It was discovered that the human mind has not been too well credited for its actual ability. Rather than a weak and capricious organ, it was found to be inherently capable of amazing strength and stamina and that one of its primary purposes was to be right and always right. The normal mind can be restored to the optimum mind rather easily, but that is again beside the point.

The focus of infection of mental and psychosomatic ills was discovered in a hidden but relatively accessible place. During moments when the conscious mind (Dianetically, the analytical mind) is suspended in operation—by injury, anesthesia, illness such as delirium—there is a more fundamental level still in operation, still recording. Anything said to a man when he is unconscious from pain or shock is registered in its entirety. It then operates, on the return of consciousness, as a posthypnotic suggestion, with the additional menace of holding in the body the pain of the incident. The content of the moment or period of unconsciousness is called, Dianetically, a comanome² (Greek—“unconscious law“). The words contained in the comanome are like commands, hidden but powerful when restimulated by an analogous situation in later life. The pain in the comanome becomes the psychosomatic illness. Any perceptic in the comanome is capable of reviving some of the strength of that comanome when it is observed in the environment. The comanome so planted in the mind has its content of perceptics—smell, sound, sight, tactile, organic sensations. It has them in a precise order. The comanome can be played off like a drama when awake life perceptics restimulate it. Which is to say that for every perceptic in the comanome there are a variety of equivalents in awake environment. A man becomes weary, sees one or more of the perceptics in his surroundings and becomes subject to the comanome within him.

For example, a man falls into a crevasse and is knocked out. His companions haul him forth. One is angry and comments over the unconscious man that he was always a clumsy fool and that the party would be better off without him. Another member defends the unconscious man, saying he is a good fellow. The unconscious man received a blow on the head in his fall and his arm was slightly injured in the recovery.

After regaining consciousness the injured man has no “memory” of the incident, which is to say, he cannot recall it consciously. The incident may lie dormant and never become active. But, for our example, the man who criticized him one day says, at the moment when the formerly injured man is weary, that somebody is a clumsy fool. Unreasonably, the formerly injured man will become intensely antagonistic. He will also feel an unreasonable friendship for the man who spoke up for him. Now the comanome is “keyed in” or has become a part of the subject’s “behavior pattern.” The next time the injured man is on ice, the sight of it makes his head ache and his arm hurt in dwindling ratio to how tired he gets. Further, he may pick up a chronic headache or arthritis in his arm, the injuries being continually restimulated by such things as the smell of his parka, the presence of the other members, etc., etc.

That is a comanome at work. How far it is capable of reducing a man’s efficiency is a matter of many an explorer’s log. A case of malaria can be restimulated. A man has malaria in a certain environment. Now having had it he becomes far more susceptible to malaria psychosomatically in that same environment and with those people who tended him. He can become a serious drag on the party, for each new slight touch restimulates the old one and what should have been a mild case is a highly painful one, being the first case of malaria plus all the subsequent cases. Malaria is a bug. As a bug it can be handled. As a comanome it will defy cure, for there is no Atabrine for comanomes short of their removal.

2 comanomes were later called engrams.