One of the things I learned practising Psychiatry for over 60 years is that you don’t treat the disease, you treat the person. Because –here is a major life lesson – everything is connected. Upbringing, education, family, job, society, culture, religion, climate – you fill in the blanks – make up who we are at any one moment in time.

Meditation as a way to personal and social transformation.

According to a new study in the journal PLOS Biology, by John Mamo of Curtin University in Bentley, Australia, amyloid protein made in the liver can cause neurodegeneration in the brain. Since the protein is thought to be a key contributor to development of Alzheimer's disease, the results suggest that the liver may play an important role in the onset or progression of the disease. If this is the case, rather than focusing all research on the brain, might it not be more rewarding to find ways to either prevent the liver from making the amyloid plaques or, to at least destroy the amyloid protein as it enters the circulation, that is, before it reaches the brain?

Hugging grandmother. Grandparents who show that they care will help this child grow up well, with good self esteem and social skills.

Healthy Brain vs Alzheimer’s Brain

Pharmaceutical companies focus their efforts on brain pathology. In doing so, they have overlooked the fact that the brain is connected to the body by multiple two-way communication systems. Through these channels a change in any part of the body will affect the brain and vice versa. The brain, as I have said before, does not work on its own.

Physical phenomena, at least at the macroscopic level, have a location in space and can be quantified. On the other hand, mental phenomena cannot be localized and cannot be quantified. The new generation of post-materialism scientists and those familiar with quantum physics have taken a run at this puzzling conundrum.

It is time to move the dial on the scientific clock and seriously dispute the commonly accepted deterministic view of the mind as an epiphenomenon of the brain. Instead, I propose we entertain the concept of the embodied quantum mind, in which the mind is both dependent on and independent of the brain and the rest of the body. Like protons or electrons that, depending on circumstances, can be particles or waves or the in-between states of wavicles, the mind is fluid and adaptive.

The size of a human brain is unrelated to its information content, intelligence, or capacities. The brain is part of a much larger communication network in the body. It does not act alone.

This extended brain—the embodied brain—acts as a back-up memory storage system and “tops up” whatever data are missing in the brain.

 Tools such as the frisson device help us understand links between interoception (our sense of our body's internal state) and the interoception-related disorders like addiction, somatic sensation disorders, and anxiety.

Stress, either acute or chronic is detrimental to both, pregnant mother and child.

The heart and cycles of the heart play a surprising role in shaping perception and cognition. o Experimental results directly support theories anchoring selfhood to interoceptive signals originating from internal organs.

Of all the lifestyle factors studied to date, stress is the one most consistent factor that shows an effect on how long it takes to get pregnant 4).

Words carrying an emotional charge affect water as well as all living cells. Hypnosis is an example of how words can affect the mind and how the mind in turn can affect the body. Response to a placebo is a function of the symbols, rituals and behaviours embedded in the clinical encounter.