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

we can do much to remedy these fixated extremes, where there is no natural alternation between states. Of course different stages in life will call for hormone dominance: breastfeeding is an obvious case where prolactin must dominate. Also the dopamine/prolactin ratio will have clinical relevance at puberty in both sexes. The other obvious polarity is creative imagination: dopamine will help you imagine things but prolactin will give you the obsessive organisational need to see the project through to completion. It is important not to diagnose middle ground tendencies according to our own capacities for organisation. Being methodical is not at all the same as being obsessive. Watching a blackbird wash and dry itself then preen should convince you that living beings survive well by adopting operational methods. In human life, a life without organisation may not be as creative as it appears and is rarely consistent with health, although exceptions could be cited; in social creatures like us, the burden of the disorganisation will be borne by others.

      Moving from “Have I got enough?” and “Am I too much?” or “…not enough?”⁷⁶ as serotonin seems to ask, may be resolved in a common output from opposite directions. Thus, excessive drive or an urgent one that will not hear any other voice and is not tempered by other considerations or other regulators, will lead to hostility and even paranoia. Conversely, a retentive fear of loss may lead to a fear of hostility and a similar paranoia. Fears of contamination may be associated with either extreme. As will be discussed under flux, the alternation between the two states may constitute the core of the problem. It is important to try to evaluate which of these two hormones dominates in patients who define themselves by opposition and who may be attracted by herbal medicine because they consider it to be in opposition to modern medicine. I pick up this theme again in Part Two, in the human economy in Dissipators and accumulators. A sense of fullness in the epigastrium which may mimic emptiness in the sense that the fullness is never enough may be paralleled by the sense of light being too much as if the serotonin synthesised in the retina feels like an invasion, or even a stimulus so overabundant as to feel toxic. The range of these experiences includes common migraine and the more extreme accounts given by painters such as Vincent van Gogh and Edvard Munch and the poet Emily Brontë in her explicit repudiation of the light of day. The intensity and qualities of luminosity affect human health, but so does the length of day. This profound seasonal effect on health was the subject of an earlier paper of mine.⁷⁷

      It would be naively functionalist to ascribe human Will to any single hormone: character is highly distributed, added to which, in the case of dopamine for instance, there are several types of receptor for this neurohormone, not to mention various cofactors acting upon them. The dopaminergic circuits are, likewise, highly distributed anatomically. All hormones act in concert with others just as the richest novel derives its one major theme from the interplay of characters and within each character.

      No character lives in real life without eating. These amines in question are derived from amino acids in the diet so their connection with resource is physically very close. A “pecking order” in the bioavailability exists between amino acids so that the commonly found does not flood out the rarer but is just as needed. Histamine is synthesised from histidine. The catecholamines may be formed from Phenylalanine but most are derived from the dietary amino acid tyrosine. The monoamine serotonin—a powerful vasoconstrictor and hence implicated in migraine—is formed from the dietary amino acid tryptophan, as is the B–vitamin nicotinic acid, as are the indoles and indolacetic acid, the crucial component of auxins, the growth hormones in plants.

      Amino acids are precursors to many of the alkaloids for which we use certain plants, for example codeine, morphine and papaverine from tyrosine. Human catecholamines share with thyroxine and melanin a common precursor. Seeing the many common pathways between amines and the B–vitamins which in turn manage the metabolism of dietary amino acids, it is tempting to reach for the pharmaceutical supplementation of these vitamins as a short cut or as a temporary replacement therapy. They may have benefits in the short term, especially in cases of chronic insomnia, but without an analysis of the neuroendocrine regulation of mood and behaviour, these benefits may be slight and short-lived. As most transamination (dependent upon coenzymes derived from vitamin B₆) takes place in the liver, the improvement of hepatic function may prove to be a more durable therapeutic strategy.

The analogic mind

      In 1/5: Mindedness in the early part of Section 3, I was at pains to emphasise that the binary bias at the heart of all cellular function, found first in the earliest, most primitive organisms, implied an inevitable and necessary direction—one that conserved energy—and did not imply any directed sense. Rather, the physico–chemical energy gradients along which the matrices flow incline us to a sense of determinism against a background field that is entirely random. In other words, mindedness from the beginning of life was not Mind; it was an inevitable bias in the construction of beings: just the way that biological bricklaying is laid out. At the far opposite end of the biological spectrum, human Mind with its consciousness exposes us to philosophical questions of intention and willed behaviour with all the social ramifications of how free the will can be.

      Neurophysiology tells us that all firing neurones are effectively digital in nature: that is, the changes in state of membranes, receptor density and quantities of neurotransmitters are best expressed in numeric form, even if those complex algebraic relations were displayed upon a graph or even as a 3–D model. The colossal amounts of information contained in the peripheral and central nervous systems of any mammal, but especially of primates, is dwarfed by the unimaginable size given by expressing the relations between the numbers generated by such complex structures. These kinds of constant outputs could not be anything but digitally compressed and stored. In these first two decades of this century, as is often remarked, the amount of data generated and stored outside human brains exceeds that produced in all of previous human history. Although “Big Data” appears to be a new phenomenon, a huge amount has always existed inside our skulls.

      The enormous Data inside the human brain may be the result of our need to cooperate to survive, and therefore to establish identities. All cooperation depends upon communication. Our capacity for highly developed cooperation and our unique capacity for language is doubtless an evolution not an exaptation.⁷⁸ Language depends upon a shared universal grammar (Chomsky's opponents have not effectively replaced his theory with anything more plausible) and this we store digitally and express sequentially. Yet our “view” of what has been said is not entirely literal: what was meant is more crucial to our survival as a cooperative social species.

      Our communications exhibit a most significant paradox: we exist and move as the product of the mindedness embedded within all our constituent matrices with all their information digitised, and use language so generated. Energy conservation and speed of operation requires it to be so. Yet for language to operate between people so that they can cooperate, they require not digital “shorthand” but an analogue “longhand” to bring all the constituent elements into a single “picture”. This picture we “know” as our consciousness of the world and it defines our sense of the reality of the world. It is our best guess: essentially a version, an elaborate approximation.

      As for useful approximation compared to a precision that is on occasion needed, if you need to know the time roughly, an analogue clock (even one without numbers) can give you a rough idea of the time even when viewed from a distance whereas a digital clock cannot offer you much of an impression, you need to see each digit clearly to obtain the information: you cannot extract it at a glance. The analogue can provide a swift approximation and as most episodes (such as sunrise) last long enough for people to gather, anything more precise has little point. (I wish I could come up with a good image that predates industrialisation: ideas on a postcard please!). This very contrast between impression and precision leads me onto an idea about consciousness itself.

Consciousness

      At this point I should like to elaborate a model of consciousness and memory that depends upon this interconversion between digital and analogue and back again. In its simplicity it sidesteps the detailed analyses of Dennett and Pinker (ingenious as they may be) but has not