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

to store many strategies and to develop ones not yet tried from those already stored. It requires the prising apart of the present moment, the development of an operational pause, as it were, to facilitate these reflections. The approach towards time that any individual takes will tell you a great deal about them. According to Raj Persaud, this temporality provides us with a fundamental classification of personality into pastist, presentist and futurist.⁸³ The first shows a tendency to attend more to understanding potentials already in store. Contrast the memorialist with those optimists whose sights are on winning the long game, (though some futurists may find pessimistic pleasure in predictive soothsaying). Both of these projectors contrast strongly with those who attend exclusively to the moment. In all three approaches, sacrifice is demanded: only the presentist doubles the loss (by failure to learn and plan) but by definition does not count gains and losses. The projectors are exiled from the moment: the pastists try to relive it, the futurists recreate it in an improved form. We must look to the personality of our patients for the clues to the prescriptions we make for them, strategies we must address in Part two (see Section 14). Although memorialists mine the past for treasures of existence, as if to find some consolation against the finality of death, that very project indicates an attempt to subvert a constitutional pessimism that may in turn conceal a secret and guilty gloating. Nostalgia is the yearning to be where you are not. Against all this, death ensures that we have deepest agency only in the present.

      Memory is linked to the future in providing a data bank for the devising of stratagems. Some sorts of cogitation involve talking something over with oneself as if others were present, as if virtual others had differing points of view. Loners do not rehearse enough outside their own interior voices.⁸⁴ So rich and life–defining is our consciousness that the notion that it is finite and will be annihilated seems to it to be utterly implausible, all the more so as an analogic construction. This very creativity enables the very theories of immortality that characterise all human cultures.

      But why should this be so? What would be the point of the cumbersome digital to analogue rehearsal, what evolutionary advantage would it confer upon us? Analogue systems require considerably more energy yet contain more redundancy than digital counterparts. Analogue systems are considerably less accurate and more error prone. How, then, could they have evolved? The seemingly improbable answer lies with these apparent shortcomings and must surely involve brain size, sociality and language. The human language is both the source and product of our complex sociality. Digital systems are able to minimise noise and error in the way that mathematical systems (in contradistinction to music) “require”. Social language has an even greater need for innovation. Its “compare and contrast” mode of sharing requires approximation, even error, for social convergence and the accommodation of the infinitude of possibilities. It almost requires implausible scenarios. Among the many processes it generates, some will be logically implausible. These “superstitions” are the unsought side–effects of analogue processing: they are no more teleological than any other evolutionary process. Technologies that we have created make the resource needs for the analogue process seem inexhaustible. Irony of ironies. The energy requirements, though, require that we have a reserve always at hand for us to have any chance of what we have come to call health. This bias towards coherence is fundamentally energetic.

      Whatever criticism may be levelled against my ideas on human consciousness, I reject any that imply that I am falling back on the discredited panoramic view (the Cartesian Theatre as Daniel Dennett puts it). I am suggesting instead that a momentary smoothing of discontinuous inputs from the body and brain occurs all the time except in deep sleep, perceptual first, imagined immediately afterwards.

A memory is always an abstraction

      Loss of consciousness in sleep

      The circadian connection involves the paradoxical abrogation of will. Is the default position of the Reticular Activation System on or is it off, or is the default an alternation between on when light and off when dark after a certain duration of light? Certain other criteria would doubtless need to be present and the pressure towards the off position would couple a summation of events with corresponding fatigue and reduction in stimuli. The accumulation of biochemicals like adenosine and melatonin execute these functions, but they are agents of some underlying processes.

      Events (changes in the physical world) are largely outside our control, a situation which our adaptational minds seek to change in our favour.⁸⁵ Routines save energy enormously. Any singular event outside a routine has to be assessed and understood, which is to say matched against similar templates and stored for later conversations, with self or others or both. Events and tasks (planned events) need a construction of time at different scales (day, hour or so, minutes) together with an object map of the physical territory. The work of neuroscientists in these first decades of the century shows that these operations take place in separate parts and have to be synthesised into a whole. Memory as a single data bank might serve as a convenient metaphor but is anatomically inaccurate.⁸⁶ It seems, rather, to be an ensemble project (in common with the other major perceptual systems, especially vision and hearing), so that space and place are represented in different brain areas and together the entorhinal and hippocampal systems form an assemblage that coordinates for us time and place. Memory of these will be processed at different times, especially after sleep, and retrieved in different ways depending upon the context in which they are sought. One does not recreate the details, indeed the level of abstraction is very high, with markers serving for the event, the task and the time and place. Borges has an arresting story about a man who could not forget any detail and whose life was devastated as a consequence. In the pain of not being able to forget, he shows extraordinary insight into neural processes with all the gifts of Oliver Sacks but without the benefit of clinical neurology serving his imagination.⁸⁷

      The anticipatory repertoire in social creatures is greater⁸⁸ than other solitary or even group animals. In humans, language itself inflates that figure by yet another exponent. The larger the repertoire, the greater the survival advantage. Consequently, consciousness emerges from the size and effectiveness of the anticipatory quandary as a solver of problems and is therefore powerfully adaptive. Poise as subjective health entertains our present consciousness. Our sense of our state is the true present symptom but may fluctuate from minute to minute as our body marshals the energy needed to stabilise the trajectory and terrain while protecting the reserves. Poise is achieved when these accomplishments are managed most of the time. It is what our patients hope for.

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      ⁵³ Known more widely in one of the more commonly anthologised poems of the twentieth century: The Second Coming by W.B. Yeats.

      ⁵⁴ “Autonome, automatisé, autogéré”, Traité de Phytothérapie Clinique, p. 587.

      ⁵⁵ Endobiogeny: A Global Approach to Systems Biology in 2 Parts, Jean-Claude Lapraz, MD, France; Kamyar M. Hedayat, MD, United States, in Global Advances in Health and Medicine, 2013.

      ⁵⁶ Like them, I favour Ganong for the continuance of its revisions (Bibliography).

      ⁵⁷ For example, Bateson and, in their different ways, Varela and Maturana (Bibliography).

      ⁵⁸ This observation is integrated into theory in The Hypothalamic–Pituitary Driver in Section 5.

      ⁵⁹ He postulates a double loop alternating from ACTH via FSH to GH in the first pass and from ACTH via LH to Prolactin in the second.

      ⁶⁰ It is possible to live a full life with only one.

      ⁶¹ “Where do we draw the line and with what do we draw it? See Separations and Divisions, Section 4.

      ⁶² As I have elaborated more fully in my History, Philosophy & Medicine: Phytotherapy in Context, Winter Press with UEL, 2nd Edn. 2013.

      ⁶³ I think everyone knows this one, but in case not, it runs: “For want of a nail,