How does anything ever get done?

Minds have ideas and minds make plans. Most people intuitively agree that minds, ideas and plans are insubstantial, with no solid physicality (until we act on them).  But how can that action happen? Without any kind of hand, how do minds affect the stuff which makes up the physical world? We can't lift a cup of tea with thought alone, or even warm the water. So how does the decision to jump actually generate the chemical and electrical nerve signals involved in an actual jump by actual legs?

Some evidence seems to suggest that ideas and plans actually follow (if only by a fraction of a second) the action they intend. I find this a bit depressing, because it says that my sense of being a conscious creature with free will is entirely illusory: just a story I tell myself to explain why I've done what I did.

But perhaps the experimenters weren't looking in the right place. They were looking in the brain, the location designated as a safely scientific venue for the mind. But maybe we actually do the thinking with the heart, or the gut, or something else entirely, and only process our decision in the brain. The trouble is that questions of mind shade into spooky and religious territory and is a bit of a dangerous subject for serious scientists.

But mind really does seem to affect body directly, causally and repeatably in the placebo effect. Nobody disbelieves in the placebo effect (where people get genuinely and measurably better in respond to pretend medicines). Even hard-headed pharmaceutical companies fund additional work in every trial to discover how much of the apparent effect is caused by their medicine, and how much is (merely) placebo.

However, as far as I can tell, little serious research is conducted into how placebo operates - although there is a bit of fun dabbling into whether red or blue pretend medicines work better for particular ailments. Instead of being a focus for study of the interface between mind and body, placebo is simply used as a kind of hygenic screen separating the real (ie currently understandable) science from the weirdness, subjectivity and the other inexplicable 'noise' that life imposes over the pure conceptual framework of hard science.

Science serves us well, but few of the remaining questions are more fundamental than how minds  gain real traction on the material world. Surely it's time to risk raising the screen and find out what is really going on. We might even find out how to lift a cup of tea by thought alone.