is a red hot poker and he then touches the patient’s skin with the ice, a blister will develop. The body will react to the suggestion and not to the reality, and signs of a genuine burn will appear.problem is even more difficult with spoken language because of background noise and people’s tendency to use ungrammatical sentences. Unlike other translators, Verbmobil-which is the product of a $94-million research program-doesn’t filter out background noise. Instead it tries to make sense of it, discardingwords that don’t fit. The translation often arrives back in a kind of pidgin language, but people still understand. Developer Wolfgang Wahlster from the artificial-intelligence research institute DFKI in Saarbrucken, Germany, expects the service to be commercially available within five years. Instantaneous translations of long phone conversations will take up to 10 years. He says early tests have shown the system is 90% accurate and quick. The delay in translation is no more than a few milliseconds. Anything to get food on the table a little faster.