May the 7th talk inside and outside the skull, around and about .

We started off making faces at each other! and discovering the range of the hard palate with our tongues. This was something we used later

The model of the brain was really crude! We reduced  it down to three areas . The development of the brain during our development like the rest of the body mirrors the development of human beings through millions of years from our forebears. The hard palate is one of the first things our bodies differentiate as we develop – i.e., its old and important – we eat through our mouths and breathe through our noses.

So, as we develop before birth there is a time when we look like an earthworm or fish ETC .

The three parts were firstly a carrot representing the brainstem.

this is the area where all our unconscious activity happens , we breathe, a heart beats, our temperature is maintained , we digest our food . All this is a very ancient function and it occurs inside our carrot!

It also is the place where a series of pairs of nerves emerge from the brain and leave the skull. These are called cranial nerves and we've already come across the function of several of those observing each other making faces and using our tongues and speaking.

We then attached our carrot to a grapefruit the second part of our simple model! Now here we are really simplifying . That piece of fruit is representing a huge number of structures in what we shall call the midbrain. These structures are to do with memory and habit and help us again to control our movement and all the centre of some fairly raw emotions. This part of the brain is more advanced than the carrot but not as advanced as to what is to come!

The most advanced part of the brain we'll call the cerebral hemispheres and here's where the cabbage came in to its own. This is the third part.  This is the place of our ‘higher’ mental powers.

It seemed a bit radical to cut the cabbage in two down its length but we shouldn't worry, nature does this and has done it for millions of years to divide our brain in 2. You might say we always needed to keep one eye on our food and another making sure we weren't food for somebody else!

This took to talking about the split in the brain - the right and left side . Roughly speaking the right side of the brain is the calmer and more thoughtful side which tries to see the whole picture. The right side is only imperfectly  connected to the left side of the brain which tends to be more compulsive and go straight to the solution without fiddle fiddle and can get angry if it is questioned. Action before thought maybe. (this is a huge simplification)

Neither side of the brain is right or wrong….. we need them both but we need them in balance. There are some particular problems because the part of the brain which is involved in speech is on the left side (nearly always) and the messages from the right can come slowly. You could say that one of the problems in the modern world is that left sided thinking is predominating more and more this is a little bit worrying.

This goes on to the apparently strange arrangement of vision where images from the outside half of the right eye on the inside part of the left eye, (Blue Below) reach the Left brain and vice versa (Red Below)  Also when we incline to the right we show our left face which is more expressive. 

 In other words, with the head inclined to the left all information goes to the right side of the brain and with the head inclined to the right all the information is going to the left brain .

Try this for yourself ………which is inclination is more stern? (mainly left brain), and which more reflective (mainly right perhaps)  (We looked at Da Vinci’s take on the ‘Last Supper’).

LEFT EYE                                                                      NOSE

Try looking at things inclining your head to the right and left and notice the difference , see what other people do in certain frames of mind.

We also got into deeper things …… memory and perception and consciousness.

These are really complex and can't be explained in current theories of how the brain works. All our senses and perceptions and feelings are in fact constructs.  The brain  has no video room for sight or sound room or touch room – it is only trillion upon trillion of nerves interconnections.

We took the example of sight; where most of seeing is done at the back of the brain, but in truth this is by no means easy to explain.   Of course, there are competing theories but that was really beyond the scope of what we talked about.

In a sense the most pure sense is smell where information goes direct to the brain without ‘negotiating’ with other sense in the middle-brain (grapefruit.).  We mentioned the sinuses in the hollow facial skeleton which help us to sense the world – smells, material from animals and plants, and a huge number of micro organisms and these inform us about the world outside our own bodies.

To get a flavour of historical ideas about the brain René Descartes was mention (17th century French philosopher) who believed that animals and plants were machine-like following mechanical, chemical and physical laws, and brains and nerves worked with pneumatic animal spirits (long suspected to be present), which affected other structures.  His problem was that animal brains looked all very similar and in practice man had hugely more ‘brain-power’.  So, he speculated man had a unique small pea-sized structure in his brain called the pineal gland (when we started the afternoon we put our tongues on the hard palette and thereby pointed to the pineal which is just above. )  Unfortunately for René, the pineal gland is not unique and this could not be our intellectual centre. 

If you are interested I feel inspired to try and  continue the argument in next month’s West of the Clee, Corvedale and Ripples.

Here are a few things you possibly might like to follow up, on a computer I am afraid but this is after all only a start to whet your appetite.

Scopaesthesia challenges the limits of consciousness | Rupert Sheldrake (Type this into youtube.)

What Do The Left & Right Brain Do? - Iain McGilchrist

(type this into youtube.)

If you want something more conventional - teaching about the brain Try Science Direct (British), or Mayo Clinic (American), but a really good one is Queensland Institute of the Brain (Australian)

Peter with friends.

On Thursday the 5th June we had an interesting discussion in our studio about the chest and in particular I tried to interest everybody in a particular part of the chest which is very central and where a lot of really important things.

We started by feeling the notch at the top of our breastbone (sternal notch )and then following along the right collarbone and feeling behind in the depths of the depression behind the collarbone (supraclavicular fossa). I hoped this would make more sense later. It is quite a challenge to explain looking at different ‘planes‘ in the body if you're not used to that sort of thing……… here is a Birds Eye view of a person’s with artistic interpretation of ears and nose explaining what the sagittal plane is (purple), think William Tell and an arrow!

  If you are OK with  this we can now start to examine a sagittal     section of the Chest, it’s interesting I promise!

I didn’t cheat on Thursday but now I am going to cheat and us  a posh pic. – here goes.  I am going to describe a line or zone  across the middle of the picture.  It’s a magic line because so much happens along it.  Every vital system of the body has something important to say at this level, that is cantered on the space between the fourth and fifth thoracic or chest vertebrae.

The greatest blood vessel in the body – the aorta springs from the heart at this level and gives of 3 big vessels straight away the right subclavian artery (remember we felt it at the back of our right clavicle or collar bone), the right carotid artery which is one of the 3 big arteries supplying the brain and the strangely named innominate  (it means no name) artery which quickly divides into the left subclavian and carotid arteries.  It also gives origin to two arteries that supply the heart – the coronary arteries, which have become famous in modern times!  So that is the arterial show at this level.

Next the venous activity.  Big veins coalesce at this level and form 4 big pulmonary veins which bring blood charged with oxygen back from our lungs.  I am leaving out how all this plays out in the heart – another story in truth!

Let us now mention a system that we didn’t get round to when we met – the lymph system.  Lymph is a bit like blood but without the red stuff.  It baths the cells and is present in the intracellular space and is collected in a series of vessels which coalesce just as veins do.  They eventually enter the venous system, where?  Of course, at the T4/5 level.

Nerves also have a lot to say at this level.  From the T4/5 level (this is slightly variable), every (spinal) nerve that leaves the spine, over several levels (shown black here though usually in anatomical drawings show as yellow.)  There are two things to say, firstly that starting at our T4 level and for a few levels below the spinal sprouts there is a nerve (a spinal nerve is a good name), which does several things including taking sensation from a strip of skin round your chest – a dermatome is the posh term.  (If you have ever had shingles erupting around the chest you will know all about dermatomes!)  These spinal nerves send branches to a very important couple of nerves, the right and left vagus nerves.  We mentioned these 2 vital nerves last time in our wonder through the head, they are a pair of a series of cranial nerves arising from the base of the brain – they are numbered as the 10th pair (X).  Like all nerves and few men, they multitask and these fellas we could not live without!  Among other things they do they enable the whole parasympathetic  system of the body – this to us is calmness and tranquility it rests our organs but enables digestion.  So, the importance of the collaboration with spinal nerves starting at our level is to make scratching the back here not only pleasurable but potentiates a series of good processes in the body – an all-round ‘good egg’ thing to do then.

The other major thing that happens at our level is that the vagus nerves give off a branch each which curve around the windpipe (trachea), as it bifurcates (more below on this).  These two nerves the recurrent laryngeal nerves, go back to a higher level to the voice box (larynx), and without them we could not speak, a rather important thing for humans – no?

Now the Respiratory or breathing system……. there is decisive action at our level, it splits into the right and left main bronchi at the carina (which means keel – as on a boat).  So, if you decide to look at the breathing exercise, I will send with these notes you can visualize your air streams being cleft in two as the water streams round the keel of a boat.  This is where any ‘foreign’ material hits if we inhale rather than swallow it – so nature has made it highly sensitive.  One thing I could not possibly help noticing after I retired and was doing odd sessions at local hospitals was that there was a positive tidal wave of people being referred for unexplained cough – perhaps a hundred a day even in a small hospital.  An ordinary chest Xray almost never shows anything much in these circumstances, and I wonder if this is part of what is increasingly recognised as the “inflammatory cascade” – who knows we might talk about that sometime.

There are other things I could mention that ‘? coincidently?’ happen at this level of T4/5 but probably you have had enough punishment; but – there is something I would like you to notice before we leave the chest.  If you look at it in any plane it is roughly triangular in shape – the body is full of triangles – we may notice this again sometime!

 All the Best

Peter

Yesterday the 6th of March saw me at Somerset House on the banks of The Thames. “Soil, The World Beneath our Feet”.

This exhibition is on until the 13th of April and if you find yourself in or near London before then, be sure not to miss it.

It is full of interest and particularly entrancing were the ‘time-lapse’ videos of the vibrant and highly dynamic life in good biologically eloquent soil.

Many things came out for me but the outstanding ones were - the beauty of it all, the dynamism and despite all we know - how little we know - the gap seems to get wider.

Yet again the parallels between the health of the soil and the rest of nature were there to see and again the parallels to the health of the human body,

Nor was it all ‘doom and gloom’ as yes in so many parts of the world our soils are suffering from chemical, mechanical and animal degridation…… yet soils are being regenerated in barren places that were once perfectly fertile. Barren hills and deserts can flourish again with the right care,

On 19th of October, I went to a course organised by the Society of Ecological Medicine in London.

Here are a few ideas that I gleaned at that meeting and a few references that you might find helpful if you want to follow these ideas.

The first idea is about the hormone melatonin. I don’t know whether I missed the lecture, but I did not remember this hormone from undergraduate teaching, but much later it was the ‘sleep’ hormone secreted by a gland in the midline of the frontal brain called the pineal gland, Importantly this is hormone is ancient, it has been with evolving life for countless ages. We have coming to recognise that the hormonal world is so much more than we could possibly have conceived!  Time was when even good medical schools taught about a handful of hormones and I seem to recall the impression of a substance and single function – a lever pulled, a single task accomplished!  How much more glorious is the picture now emerging, and how much more complex. Vast numbers of substances have numerous interlocking functions which work together in dynamic processes and relate to other bodily systems to help keep us on an even keel, the process of homeostasis.

Melatonin is an example of this and the fascinating thing is it’s longevity, it has been with life as it grew and developed through long epochs and is therefore apparently present very widely throughout living things as you would expect.  It’s a good thing to go back to if we are trying to regain the pillars of our health.                                                                                                      Now, it is tradition that melatonin in the body is associated with the pineal gland but it is now known that it is also produced in other brain cells and a wide range of organs in the rest of the body.  It has been thought of as the sleep hormone, inducing and maintaining, a process known as homeostasis.

It also occurs in our food and is produced by our fellow travellers – the human biome. It has been thought of as the sleep hormone, inducing and maintaining.  This is only a start however, it is known to be a profound anti-oxidant, countering damaging ‘reactive oxygen species’, which are produced as a result of energy production.  The body also makes the stuff in response to exercise and naturally during sleep.  It appears quickly in response to sunlight and during a fever. It is stimulated by red and infra-red light and inhibited by blue light,                                                                               So, it is an ancient  substance which responds to various challenges that the body encounters but there are other important effects.  It stimulates various macrophages – white blood cells  -  a vital part of our immunity and also stimulates the important glutathione, which has many helpful functions in keeping our body healthy -  an all round ‘good egg’.

So here is a word that might start to explain a good number of things we are told these days - that outside and sunlight and exercise are good, as is limiting our devotion to the screen. Eating a good natural diet and good sleep are also on our side.

The word is melatonin!

Perhaps sadly most of the literature about melotonin is about the its supplimentary use and I have not found much about it’s wider homoestatic effect in the body.

I’m afraid this a trend in the world that instead of doing natural and simple things to help ourselves we tend to reach for a drug company.

There is a lot of good information on the subject for anyone who wants to take the subject further….. here is a good one and available without paying a fortune!

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1600-079X.1993.tb00478.x

DIMENTIA; So here is something unlike melatonin that has not as far as we know been with us since the dawn of time - it a real pressing and threatens to overwhelm us like no other problem of health or lack of it.

The numbers are extraordinary, at the time of writing this we are probably up to a million sufferers in this country and rise in numbers are rising seemingly without any limiting factors. The threat to our nations resources is unfathomable and the threat to our vitality just as serious. Conventional industrial medicine seems to have next to know answer. It is providing a mop in a flooded room and has no idea as to how to turn off the tap!!