A systems view of biological health

Section 1: Theory

1 : Contents

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Theory: Contents

• 2. Health instead of Pathology as a starting point to re-frame human behaviour and physiology
• 3. Boundary and Relationality - Life is complexity, complexity requires division (boundary) - which then implies relationship
• 4. Symbiosis: the body as an ecosystem   
• 5. Life is self referential: relationships extenmd inwards as well as outwards
• 6. Identity as a biological principle
• 7. Function and Form - the interplay between things (anatomy) and processes (mobile interrelationships)
• 8. Pulsations Polarities Rhythms & Gestures: common modes of communication
• 9. Innate survival agendas: how life has optimised itself for survival from its very beginnings
• 10. Adaptation, adaptedness & adaptive capacity: three important inter-related concepts      
• 11. Optimisation of Energy and Structure: a core survival strategy
• 12. Consciousness and Intelligence is not just held the human frontal cortex
• 13. A vast ocean of information: what we could sense if only there were the attentive bandwidth to do it   
• 14. The various timeframes of the present moment: shifts forwards and backwards in time as an intrinsic part of the reality of Living systems      
• 15. The Window of Attention: how much can you keep in your bandwidth of attention at aony one moment (and what happens to everything else)?   
• 16. Meaning making - the universal link between information and response/action   
• 17. The constant flux of calibration: how we (ideally) leave the past behind and attune wholeheartedly to the present
• 18. The Direction of Flow of Meaning
• 19. Predicting the future - the basis of movement
• 20. The two kinds of survival - Plan A (using energy, turning outwards) and Plan B (conserving energy, turning inwards)   
• 21. Left Brain, Right Brain - two very different ways of seeing the world   
• 22. Feedback loops and conversation theory - a fractal hierarchy of selective communication   
• 22a. Semiotics and signs - a little more on how Life communicates with itself   
• 23. The Imaginary and the Imaginal - unpicking yet another cultural confusion
• 24. Expectation and Anticipation determine the first meaning-making
• 25. Gestalts - learning to expect how the world is so that meaning-making is fast
• 25A. Conscious Agents
• 26. Mirror Neurons and the primacy of movement - all meaning-ful response is movement, response is based on meaning-making, therefore meaning equals movement!   
• 27. The asymmetry of safety vs danger - fast to react to (potential) threat, slow to return to safety   
• 28. The 40-second rule - how long it takes for your nervous system to begin to recognise safety
• 29. Internal employees - a few key gestalts in your internal organisation
• 30. Attentive engagement - the reason we have a cognitive mind   
• 31. Loose coupling: organ-isation of the organ-ism by means of modulation of communication   
• 32. Not One, Not Two: nothing can be removed from its environment and also be unchanged   
• 33. Not just biology (q.v. Viktor Frankl)
• 34. The Autonomic Nervous System as a means to an end   
• 35. The Three Compartment Body Plan : our evolutionary inheritance   
• 36. From Shrimps to_Mammals : not a lot of change to the three-compartmnnt body plan!
• 37. Living in the Safe enough zone: safe-enough is as good as it gets
• 38. Emotions of connection
• 39. Normal adaptation: Plan A Plan B: life as a polarity   
• 40. Surviving extremes: Plan A+ and Plan B+   
• 40a. Imprints - and their similarity to Gestalts
• 40b. Fragmentation in a biological setting (... is NOT a set of fragments!)   
• 41. From Mammals to Hominids: our more immediate ancestry
• 42. Conclusion
• 43. Summary