Human Health and its Maintenance with the Aid of Medicinal Plants. Julian Barker

readily absorb. Is it meaningful to speak of culture as a matrix? Clearly it derived from human life and has no independent existence of its own, but a line of demarcation exists between its artefacts and the biological and psychosocial matrices that gave rise to them. An example close to our physiology is the distinction between music (the stuff people make and engage in) and musicality, the propensity for humans to make music as a consequence of neuro–sociology. Apart from the voice, musical instruments can only count as inventions. Steven Pinker has marshalled sophisticated arguments to claim that even vocal music is a cultural invention: like literacy it answered a need but was not itself an evolved faculty and became universal only because of the pleasure it gave and the cooperative spirit it engendered. Stephen Jay Gould and Elisabeth Vrba coined the term exaptation to denote this link between functions that were not primarily evolutionary and the inventions that emerged from such inventions. Gene–Culture Co–evolution theories would argue that in any case, there is a feedback loop between human inventions and the biology from which it emerged. The concepts of Mindedness (see Section 3) and the interconnected Matrices are congruent with this view. From neurological evidence, music has many integrative functions (such as grasping and climbing) for the musculo–skeletal matrices.

      I would go further and hypothesise that music functions as:

      • A necessary primer for language and provides the trigger for the germination of the seed of linguistic grammar and the emotionality of communication

      • A necessary primer for the integration of movement, both for upper limb grasping and the alternation needed for bipedal walking, standing, twisting and turning

      • A source of pleasure to allay the fears of us as a prey animal and to encourage social cooperation as an adaptive tool for a weak but clever predator

      • Preceding the Tower of Babel, it mimics aspects of the human voice and communicates effectively across barriers of dialect.

      The ubiquitous nature of music in adult life is matched by the universal exposure of babies to music, and the special way we speak to babies—and this is not only a parental impulse—has many elements of music that would be out of place in normal speech and do not of course have lexical or logical intention. These include repetitions, rhythmic movements with a constructed sense of timing and a deliberate change in pitch and timbre that has no semantic intention. It is not utilitarian speech. Adaptive deficits are seen where there is a profound absence of musicality, which is highly suggestive that musicality precedes music as an artefact of culture, though of course it is an important non-verbal marker of cultural identity.

      The reason for including music here is that, if musicality connects deep structures in our neurophysiology, then the great therapeutic value that is actually found will surprise no one and should be in the back of one's mind when evaluating the health of our patients: both as a diagnostic criterion (rhythms of life and discordance within) and even as an adjunct to prescription by way of recommendation of a musical experience unknown to the patient, or even a referral to a music or movement therapist.

      Music, like the pituitary gland, contains both vertical and horizontal axes: the harmony of the moment depends upon vertical (stacked, simultaneous) relations while rhythm can only be extracted along the horizon of time. Music conveys simultaneity and sequentiality in a single passage. Scales reflect the relativism of pitch and the direction up or down. Harmony and rhythm fill in the clues across. The scales within the neuro–endocrine matrices are driven by the hypothalamic pacemakers that respond in turn to rhythms of life, those expected and those that are puzzling.

      If this sounds like an over–extended metaphor, consider the uniquely human ability to recognise transposed pitch, enabling us to translate intact between child and adult, male to female and back again. Language depends absolutely on recognising the signal from vocalising structures of very different sizes. If language were only a logical structure, it would not so easily contain the emotionality required for bonding between parent and infant and between members of the same group. Music provides the immediately recognisable emotionality to the communication, and therefore to the quality of the communication. Musicality connects our social and psychic selves and, through rhythmic movement, exercises our technical capabilities. Music itself leads to technical invention, hence reinforcing human development as technological beings.

Separations and divisions

      In the domestic sphere, whether an item separated from food in the dish ends up in the stockpot or on the compost heap will involve various types of discrimination.

      From an ecological perspective, what you call an area rather depends upon the demarcation lines that you care to draw and whether you take an exclusively human–centred view of the biosphere and see us as the delinquent children of Gaia's sister, or rather that you dissolve separations into transitions for most functional purposes. The boundaries that permit the accumulation of energy that all life needs for its persistence must remain porous to exchange. This part has touched upon the discontinuities between habits of mind and the spaces they inhabit. Let us now move on to continuities within and without the human terrain.

Fixation

      The human triangular

      In the simple geometry of planes, a line may demarcate but cannot enclose space: you need more than two and at least three lines. After the triangle, a series of polygons succeeds, starting with the square. We use such geometry in the technosphere because it is difficult to build even a temporary shelter without approximations to straight line geometry. In the biosphere, more precise geometry is possible from the hive to the shells of molluscs. At least on the material plane, the triangle is a stronger and more rigid structure than a square, and is integral to the geodesic dome and to the wonderfully stable tables made by furniture designer and maker David Colwell. These artefacts are made on principles of tensegrity, and follow structures found in nature. Molecular bio–tensegrity has been used to explain the formation of cytoskeletons and the helical structure of DNA, and to the spontaneous self-assembly of proteins, and even organs. Quadrilaterals provide useful intermediates in natural structures and endow modular structures with flexibility besides being needed for standing beside walls and the cubic storage needed by our uniquely acquisitive species, whatever Rudolf Steiner had to say about straight lines.

      Triangles may also have greater conceptual strength than the quadrilaterals favoured by ancient humoral theories where the relative quantities of the four “elements” are indeterminable. In Axioms (Section 2) I proposed that to understand the health of an individual, she or he needs to be considered as:

      A psychosocial and psychosexual being who tends to seek a life that seems sufficiently purposeful to that individual.

      This concept of the human is founded upon the triangular relations between bios, psyche and the sociolinguistic being. While you might say that a societal being cannot exist without biology, a non–social human being cannot partake in human life; nor can you operate socially without a psyche. So much is obvious, yet we partition our physiological medicine as if it operates in a different sphere to the psychological and sociological. Only when physical health cannot be adequately explained by medicine do we call in the experts. This partition is based upon an absurd separation of the primordial triangular functions of humanity and reduces it to a mere division of labour. (See also Triangles of Identity in Section 17.)

Oscillation

      A good deal of the nearly 70% of water in the human body contributes more to colloidal systems than to solutions. The sol-gel ratio inside cells is not only variable but may oscillate and so propagate a weak wave of the type that Wilhelm Reich claimed to see. Although his methods and findings have been discredited, that is not to say that he observed nothing or that all of his observations were artefacts or entirely delusional, but they were not what he said they were. Biological systems can only take up an intermediate position between fixity and fluidity. Rigidity obstructs flow of material and information (and surely Reich was perceptive about the armoured