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SECTION THREE

The biological basis of the adaptive response

During any consultation, most of biology is invisible and must be inferred from appearances, as it has always been. We also examine one another in social situations: mutual interpretation is the basis, after all, of human interaction. Reading facial expression and looking at the skin is not the preserve of the clinician, nor even are the effects of the underlying circulation. Any malformations in the skeleton are immediately apparent to anyone. Before the era of microscopes and blood tests, it was clear to everyone, not only doctors and priests, that causes of illness were obscure, that hidden forces were at play (or at work).

The vision of the unaided anatomical eye was partly distorted by humoral ideas: the facts did not seem to fit the theories appropriately, or perhaps the details of the facts seemed trivial beside the explanatory framework provided by the ancients. Thinking was nobler than looking; anyone could look, but only the genius of Aristotle or Galen or Avicenna could know what they were seeing. Besides, not everyone had human cadavers at their disposal, though Galen was more likely to use animals for dissection than human victims of violence.

Medical training is more focused on human anatomy than on biology. It is this partiality which may distort the bias away from biological notions of health towards medical and cultural ones. However, let us put ourselves in the position faced by physicians in the ancient world whose notion of health was holistic and based upon notions of a balance between forces, impulses and tendencies: the term κρασις survived into the twentieth century in haematology, for example, as “blood dyscrasia”. The word poise that I have chosen to stand for health comes through French from the Latin for weight. A weighing scale is after all called a balance. Yet the subsidiary meanings indicate a resolution of opposing forces or tensions in the sense of a suspended preparedness (and weighing scales are suspended from a fixed point). An obsolete meaning of poise referred to the stabilising weight, or ballast and also to bias and momentum.²⁰ These are all crucial elements to the bioenergetic model of Health as Poise that I will develop in these pages. This model, which ultimately wishes to talk about Human Health, relies upon biological ideas and does not seek to elaborate new categories but perhaps to emphasise old interrelationships and possibly to use old terms in newish ways.

By looking at someone we may have quite an accurate sense of their present state of well–being but however good our interpretation might be, our predictive assessment lacks any certainty (even if we have some history to go on) just because the matrices in solution (or in colloidal suspension) and the metabolic states they drive cannot directly be visualised. Indeed they can never be seen as a whole but only piecemeal and by snapshot. Illness follows from their derangement but it is these unseen structures which most need to be assessed in order to help someone regain and maintain good health. These unseen structures form the basis of the ideas behind the concept of Poise.

Let me now list the Interlocking Ideas upon which the Idea of Poise–as–Health is built; I shall follow this outline with greater detail.

Five crucial interlocking ideas

1. Mindedness

A product of the circularity and recursiveness of Life: the culmination of informatic system processes, mostly self–limiting by negative feedback. The circularity is founded upon a signal and response and the intervention within this circuit by an organisation of the signal (S–O–R).

These circuits are at once the reciprocal source and product of:

2. The interconnected matrices

These are nothing less than the underlying architectural fabrics (most of them in solution) upon which the visible fabric is laid.

3. The trajectory

A Fast–Forward and a Positive Feedback path along which all living beings (along with their Mindedness) travel.

4. Capacitance

The index of our ability to hold a charge and, with it, a reserve of energy.

Capacitance denotes a response of the whole system to the constantly fluctuating condition of the Matrices.

This flux is a constant load upon Capacitance and must be attuned to the Cyclicity of the world. The signals within the matrices are amplified and entrained by circadian rhythms. Adaptation is the overall measure of our success in dealing with the flux to the extent that we escape illness. Illness may in some circumstances operate as a brake upon loss of capacitance.

5. The distribution of energy

(maintenance of an effective ratio between Capacitance and Adaptation)

“Mindedness” is really just a term for biological interdependence. It is entirely energy–dependent. The distribution of energy between operator and reserves is the proximal source of the quality of subjective states in humans (whatever its ultimate nature might be).

The “operator” is notional only: a pointer to the culmination of functions embedded within the mindedness of the matrices. It is not contrived to be an entity in any anatomical sense; it mimics the sense of self that we experience as both certain and elusive at the same time. Psychologically it is an imperative; physiologically it may be a fiction.

1/5: Mindedness

I have come to use the paradoxical term mindedness to express the constant directional oscillations of cellular and multicellular life not because I want to introject a sense of volition to the small scale but rather the opposite: to suggest that the willed or at least seemingly deliberate actions of any multicellular creature are based upon a myriad of stacked connected cellular operations that are contingent upon external conditions and are, at least initially, binary. Later on, I suggest that the biphasic circadian oscillation—within which all living things participate—is coextensive with that structure.

Primitive creatures—amoebae, for example—react and move away from toxic environments towards those that are nutrient–rich. This binary condition of contrasting states is multiplied and multilayered in what I call the matrices that make up complex beings and, though irreversibly shuffled by them, the binary foundation remains intact. It is a very long way from amoebae to the discriminations and movements that we make in our lives between Approach–and–Reward and Avoidance–and–Pain but I would suggest, given the unbroken though divergent thread of evolutionary history, that this fundamental template is conserved. Mathematical modelling in chaos theory shows the deep simplicity that underlies and generates complexity.

By mindedness I mean an outcome and do not want to imply any intention. It is rather a direction: Mind in the conscious sense is not meant at all. If one wanted to overcome the suggestion of teleology, a better term for mindedness might be the biased automaton. I am referring to the assemblage of communicative and reflex arcs within and between living cells and their products that respond to the external world and to the internal milieu that they themselves create. These assemblages of micro-minds are themselves the operators of the arcs of which they are part and also the operators of the assemblage of matrices that hold the assemblage of micro-minds in place. Put another way and consistent with modern biology, the single cell can be viewed as a system of nested information circuits the outputs of which are part of the inputs. The circuits are incorporated into nested matrices unified by an enzyme–substrate matrix and so extends to multicellular tissues and whole organisms. What may look like a hierarchy I would rather want to describe as a unitary organism of stacked recursiveness linked obligatorily with other such organisms. Cellular life, then, is conceived as a system of nested information circuits the outputs of which are part of the inputs; these generate and ramify into more extensive networks or matrices all made possible and unified by the primary “circuits” of the enzyme–substrate matrix. Two further notes could be added here to be amplified later:

1. Inputs to cells, tissues and organs are generated and regulated by circadian rhythms; the output is the trajectory we call Life. (If the trajectory is viewed as a time series of multicellular states, the outcomes are products of the operation of a nested series of micro-minds.)

2. These processes are entirely energy–dependent, some more costly than others. The successive conditions of the management of the economy of the trajectory correlates with subjective states.

Life is taken to be a trajectory from conception to death. Living beings are bordered states which extract energy from the environment and so maintain themselves upon the trajectory. They are able to do this only by virtue of an extensive structure of interrelated and interdependent enzyme complexes. So extraordinary and pervasive is this that some scientists have even questioned whether the complexity of this fundamental matrix of life (even more than that of the nucleotides) could have arisen by natural selection.

The presiding matrix is the catalytic network without which metabolism, the very continuation of life, would be impossible.

This primary or presiding matrix is in effect an informatic loop that permits the primitive binary operation of biological movement: towards and away from. This movement (which may seem to simulate “choice” and “decision”) is the template for the micro-mind: communicative arcs, an assemblage of which responds to the external milieu. Form and function within the living entity are therefore co–constructed as a constellation of matrices. Being and operation are both the product of congregated negative feedback loops within and between the matrices. Mindedness or the biased automaton will culminate at higher levels of order and will manifest as neural circuits and reflex arcs. These in turn will contribute to the matrix that I will later call the thalamic mind. Here we do get a little closer to Mind in the usual sense.

To repeat: the trajectory is generated in and by time. This generator is composed of a few positive feedback loops and is modified and regulated by the four closest astronomical cycles. Inputs are generated and regulated by circadian rhythms; the output is a trajectory we call Life. Generation and discharge is the source of the essential pulsatility of life.

The sequence of human development follows (in common with all living creatures from bacteria and amoebae upwards) this essentially binary operation upon the environment from which the matrices are constructed, first the cellular then the embryonic then the foetal (or their equivalents in other life forms). As the matrices grow in number along with their micro–minds, the binary nature (though conserved) allows for complex summative outcomes which of course are very far from binary, although depolarisation of individual neurones remains “all or nothing”. Life as an attempt to obtain and maintain resources is composed of movement within circuits which are binary at their source. A large number of semi–autonomous centres for driving behaviour profoundly modify the response of the micro-minds to the generator. If I may repeat that in a slightly different way and so connect it with an idea of health: the binary movement of micro–minds as the template for the operational circuit of input/output is the foundation of all biological structure and function except for the generator. The reflex arc is one such outcome and is a prototype of all behavioural adjustments which attempt to resolve the discharge of the charge separation induced by the generator and so confer poise upon the trajectory. The shape of the phase, that is the balance between the signal as stimulus and response or, put another way, the capacity for the response to match the stimulus is the basis for Poise.²¹

Given the number and complexity of the matrices and the multiple operations of the micro–minds, energy must be kept in reserve to face unpredictable changes in the environment, and so deal with flux that is partly predictable and deal with flux which is internal, and also conflict and charge separation between semi–autonomous centres in the brain, in the gut and in the organs. The assemblage of matrices and the structural assemblage of “minds” mutually hold themselves in place. Life is, of course, a distributed system of reciprocal elements; the notion of central controller is one of the fictions of our consciousness. Randomness in the universe, however, saves us from a life of determinism. We live in the gap between extreme randomness and complete determinism.

The continuity of one domain remains completely unresolved: the microbiomes that inhabit our guts and our skin might appear to be discontinuous with our personal genome. Yet it was initiated from our mother's environment at birth and if removed by violent purgation is replaced within a day or two (Haller 2018). Microbial metabolites influence signalling in the gut lumen (ibid.).

2/5: The interconnected matrices

The Matrices do not form a separate idea from Mindedness: rather they are the assemblages of the assemblage at the heart of life. All the ideas in the list of five given at the head of this section are interlocking. Perhaps first I should explain that I make use of the term Matrix whenever a standard physiology textbook might use the word “system”. This conventional usage separates, for the convenience of study, elements which can have no separate existence. As a device, it helps the student focus on details abstracted from the whole, which is useful but tends to diminish the evolutionary integrity of life, and may even promote a diagnostic tendency that favours one “system” or organ over another. In this way a hierarchy of values (and medical careers) tends to dominate the clinical assessment of the patient's situation. In an emergency, this may be desirable or even necessary but in formulating a course of herbal treatment for a chronic condition, it obscures the interconnectedness and evolutionary integrity of the patient's life.²²

Matrix is the only word in current usage that I know which refers both to origin and embeddedness. Originally referring to any generating mammal, it became a synecdoche for the womb. From this root comes mater in Latin and cognate words for mother in other Indo-European languages. It is used in geology to express the seam and its embedded ores. Serving also as an expression of the ground–matter of existence, in mathematics, a Matrix refers to a structured array of values which, once constructed, may generate sub–matrices so that any alteration in one of its cells is reflected everywhere within the common ground that the matrices express. Those who use spreadsheets will recognise at once how embedded operations automatically adjust to changes made elsewhere within the matrices. The understanding that no thing in the universe can truly be independent of the rest (at least in the long run) sits at the basis of both ancient and modern physics. In medical physiology, walling off (e.g., fibrosis) may be a protective resistance of a tissue against invasion or incapacity to preserve life but, of course, that resistance extends itself against therapeutic interventions.

The use of the concept of Matrices rather than the anatomical and physiological systems they produce emphasises the obligatory concurrent existence of both simplicity and complexity as equally self–affirming structures of Life. Negotiating the poise between them ensures that we not be trapped in the one and lost in the other. Herbalists will not need reminding that Matricaria, a remedy they use probably on a daily basis means “beloved mother” from Matrix cara.

If the surface and deep anatomical structures of the body arise from embryonic structures during the course of foetal development and maturation after birth, they can only do so by the gradual extension of the matrices into living tissues. The point that I wish to labour is rather an obvious one: the visible and palpable structures like skin, muscle and bone as well as the hidden viscera that make themselves known to us are co–extensive with other “skeletons” which though invisible—because in solution or enmeshed in colloids—they are quite as material as our skin and bone. It is these matrices that underlie the abstractions studied in physiology and upon these that medicinal plants have their greatest effect.

The deepest matrix is the interpenetrative Catalytic Matrix which pervades and permeates all the others. Without this presiding Matrix of Catalytic Enzymes and their cofactors, little if any biological chemistry could ever take place. Thus enzyme matrices operate both constructively and destructively: both are needed for the organism to continue.

The other interpenetrative Matrix in the human body is the haemopoetic system, including the lymphoid immune system: so important in separating out Self (and yet clinically linked to Separation as I hope to show later). Along with these are the Reciprocal Service Matrices, notably those of the cardiovascular system. It is perhaps the kidney and blood that constrain and restrain the internal environment within normal limits lest energetic ambitions from within threaten to exceed themselves. I list the most salient of these elements in the Table below:

Visible or visible in outline or capable of inspection or palpation
Integument with surface glands	Evidence of the underlying Circulation: from character of pulse & feel and look of blood vessels
Eyes, Tongue & buccal cavity	External Ear & other orifices
Musculature & skeleton a secretory osteo–myotome	The cavities of the Axial Skeleton the principle sites for congestion by way of the operation of Para–Sympathetic nerves; the limbs of the Appendicular Skeleton the principle sites for the operation of the Ortho–Sympathetic Nervous System
Potentially visible on dissection or under high power microscopy
Digestive tube & Adnexial organs
The Splanchnic organs (traditional terminology)	a major part of the homeostatic system esp buffering of pH
Nerves	and supporting tissues
Circulatory and haemopoetic	Blood & lymphatic vessels
Cellular & intercellular	Tissular
Invisible Matrices, some virtual & some developmental Matrices
Pheromonal and other communicative circuits	extra–corporeal via olfactory bulb and limbic system
Inter–cellular colloids & epithelial connections
Intra–cellular (between organelles)	The Families of Cytosolic receptors
Cellular	especially the Ribosomal matrix involving transcription and replication
Limbic & Memorious structures
Neuroendocrine systems
The Proprioceptive or Thalamic “Mind”	All animals know where they are in space
Morphic plates and other zones of differentiation	Germ layers
The Families of Cell–membrane receptors	in spite of appearances, the phospholipid membrane itself represents more of a continuity than a barrier (discussed in Section 4)
Catalytic Enzyme & cofactors	enables and presides over all matrices
	The rate limiters of all other matrices
Genetic limitors and expanders of capacitance	Should perhaps include the genome of our microbiota

The sense of mindedness is that all cells and all tissue is connected not only by the so–named connective tissue but is also permeated and penetrated by the enzymatic matrix and underpinned by the informational matrix encoded in the chromosomes which resonate to the pulsatility of the physical world. Mindedness provides a narrow escape from determinism. It might seem to imply that the enzymatic and other matrices have a purpose. While a sense of purpose contributes to health, as I wish to assert at the level of the psychosocial individual, there is no purpose to mindedness beyond the structural bias at the heart of life. The enzymes do not have “minds of their own” but respond to the demands of the inner and outer environments and, being proteins, necessarily require DNA in the nucleus for their synthesis. The matrices are not teleological entities, but, although they must respond to the random world (and to lucky accidents), they are biased. The random luck is stored if it contributes to survival.

Under all the complexity of the human body, one very simple idea stands out: any change within one matrix will result in adjustments in all the rest. Metabolism expresses the need to change constantly as the organism responds to the inevitability of change. I suggest that we best discuss human health from the point of view of metabolism and, with our clinical and medicinal purpose in mind, need to explore the state of the metabolism of our patients. You want separation from a surgeon and from any processor of materials, whether a cook or a herbalist, but the whole needs to haunt our minds as we dissect out parts of it. Keeping in mind the interconnected and interdependent reality of the matrices helps us avoid emphasis of one aspect over another even though we have little choice temporarily to separate the part from the whole out of a convenience tantamount to necessity. Analysis demands it. We cannot forever talk about the inseparable if we want to explore, but some degree of synthesis is demanded if we are to arrive at an integrated view of health.

The necessity of coherence to poise requires us to conceive health in a unitary (albeit federated) sense if we want to construct one that is founded upon consciousness, upon the subjective sense of well-being. Consciousness strives for a cohesive state and a single identity. The fitting of a conscious state, however fictitious, onto a biological unit must implicate psychosocial phenomena. We are trinitarian as in the original theological sense: as technical and biological beings, we beget an expressive self. As all events are lost to time, memory is our tool to reinvent past events, the better to predict future outcomes and so raise our capacitance. Social memory manifests as culture, a virtual matrix with visible artefacts and hidden relations: pathways to remembered events or imagined ones—they are both much the same thing. There can no more be a gap between all biological phenomena than there can be in the fabric of space-time. Sociality is a derived characteristic and is co–extensive with the matrices. It is easier to formulate borders than control traffic across them.

While no single writer or clinician can hope to have special expertise in all the fields implied, these must remain always in sight for the correct referrals to be made when needed. Ironically, mathematics is the one integrator which excludes most people from the discussion yet possibly the ultimate description requires to be mathematical. The mathematics of non–linear systems demonstrates the self–similarity of living and geophysical systems and shows that separation is both permanent and temporary. This paradox says only that while we cannot retrace our steps along the dimension of time, time does recreate us anew, self–similar to our past.

3/5: Life as trajectory

If mindedness is witness to the inherent bias in biological systems against a sea of random noise and if the sequentiality of day and night reinforces and exhibits as behaviour this binary oscillatory potential (on which summer and winter and other binary sequences may be superimposed), Human Drives complicate (and may obscure) this simple pattern by the emergence of a higher order of duality in the tension between individuation of the psyche and sociality.

From the perspective of a physicist, biology is a foreign territory which has produced very few generalising theories that may be tested in the physical world. From the perspective of a biologist, Human Drives are deemed outside the field of investigation. The social sciences are called soft sciences because their adoption of scientific experimental methods does not generate any hard facts. With the naive enthusiasm of the amateur, I would suggest that, whatever they may be, Human Drives are a function of time. The sequential operation of the physical world, the Time Series, implies a choice of outcomes whether those outcomes are determined or not, predictable or not (and by whom)? Whether Time is a perceptual construct or a real constraint on the physical world, neither psychology nor social sciences consider Time to be their primary province.

Psychological descriptions of Drive, for example those of Freud and his intimate dissidents, Rank, Ferenczi, Adler²³ and Jung, are classifications which have exerted enormous influence on the bias of intellectual and cultural life, if the criterion of influence is that they are not commonly faced with a neutral or indifferent response. Perhaps less well known from this era are the alternative explanations offered by Leopold Szondi and Robert Zajonc or Viktor Frankl's logotherapy.²⁴ Besides their pervasive influence, they have spawned special fields of their own and Freud, especially, has inseminated other disciplines, such as literature and existentialist philosophies.

In their practice and theories, however, they have either avoided excursion into biology or have been hostile to any physicalist discussion of the psyche. Of course it is absurd (and potentially dangerous) to think that animal ethology “explains” human development but it is just as fatuous to think that it illuminates nothing, that biological constants are not amenable to analysis and that the boundaries of disciplines should be guardians of the hard practical work that goes on within. These very boundaries are fertile for the imagination. We may think of speculation as tunnelling into the unknown with the hope that parties from different starting points may meet or at least be within earshot of one another. Perhaps Freud was bored by the routine of the practical science in which he was trained as he became entranced by the drama of clinical practice and the enticements of theoretical speculation.

Before I edge further into self irony, let me make the modest suggestion that if health is primarily about integration, talking about health should not start from a position of demarcation. The three regions of the physical body, the psyche and the person in the sociolinguistic world should of course be distinguished clearly but we cannot speak about health without describing the relations between these three rather than the distinctions to be made between them, distinctions which modern neuroanatomy show to be outdated and unhelpful fictions. The communicative arc between the physical, psychic and social reads like a meta–matrix of the human condition and a prelude to human consciousness itself. If health is an index of coherence, we should try to speak about it as coherently as we can.

Human drives as a function of time

I should like to present a short schedule to express the notion that Human Drives (however we may categorise the behaviours they engender) are a function of time. I aim only to emphasise the dependent link between physics, biology and human psychology as a necessary ground to any discussion of health, even if we cannot and may never be able to “explain” the detail. Delineating the links between human life and the rest of what we seem to know of existence seems to me more important for a discussion of health than permitting these links to be broken out of a fear of crossing boundaries.

• The Physical World in which we live is dominated by proximal astronomical rhythmic events of which our earth is both product and contributor.

• The Living World likewise is dominated by such events, notably the sun and moon and the tides they create on earth, the magnetic and convection forces beneath the earth's mantle and the atmospheric events they create including, most important for biological rhythms, the photosphere. Anything that lives, participates.

• Living beings depend upon a source of energy which they transduce for their own purposes. Biological discussion cannot get far without considering the energy economy of an organism or a system or habitat.

• All living systems are structured at all levels upon a circuit of input, processing and output. In this sense it is useful to say that all living things have a Mind²⁵ of their own, or rather a composite set of minds, though mind is a bad choice of word; perhaps Responder is a little better. This Mind or Responder samples the environment as the environment takes random samples of living structures, responding towards replete areas and away from depleted toxic zones. Light and chemical Nutrients, the sources of material and energy are also sources of information. Mind is a tropism; however blind it might be, its process is a succession of a web of “choices” that are initially binary. If the emphasis on binaries seems simplistic, physics seems to recognise bipolarity in charge and in velocity, in positive and negative, acceleration and deceleration. All without reference to biology. Some derived binary phases will be found in Circadian Binaries & Transition Zones in the following Section 4.

• As tissues evolve and differentiate, the mind becomes distributed, composite and constellate.

• The afferent stimulus and the efferent response create the architecture of mind and are reflected in all the controlling matrices in complex animals: the endocrine feedback loop and the reflex arc in the nervous system provide the clearest examples. Such an arc or loop is modified at points along its path, amplified, diminished or interrupted by negotiation with many other organs and operators. One outcome for the adaptive state, at least in a momentary sense, could be visualised as the height of the step between stimulus and response and the balance between rhythmic and chaotic events, symmetrical and asymmetric responses.²⁶ Whether it could be measured and act as an index of health rather evades the point that health must be construed in time and as a product of time.

• As the physical world operates incessantly in Time, which we perceive as unidirectional, we are constrained, in common with other living systems, to be pushed effectively by a Feed–Forward Generational system.²⁷

• The oscillating nature of the primitive Mind²⁸ is superimposed upon the oscillations of the photosphere. The alternation between night and day is a pilot cycle for all the other dependent cycles. Life is thus intrinsically waveform.

• It follows, then, that Life is polycyclic, phasic, patterned, and sequential. Cellular life is pulsatile and lives on a sea of waves: solar, lunisolar, lunar, tidal, lunitidal.

• The Trajectory of an individual life is a series of responses by “Mind” to the feed-forward of time. However complex and conflicted the “choices” might be, from a meta–view, the set of linked sequential choices leads to outcomes which are essentially binary. Perhaps “turns” might be a better word than either “choices” or “decisions”. Anything to avoid inverted commas, dead leaves on top of trees.

• The Trajectory of a human life is directed ultimately by the sun and the moon and all manner of things under them and is diverted by events both outside themselves and stored within. Randomness in the universe is our only way out of determinism.

• This Line of life, which is also a line of “decisions”/“reckonings” made by our composite Minds must primarily store and utilise energy, create structure and operate as far away as possible from chemical equilibrium. The “rebound” from this displacement from equilibrium is another way of construing the pulse that drives the trajectory. This series of “turns” creates waves in turn.

• Our trajectory is stabilised and protected from the fluctuations in the outside world and from our inner responses by ballast, buffers and shields. Our line of minds must be stable in its own oscillations to face the perturbations from within and without.

• For an energy/information event to provide us with a coherent signal to our proprioceptive sense and to our conscious mind (in the usual sense), we must be in an adequately stabilised and buffered state. If we are not, we will feel ill in some way. The way in which we tend to feel ill depends upon factors that to some extent can be systematised.²⁹

It can be seen from the above that these are ideas without data, without quantities. Drs Duraffourd and Lapraz fully appreciated that their analyses and sets of axioms that formed the neuroendocrine theory of terrain³⁰ had no predictive value and was limited as a clinical tool unless some measurements were brought to bear upon the model. They would insist that to make a measurement of any biological material implies the measurement of a set of relations, the point that I have tried to make in the schedule above. After years of application and research, they devised the Biologie des Fonctions, a mathematical tool to guide prescription and assess treatment outcomes. The Biologie, a most ambitious and remarkable product of great conceptual daring, is a series of algorithms derived from certain numerical values from a set of blood test results obtained from an individual patient. In modern medicine, biochemical measurements are mostly used to ascertain the presence or absence of disease or the inference of metabolic states defined by ranges that have been established by statistical analysis. It provides a binary assessment of each index: within or outside a range. This exclusionary procedure provides the clinician with vital clues in the diagnosis and management of the patient's condition but does not claim to establish an index of health.

4/5: Capacitance

Bounded states ➤ charge separation ➤ energy storage/ ⇒ living entity

Modern physiology has demonstrated that the survival of an organism depends upon homeostasis, but health has always been taken to mean more than survival. Living entities are bounded states constructed of matrices which behave like a connected array of circuits that constitute what I have called the micro-minds but might be better thought of as a biased automaton. These structures hold whether the entity be composed of a single cell, a colony of cells or a multicellular being. The living entity is composed therefore of three interrelated levels of structure; if one is true, the others must be truisms:

The communicative and reflex arcs

An assemblage which is structurally responsive so that it must respond to the external milieu and to internal conditions.

The assemblage of micro-minds

As the operators of the arcs that aggregate to a matrix.

The assemblage of matrices

Holding the assemblage of minds in place

These are inherently fractal so that the reflex arc in the gross anatomical sense reflects its earlier and microscopic structure at the cellular level. At a certain degree of size and complexity, the organism (or colony) has for its survival to respond to internal states. Out of the need for the operator³¹ at all levels to incorporate both internal and external demands without challenging reserves, a growing autonomy of decision–making arises in the later sets of micro-mind at each level of assemblage.

All levels of assemblage are energy-dependent and so the primordial function of the Living Entity is to obtain that energy (to feed), then, immediately after feeding, to extend and stabilise. Extension (building) starts with mitosis and cell division then proceeds to cell growth, tissue growth: these are the first forms of reproduction. Without stabilisation, neither energy extraction nor reproduction could continue. Collectivity and connectivity are each a form of stabilisation.

The co–emergent unity from the arcs constellates or in a sense reproduces a higher order of organisation allowing for the eventual emergence of self–consciousness. Many of the matrices are effectively macro-minds, constellations of micro-minds. “Mind” is always a plurality but collapses to a collective unity when a decision is implemented, from which a behaviour derives. Primitive creatures—amoebae, for example—react and move away from toxic environments towards those that are nutrient–rich. This binary condition of contrasting states is multiplied and multilayered in complex beings but the binary foundation remains intact.

At the human level, we make binary discriminations and movements between Approach–and–Reward and Avoidance–and–Pain. Interest, Attention and Drive all likewise have their contrary states. As social beings we make judgements that, for all the complexity and ambiguity that may attend them, usually reduce in the end to binary decisions. It may be that when we learn we make incremental micro–adjustments that are committed not only to memory in the central nervous system but also to the memory states of the matrices, the basis of the putative “tissue memory”. An adjustment at one level inevitably alters even if by a tiny amount subsequent state cycles in all the others.

When the requirements for homeostasis no longer hold, the entity dies. When the reserves built up by capacitance are exceeded, the entity suffers in some way. If we want to use shorthand, we might define health as surviving well. Later sections of this book try to elaborate on the construction of wellness for people who present with symptoms that are poorly defined in the orthodox clinical setting, but in this section I am at pains to imagine the theoretical basis for observations that the clinician might make and the medicinal plants that she or he might prescribe.

The discussion of charge separation and our ability to hold a charge will be found in Appendix 2 to this Section: the next segment deals with the maintenance of a reserve of energy.

5/5: The distribution of energy (maintenance of a ratio between capacitance and adaptation)

Mindedness starts as no mind at all: nothing more than the inherent bias in biological systems against an ocean of random noise. Mind in the sense of direction. The bias is fundamentally one that first is directed towards a source of energy, then enclosing and storing it. The enclosing structure facilitates the very harnessing of energy: both the structure and the function are catalytic to processes that time and randomness would otherwise unravel. No single agent can be considered protean: the matrix is an assemblage of relations between the macromolecular structures and their substrates. Energy is the key to health and fulfils a determinant role: not just the supply of energy but its liberation and distribution. Assuming adequate substrate these processes require the catalytic matrices but also the non–enzymatic co–factors to be in place with reserve. Without this reserve: without, that is, buffers and ballast (and these can be quantified), no matrix could be robust and resilient. The greater the reserve the greater the manoeuvrability for the organism because the “choices” it has to make between predictable, compressible information and random fluctuations is incalculable and so needs a platform, as it were, from which to operate. What might look like choice is of course no more than a bias, one that may become a disposition, depending upon circumstances. Without a buffer, which is the fundamental requirement of capacitance, no adaptation that is capable of permanence would be possible.

Detailed biochemical pathways of animals and plants in all their intricate beauty can be found in the textbooks. Underneath these descriptions of energy transformation the relations between quantities of substances fall within the province of mathematics, especially that of non–linear systems. The beauty of mathematics is that equations allow a situation to be written succinctly and so reduce the tendency for repetition in the futile striving to expunge the ambiguity and circularity from words and sentences. This note of regret may be misplaced as I am not a mathematician and my subject is to try to formulate how the medicinal plants that I have prescribed might operate and to draw attention to their best use.

When energy reserves are depleted in the human body, the most readily available retardant to the traject is spasm. It is a global reflex action that will conserve materials: spasm will reduce demand for calcium, magnesium and other co–factors in the smooth–muscle lining of all blood vessels, especially in the musculature. As it will do the same in the highly vascular organs, spasm necessarily causes congestion. In so doing the resultant congestion causes a very wide range of symptoms very quickly, prominent among them being pain. The location of pain and discomfort, whether cranial or thoracic, abdominal or pelvic is a poor guide to the real source because the retardant action of the spasm is global. A primary response will be the wall of the digestive tube itself, along with its contents, its receptors and adnexial organs. The response of the clinical phytotherapist should be as global as the circumstance demands: merely to reduce spasm would be to frustrate the recovery of capacitance. The great gift of medicinal plants lies in their ability to accomplish gentle³² change across a range of systems.

The central cholinergic, aminergic, and serotinergic circuits attempt to compensate for the congestion and to modify it. Notable among these compensations stands histamine, with its provocation from peripheral reservoirs (in the stomach, skin and small intestine, for example, and from the exposed epithelia of the ears, nose and throat). The phenomena thus generated—hay fever, sore throat and malaise, gastritis, diarrhoea, hives amongst others—serve to distress the person into slowing up, changing plans or using other strategies to increase working reserves in a dwindling capacitance. Again, one must look beyond the prescription of anti–histaminic plants to resolve the crisis: histamine is not the problem in the sense that a fire–alarm should not be mistaken for a fire. By slowing the person histamine provides part of a painful solution.

While attention to the clinical situation belongs to a later part of the book, it might be helpful to pause here briefly to anticipate the place to which this biological discussion hopes to lead. The following preliminary list concerns our primary focus of attention if we are to practise constitutional medicine, with the developmental and family history of the patient always in mind:

• Current anabolic or catabolic preponderance and, and if it has switched in the past, noting the phase of life at which that occurred

• Preponderant tendencies of the Autonomic Nervous response as a disposition

• Dominances within cholinergic, aminergic, histaminergic and serotinergic expression

• Digestive function and transit characteristics with an attempt to separate out parotid, pancreatic, gastric and hepatic performance and the state of the small intestine

• Lung and colon function

• Sleep patterns and history.

I suppose it goes without saying that a full discussion of the patient's diet and patterns of eating, and approach to sunlight, fresh air, exercise and rest must form an integral part of the clinical assessment. Nor do the reciprocal effects between all these factors and the emotional life call for emphasis. How these factors emerge or are adduced, are witnessed by the patient, and then integrated into a treatment plan create and sustain the art of medicine.

Recapitulation of Section 3–The biological basis of the adaptive response

The mindedness hypothesis (1/5): Recapitulation

1. The essential bias of a cell tends to reduce the randomness of the “choices” it makes (with choice asymmetric³³ and binary at first). The bias is maintained by the separation of the elements of a cell into paired opposite poles. This separation is at the basis of charge, and asymmetry the basis of the consequent binary structure of a stimulating pole coupled with a receptive centre.

2. The primitive informatic circle of stimulus–response becomes interrupted by organisation to become the “three–body” structure of stimulus–organisation–response. Given the complexity of the environment in which the cell is bathed and therefore the multiplicity of inputs, multiplicities of S–O–R's are generated, creating a series of interdependent networks. The increase in processing space implied from this escalation gives rise to the emergence of a higher order of organisation, as if a third pole arises from bipolarity that binds the mindedness34 of the system.

3. The informatic circle is cyclical and phasic because the s–o–r circle is entrained by geophysical and astronomical cycles.

4. The increase in complexity of these interdependent networks creates so much charge and surplus of energy that a new supra–network or matrix inevitably emerges. The claim of inevitability must be less controversial if linked to physical and mathematical explanations.

5. Each matrix is interpenetrated by those before and after it in time and complexity.

6. Matrices can only form by the incorporation at each level and in each structure of an operating surplus. Charge separation can only happen in the presence of such a surplus: without a surplus there can be no integration, and integration forms the basis of informatic biological structure of which function is the manifestation. Information without integration loses charge and power and so dissipates. Once the organism passes the threshold of reversibility, death follows.

7. If Mindedness is embodied within an integrated series of matrices and if the integration of these collective biases absolutely require an informatic and energetic surplus, then Mindedness leads to Mind at all its different levels of complexity and integration. If the obligatory presence of such a surplus leads to the formation of Minds within each structure and at each level of integration, mental structures will proceed from physical ones.

8. Although it seems like a qualitative leap, it leads the way for the conscious mind to derive from anterior physical minds. While the bias in the single cell may choose between two or a very few alternatives at one time, the conscious mind is able to maintain a virtually infinite set of alternatives in place from second to second. This is its characteristic ability. The informatic state is so vast and yet requires an even vaster operating surplus that the ineffability of the conscious experience must be a prevailing character of consciousness itself. It is an nth pole at the end of n matrices and the corresponding exponent of the information–processing space.

Capacitance (4/5) Recapitulation

Circadian biology as a template for adaptation: the matching of biological cycles to the physical world

Living Beings participate in physical cycles, which show regularity and sequentiality. These regularities are somewhat predictable, with two contrasting phases that alternate. There are four cycles known to affect the lives of all creatures:

1	Circa-tidal	half a lunar day of 12.4 hours
2	Circadian	between 19 and 28 hours
3	Circa–lunar	29.5 days (or 27.2–29.5 days)
		This cycle partly drives the Tidal cycles.
		The range of variation in luminosity is between 0.1 lux at full moon and 0.001 lux at new moon.
		Daylight, by contrast typically provides >10,000 lux.
4	Circannual	365.2 days

It is from the Circannual cycle that Seasonal fluctuations emerge.³⁵ Nested within each phase of each cycle is a smaller pulse. Just as a day has a morning, noon and afternoon, so within each part of a day there is a beginning, middle and end. On a larger scale, the alternation between night and day (with its transitional crepuscular zones) is mirrored in the alternation between summer and winter with the two transitional seasons. For us to participate in this regular sequence of events we must have within us a model, an analogue, a pattern of cyclic alternation and sequentiality. This is entrained to and by a pulse generator, situated within the hypothalamus, which maintains and constrains our responsiveness to regularity in the natural world.³⁶ Events that impinge on living beings are, by contrast, irregular and somewhat unpredictable. Recognition of a regular background provides an adaptive advantage to living beings in that patterned information is compressible, and so allows more internal space to be freed for attention to unpredictable events. By analogy, the metronome provides regularity but not music. The internal oscillator and pattern generator found in the hypothalamus provides us with great adaptive advantage in that it allows us to discriminate between danger and opportunity. For us, danger may contain hidden opportunities while boredom and stagnation may lie within the stable environment. This interpretive faculty is highly developed in humans and lies at the heart of individual personality and group culture.

Between the two contrasting phases of the circadian or nycthemeral³⁷ cycle to which we are most attuned lie two transitional zones: dawn and dusk, times of potential ambiguity. Ambiguity presents us with a greater processing challenge: beginning, ending, entering, exit, departure and return. Much human illness occurs during transition states. The daily cycle is nested within the annual alternation between summer and winter with the two transitional zones of spring and autumn. At such times our metabolic and endocrine settings are altered and so our capacity for adaptation will be challenged: the disturbance may precipitate illness.

Life can be viewed as a modifiable sequence of Time Series against a backdrop of uniform and unmodifiable Time. We negotiate objects in space within intervals of time. We cannot negotiate time itself but we can estimate and construct time intervals and adapt them to our perceived needs. Our ability to match these time intervals with our needs reflects our capacity for health. We are inherently receptive to pattern. Patterns become coded within us while perceptions of time intervals are modifiable by current events. Patterns allow us an abatement of vigilance: in such calm, resting states we may conserve energy. Random disturbance of background patterns heightens our attention and prepares us to react. We have a pacemaker in our hypothalamus: the Supra–Chiasmatic Nuclei. The SCN is not really a body clock though the pace may become highly attuned to a clock in a society that uses them. A clock is a precision instrument made more accurate by being unresponsive. A pacemaker, by contrast, is an approximator, made more effective by being responsive. Clock time is cultural not biological. The oscillations to which we are attuned may be tabled as follows:

Greatest Sequential Regularity in the Environment
Light	Dark

Matched within by Alternation in the Autonomic NS between
Sympathetic (aminergic)	Parasympathetic (cholinergic)

Against this tendency to regularity, living beings are faced with:

Perennial Irregularity in the Environment
Food & other primary needs	Potential Danger & Lack

These irregularities may show some sequential pattern and our pattern–seeking nature may contribute to our success. As both predator and potential prey, we have two scales of focus: the near and small contrasted with circumambient vigilance: microscopic focus and cosmic imagination: a brain with left and right hemispheres. The alternation that we may experience between fear and self–confidence surely reflects our dual nature.

POISE consists in:

• Responsiveness to a wide range of signals with good buffering of noise, while at the same time retaining the ability to adjust responsiveness to prevailing changes.

• Maintenance of inclines and equivalences within the reflex arcs that are capable of being maintained over the length of the current cycle without recourse to reserves.

The model suggests that as these processes are energy–dependent, some more costly than others, Management of the economy of the trajectory will eventually correlate with subjective states.

Under the extreme circumstances of emergency, it is meaningless, even distasteful, to speak of Health. In such cases, Medicine must be dedicated to the maintenance of vital functions and the reduction of suffering. But it is equally meaningless to model Health upon Homeostasis. If Health is more than an absence of Disease and a movement away from lethal boundaries, we may speak of it as an opposite tendency: a movement towards a state that matches physical reality as the source not only of survival but of growth and development. Such a movement must be adequately resourced against unpredictable fluctuations and congruent with our capacity. Health can be seen, then, as a resolution of tension between the “to” and the “from” of life. We experience temporary irresolution as illness.

PAIN generates a positive feedback (equivalent to feed-forward) while most homeostatic mechanisms are systems of negative feedback. Illness is not an entity—injury and invasion aside—but the end of a process that once succeeded and now fails.

The parallel interlocked systems of homeostasis and circadian adaptation

The circadian “clock” resets before the dawn of each day, and is associated with a surge in cortisol at 4am, which rises steeply and peaks at about 8am. As will be shown in the table below, while homeostasis is crucial to our survival, the circadian system manages the living texture of our lives.

Homeostasis	Circadian system
Maintains and buffers internal environments close to a steady point by means of negative feedback loops. These maintain each variable—notably core temperature and pH, also blood glucose and electrolytes—within narrow bounds.	Maintains the Function of the individual within Dynamic Balance by feeding forward to the day and night ahead. Unless the current event is automatised, it retains the present as a new event in short–term memory at least until nightfall. The archiving of events will happen at night along with maintenance and growth.
Is concerned with the current situation.	Recognises the sequentiality of Life.
By stabilising inner variation, homeostasis allows the organism to deal with unpredictable local variations.	Alerts the internal environment to predictable variation based upon the onset of daylight, and so marks and measures Time of Day and prepares each system for tasks and probable states ahead.
The values of these inner constraints oscillate narrowly in following the circadian cycle with which it communicates via the hypothalamus.	Resets the main pacemaker in the hypothalamus before the dawn of each day. Integrates and coordinates the timekeepers in each organ and every system.
	Daily, tidal and seasonal resetting stabilises the recalibration we have to undertake in the light of experience. Facilitates the incorporation of new material and (insofar as is possible) resets adaptive capacity.
Stabilises inner states to allow for alternation of functions.	Maintains the alternation between sleep and activity, and between activity, rest and feeding.

The alternation between:

sleep	with	activity
rest	with	activity
feeding	with	activity

mirrors the sequential accumulation of a charge and its subsequent discharge. The retention of an adequate charge is one index of our capacitance. The smooth transition between states without undue perturbation is a prerequisite for feeling well most of the time.

All processes of life are energy dependent. The drives attached to the circadian system may sequester energy. Although we may not know the precise location of our Will, or whether there is such a thing, these drives may ignore constraints imposed by internal states. This stretching of our resources is largely accommodated by changes in hepatic function (especially in the maintenance of normoglycaemia). The motive and drive of this risky business comes, at least proximally, from the overriding capabilities of our frontal cortex, aided and abetted by the autocoid hormones, notably dopamine. Other autocoid hormones, particularly histamine, may produce counteractive symptoms. Such discomforting symptoms may encourage us to reduce our activity long before homeostatic mechanisms need to be invoked.

Food might seem to be an obvious way to manage any loss in energy, yet eating may reduce our capacitance because of the metabolic and neurohormonal demands that digestion makes upon us. What, how and when we eat will influence our ability to respond to immediate demands; lack of digestive capacity will always result in malaise.

So, while illness may seem like an obstacle to overcome, it may provide a necessary slowing and integrating device so that our terrain can catch up with the surf of Time. The first sign of illness—a subjective unease—manifests as some perturbation, an interruption of our Circadian System; or do we interrupt ourselves? (If we are unable to utilise these catch–up manoeuvres, a deeper disturbance may be at work in which case the illness might be an omen of impending disease.)

A number of second order symmetries match the alternation between rest, feeding, sleep (accumulation of a charge), and activity: its subsequent discharge impelled by the beta-sympathetic stimulus to the musculature. Freedom from illness depends upon smooth gradients between these contrasting states and they in turn flow ultimately from alternation in the physical world: between darkness and the light of the sun. Symmetry between impulse and resolution—broken briefly, restored promptly—will convey us towards an adaptive state.

As all living systems depend upon the light/dark cycle from which the pulsatile nature of life derives, “we”—this nexus of physiological cycles—can expect freedom from illness to the extent that we are able to match the impositions made on us by the sun on its daily excursion. As we are pushed and pulled about on our trajectory, to the extent that we maintain a hold on events without exhaustion and to the extent that our shadowing remains stable, we might justify calling such a capacity health. Phasic and cyclical, our Circadian System manages our daily, monthly and seasonal lives. Any delay in reaching congruence between our internal model and the external world will manifest as some disrupted function. Such disruption will vary a great deal in character and severity depending upon the capacitance of the individual.

Fatigue and lightheadedness are early warnings that we need to pause, rest or otherwise change the rate of discharge. The experience of thermic stress without an obvious external source may be a message of a deeper strain on capacitance. (These and other symptoms are well known and found everywhere; the commoner forms are listed at the end of this Appendix, graded according to the incapacity invoked.)

The delay imposed by such conditions permits a temporary resolution, but they have been always a major source of human unhappiness and ill health. If a more permanent resolution can be achieved, however, by improving the capacitance of the terrain by the application of medicinal plants, perhaps in conjunction with other means, a lasting state of health will be the happy outcome.

Some examples of accumulation and discharge

• Pulsatility is inherent in biological systems. Charge separation provides potential energy.

• The concomitant Charge and Discharge is highly patterned in Living Beings while, by contrast, randomly distributed in the physical world (e.g., lightning).

• Reserve from such Discharge (in other words storage of charge) leads to the notion of Capacitance.

• While the opposites of day and night are most notably built into sleeping and the exercise needed to obtain food, they must intermingle during each phase, as we all experience. So, while the basic plan is binary as is the movement of heart and lungs, there are rhythmic alternations set by the circadian system as well as our capacity both to create and respond to variance.

The constant cycle of accumulation and discharge

It will be crucial to assess the autonomic functionality of each patient and to try to ascertain whether they exhibit a net anabolic or a net catabolic tendency, or an oscillatory tendency, that is, one of constant unstable fluctuation.

an inability to	will tend to result in
discharge	congestive states
complete the transition	states of spasm, blockage and hyper–vigilance, hyper–reactive states and eventual exhaustion
recharge	exhausted states; (one of the more complex) always tends to illness
discharge fully	hypertensive states
This is very crudely put: the individual case has to be evaluated; the relative states of each segment and the rate of change configure the overall tendencies

The transition between night and day and between winter and summer contains the fastest rate of variation, and places us at the greatest risk for maladaptation. Many of our patients’ problems involve difficulty with transition of all kinds. Aside from stumbling, running in a relay race is not the difficult part: the time for fumbling comes when the baton must pass between the runners.

The adaptive capacity

Most symptoms of illness show as a disturbance in the functioning of the Autonomic Nervous System. This is not surprising as the ANS mirrors the cyclic, phasic architecture of the day itself. Accordingly, failures of charge, discharge or transitions will manifest as disordered states.

In an attempt to right these imbalances, the autocoid hormones—especially serotonin and histamine—will amplify them and cause further symptoms. These hormone–like neurotransmitters are like emergency doctors: very useful in the short term but poorly adapted for chronic states.

The settings of the ANS are pegged to that invisible matrix within ourselves: the neuroendocrine system. Although in solution and not palpable, it is as robustly and coherently manifest as is our skeleton. The constitutional setting of this deeper organisational structure is known as the terrain. It is first acquired in embryogenesis, during gastrulation and modified at major transitional stages. Cortisol is a crucial pivot: as Hans Selye was able to demonstrate: we need an adequate Hypothalamic–Pituitary–Adrenal capacity to deal with fluctuations in the external world. Our memory of it can also haunt our particular lives, creating cross-currents which we must also manage. Cortisol not only notifies the start of the day and other cycles, it sets the limits for the other three vertical hormonal axes: reproductive, thyroid and somatotrophic (both prolactin and growth hormone). The Adrenal axis, coupled with the two hormones of the Posterior Pituitary initiates the horizontal pulse between all four of them, as Drs Lapraz and Duraffourd have been able to demonstrate. The state of this axis, in its internal relations (and within the adrenal gland) alerts and stabilises the whole system, contributing to poise or, in maladaptive conditions, destabilises the system through hyper-vigilance and other drains on capacitance.

If illness is a failure of adaptation, we must restore the patient to a previous adaptive state. The illness is not an entity to be treated, except lightly and briefly. Otherwise the illness may deteriorate to an entrenched pathological state (a Disease, in modern parlance). If it does, the adaptive state may be difficult to recognise and recover. Strategies for improving the adaptive capacity of our patients (which I believe should be the primary objective of the clinical phytotherapist) will be found in the later part of this book dedicated to the clinical enterprise.

I have perhaps used the word “adaptive” too loosely here and throughout this section. It is worth stating clearly that in a healthy biological system, a stress placed upon a system that is constructed to accommodate that stress (for example, the cartilage in a knee joint is constructed for walking and can accommodate running), the system will up-regulate its structure to maintain its function.

Summary of common chronic conditions

These cause delay by reversing feedback from negative to positive and so impose further delay to permit a return of the matrices of the terrain to negative feedback, which constitutes recovery.

1. Brook No Resistance

• Neuropathic Pain with or without discernible lesion

• Severe Abdominal Pain

• Asthma

• Migraine and Cluster Headaches

• Gout

• Diarrhoea and Vomiting

• Vertigo

• Severe Depression

2. Permit some Resistance (depending upon stoicism of patient)

• Tension and toxic Headaches

• Nausea and Dizziness

• Raynaud's Phenomenon

• Mild to Moderate Reactive Depression

• Cramp

Footnote to Section 3: adaptive capacity is not a heritable trait

Adaptation in the sense used throughout this book relates only to the health of the individual over a lifetime and reflects the capacity of the terrain. The terrain is an outcome of the development of an individual, an expression of an endocrine and metabolic disposition set in motion soon after conception. The embryo and foetus are impelled upon their developmental trajectory during gestation in negotiation with the terrain and current state of the mother but equipped with features obtained from the egg constructed during the grandmother's gestation of her daughter. In this loose sense, generational effects radiate throughout the associated terrains and are mostly variations in the response of individuals to environmental cues, but they are not heritable in the genetic sense.

I hope that the distinction between adaptation in the evolutionary sense and adaptive capacity as a measure of Poise will become clearer in The Structure of the Terrain in Section 5. Although this disclaimer is genuine and I am not proposing a reversion to a Lamarckian theory of heritable adaptation, I suspect that the absolute distinction between genes and the environment, between evolution by natural selection and the means whereby the terrain obtains the resources to manage daily life will not survive long into the future canon of biological science. Besides, good energy management and adaptation in the present may confer reproductive advantages.

There is no intentionality in the genome: natural selection has no future but the terrain does construct plans which go some way to defining our personality (to be discussed in Section 14). Unlike natural selection, capacitance has a future in view.

______________

²⁰ Chambers Dictionary 9th Edn. 2003.

²¹ I have attempted to summarise and tabulate these ideas at the end of this section.

²² Traditional Humoral Theories tend also to favour cycles over hierarchies but they do tend to emphasise the organs at the expense of the unseen matrices in solution, which they could only infer or attribute non–material qualities. Of course they remained completely unseen until the development of the analytic techniques of modern chemistry.

²³ Founder of the School of Individual Psychology, a paradoxical title because he meant it to mean “holistic” rather than individualistic: he was a socialist who considered the psychology of external relations every much as that of internal process.

²⁴ Born 1905, died 1997, he may not be a household name but his Ein Psychologe erlebt das Konzentrationslager (published in English as: Man's Search for Meaning) is said to have sold 12 million copies since its publication in 1946.

²⁵ I do not at all mean what is commonly meant by “mind” in humans in the sense of a conscious operator. Even this apparent “self” can at least in part be construed as the outcome of a stack of minds at cellular and tissular levels operating in obligatory concert.

²⁶ I envy the rhetorical strength of the explanation given by the composer Pierre Boulez about his work Répons which leads me to think that talking about music may reflect well on this difficult discussion about health.

²⁷ Loops of stimulus and response (converting positive feedback loops to negative ones reduces pain and distress).

²⁸ A long way down the line, in evolutionary and physiological terms, the binary states of predator and prey structure our percepts and responses. See: Parallel Worlds at the start of Section Four.

²⁹ Vicious cycles occur when opposite behaviours produce the same result. For example, in the case of gout, eating too much is as bad as fasting or eating too little; too much exercise exacerbates gout just as much as none.

³⁰ Later termed Endobiogénie, Endobiogenics in English with Endobiogeny preferred by Dr Hedayat.

³¹ I use the word as shorthand for the collective automatic response and not at all some kind of unseen director.

³² The word ‘gentle’ refers to the capacity to induce change gradually and broadly so that abrupt change is averted. Pharmaceutical agents deliberately induce disruptive stress; this may be desirable in an emergency but usually put a greater load on the recovery of capacitance. Innocuous does not here mean ineffective.

³³ In binary random systems, a flipped coin is said to be equally likely to end up heads or tails; the point about asymmetry is that a head is not symmetric with a tail.

³⁴ It is of course a long way to human consciousness but even at lower levels of organisation, I suggest that in this third pole, the experience of that state of the mindedness emerges.

³⁵ Developed further in Barker 2011, From Solstice to Equinox and Back Again: The influence of the midpoint on human health and the use of plants to modify such effects. See also Seasons of Life, Foster & Kreitzman 2009.

³⁶ The current state of knowledge suggests that we do not construct a pattern recogniser de novo, but rather that structures within are attuned to our perceptual and processing organs in a manner analogous to Chomsky's Universal Grammar, but much more generic and fundamental.

³⁷ Not a pretty word. Used by chronobiologists to avoid the ambiguity of terms such daily, dian and diel to indicate one complete cycle of photophase and scotophase.