Wired for Health

Made by Serif

UPstream Healthcare Ltd

Director: Dr Chris Manning

"Wired for Health"

Many healthcare systems still design and deliver services that are based on the time-expired ideas and models derived from the 17th-century French philosopher Descartes. His notion was that our minds and bodies are essentially separate, with any two-way communication between the two taking place via the pineal gland.

Professor Stephen Pinker says that "mind is one of the things that the brain does" and many authorities now talk about ‘the brainmind’, rather than use the terms 'mind' and 'brain' separately. It is also now clear from much research that there are millions of structures and functions within our bodies that 'mind' us - starting with the complex genetic sequences in our DNA that code for basic physical processes and build through to higher level structures and their attendant functions and interactions.

Such functions and interactions include for example: a cell's ability to divide; all the biochemical processes that regulate themselves within those cells; the body's ability to heal after injury; our immune systems and their constant patrolling for invading organisms or potentially damaging cancer cells; the massively complex nervous systems and hormonal mechanisms that ensure our various bodily processes run smoothly.

We don't even have to think about any of these processes, which is just as well, since controlling these billions of processes at conscious level would render our lives impossible.

So much more is now known about how people 'tick'; however, the widespread use of the terms 'mental' and 'physical' to describe our various bodily functions still perpetuate the idea that mental functions are not produced by physical processes and that our mental and physical functions are disconnected from each other. Such ideas are directly derived from hundreds of years of practised thinking based on the notion of Descartes that the mind is separate from the body and the 'physical' from the 'mental'.