When you spot an acquaintance across the street, or bump into them, you acknowledge with a smile, or reach out to shake their hands. Or, if the ‘expanse’ is beyond a handshake, you ‘wave,’ or illustrate the ‘thumbs up’ sign. Each community or culture has its own mode of greeting one another. It could be a ‘hello,’ ‘aloha,’ ‘namaste,’ or a friendly nod of the head in response. This is all part of us, our tradition, or culture. It also connotes your own space around your body. The fast-expanding field of neuroscience calls it your ‘peripersonal space.’ It is all part of the whole. It is also the sum of the parts, which is ‘you’ in flesh and blood.
Your space does not just celebrate a simile, or an extended maxim. It projects a functional perspective; your personal space is a fact of life. It expresses a chart, much like an atlas, or a diagram, no less. Call it mind-mapping of a different kind, where your brain connects to your limbs and body, holding the prospect to execute action in your own space — your physiological province. It details a canvas that is larger than your own self. It exists beyond your body. It envelops, permeates and merges with the cosmos. It also connects with your fellow beings, family, friends, and colleagues.
When you play computer games, your hand that holds the mouse is replete or endowed with spatial skills that connect to your mind and brain, pronto. As you move your ‘muse,’ your body-mind ‘maps’ your every move. If you are a golfer, at any level, your mind-body ‘taps’ your every movement, or thought, or stroke that you play — even when you mentally rehearse them. It all happens as if you are on ‘auto-pilot.’ As your mind-body replicates such maps, you automatically enter ‘space’ beyond your body. Put simply, you know that you are allied to every tool, or skill, you employ, or use, as if they were your own alter ego.
The plain art of eating is also a part of such a process. As you savor each morsel, your ‘peripersonal space’ expands to encase them. You may sometimes think that it is your fingers that do the chore for you. The fact is it is your brain that encircles your field of conscious awareness — reaching out with your fingertips to the victual on your plate. It does not require the presence of food to send a picture-postcard of the ‘treat’ that you await to eat. Just thinking, or the mere thought, of food will have the same cascading effect.
New research shows that your brain is swarming with such interconnected maps — along with their intent, potential for action, or mapping others’ actions. When you see somebody munching food, it sets a chain of events in your mind-body. It tickles your palate, no less. Not all of us recognise, forget about appreciating nature’s handiwork, in the entire plot residing within the deep recesses of our conscious mind. This is akin to using your touch phone day-in and day-out, without knowing, or caring a damn, about its processes. The familiarity of using the gadget is ingrained in your mind. It works. It is natural; also, all-encompassing.
All of this and more cannot just emerge with the best of artificial intelligence (AI). The reason is simple. Also, profound. Nothing that is naturally and truly intelligent is ever going to surface in a ‘bodiless’ processor. Maybe, something close to human intelligence and ‘subjectivity’ could possibly emerge sometime in the future. We don’t know what it could be. Yet, one will have difficulty in celebrating ‘artificial consciousness’ that is ghostly or ethereal. What ‘makes’ us human beings is our ‘personal’ entity — the ‘me-ness’ that adds and augments our psyche, including our ability to comprehend and navigate on charted and uncharted waters in our journey through life.
In like manner not all of us often bestow a thought to what goes on in our body with such amazing, natural, sophisticated precision. Like the rhythms of a melodious wave all through life. We know it by just one name — bio-clock. What drives our bio-clock has intrigued us from time immemorial. What we actually know today is every function of the bio-clock rises and falls with a kind of accepted constancy and equilibrium. So delicate is this symmetry that a clock that goes awry, not only in its wake-sleep cycle, but also by way of its full day-night pattern, may lead to illness and disease states.
The existence of the bio-clock was first ‘conceived’ by philosopher Aristotle, 2,500 years ago. It was demonstrated, with gadgets, by researcher Erwin Bunning in the late-1930s. Bunning’s study, which was soon replicated by other investigators, confirmed that there existed a solitary, master circadian (circa = about; diem = day) clock in all human beings, including animals and plants, coupled to a series of ‘subordinate oscillators.’
New research has shown that the pineal gland and its hormone, melatonin, are fundamental to maintaining the normal phase and amplitude of different body rhythms, their synchronization with one another, besides factors such as the external environment. For example, the level of melatonin in depressed individuals suggests not only decreased values, but also a marked variation in their bodily rhythms.
Melatonin is a chemical ‘courier.’ It functions as a ‘chronobiotic’ substance — one which has the capacity to reset desynchronized bodily rhythms back to normal by percolating though every cell and tissue. One excellent example of the mechanism is ‘jet-lag,’ which, in real terms, is the inability of the air traveler to resynchronize their body rhythms with the time of their destination on arrival. This is precisely the reason why melatonin supplements — as also, the wonder herb, ginger — have become a ‘rage’ to ease jet lag without the dangers, or side-effects, of prescription sleeping pills.
The inference is obvious. Our mind-body is so seamlessly integrated that everything we do functions with clockwork precision, even when we don’t know what is happening, or what it connotes to living a life in the fast, or slow lane. Just like what the chip is to an electronic gizmo, our mind-body exists for each other. They are inseparable; they are not complete without one another. Just think of it — touch, temperature, pain, angst, happiness and pleasure are all part of our mind-body’s true groundwork. Our other senses are primarily ‘value-adds,’ notwithstanding the fact that one may lack some of them in one respect or the other. To cull a fascinating exemplar — individuals who are visually- or hearing-challenged, have their own bodily maps, or ‘radar.’ Sights and sounds may be empty patterns for them. Yet, what makes them unique — also, at times, better than many of us, who see, but don’t discern — is their natural ability to factor or ‘perceive’ things with a deep psychical intent.
If this is not what endows us with our unique, individual identities, as distinct as our fingerprint, what is?
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