A systems view of biological health

Section 3: Summary of theory

6 : Summary of the summary

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All Life operates through communication – within itself and with the external world. All these communications have a limited bandwidth due to time frames, modes of communication and interest/attention. Within whatever bandwidth a particular part of Life is operating in, healthy Life is always interested in communicating and being communicated with – something Gordon Pask termed "Amicity".

The body is a living and intelligent organism in its own right, that is "loosely coupled" to the cognitive mind. Loosely so that it can get on with its own important tasks (such as staying alive through homeostasis) whilst the mind can go off and more or less do its own thing.

One important role of the cognitive mind is to calibrate the body to the reality of the present moment, so that it can be most effectively and efficiently adapted.

In order to do that, the cognitive mind has to slow down, come away from its self-preoccupation in thoughts, and attend to both the body ("internal environment") and the immediate "external" environment - at a speed suitable to help the body process new information. This speed is 50-100x slower than the mind’s speed.

This form of inside-outside attending is an evolved means by which the mind and body become more integrated – it is the means by which the mind and body engage in a high quality of mutual Amicity.

Putting it most simply, any event internal or external – be it a thought or memory or something sensed, or a movement / gesture / vocalisation – generates a response. The response usually includes a movement (even if that is so subtle we are unaware of it), but also physiological and emotional changes, along with changes to sensory orientation and activation. These changes can be perceived through "interoception".

Interoception at the speed of the body’s processing is effectively the primary means to Mind ⟺ Body Amicity (or more accurately, mental-mind ⟺ body-mind Amicity).

If Mind-Body Amicity does not take place, and/or the messages coming from the mental-mind are interpreted by the body-mind as indicative of danger (or lack of adequate safety), then the body-mind can never reset and recalibrate itself to the present moment, and so accumulates a large backlog of survival responses. These accumulated adaptations reduce adaptive capacity and therefore take a toll, having a negative and damaging effect on physical health, mental health, relational and societal health, being particularly damaging of the capacity for empathy.

This book describes these processes in more detail and provides relatively simple instructions as to how to re-gain better mental-mind ⟺ body-mind Amicity, and clear the backlog of unnecessary and defunct adaptations – that are now commonly called "trauma".