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Richardson, N. & Locks, A. (2014) Chapter one, ‘Body: nature or culture’, in Body Studies: The basics. Routledge. 1-16

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Supplements to make us smarter.

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Mindfulness meditation is even being taught in schools in a bid to increase student well-being.

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According to this article " You don't need to go on a meditation retreat to create peace in your life: If you're looking to cultivate a little calm, try tackling the four household activities below. You'll have a happier brain." Funnily enough, doing the house work doesn't make me happy!
http://www.huffingtonpost.com.au/entry/mindfulness-and-chores_n_5533845

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We are bombarded with books, articles and television programs telling us what we should be eating to improve our brain function.

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Which one of these lists of foods do we believe?

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What did we do before chia?

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Top ten superfoods for your brain

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The stress of our modern day lifestyles is often cited as the reason we all need so many de-stressing therapies, supplements and superfoods.

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"music therapy is used to enhance health, functioning and wellbeing"

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"Art therapy is about connecting the whole body" People seek art therapy for both physical and mental health symptoms.

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Adult colouring books have become popular as the new way to meditate.

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Apparently eating certain foods can impact on our brains biochemical pathways, which in turn can improve our mental health. Does this prove a link between body and mind?

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According to "Australian Women's Health' magazine, we can become more zen, just by placing our fingers on our pulse and chanting "sut nam, sut nam" for two minutes. If only goat man had known it was that easy!!

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Embodied Cognition is the idea that not only is the body connected to the mind, but that the body can influence the mind. This is a sharp contrast to the theory of dualism.
"our cognition is influenced, perhaps determined by, our experiences in the physical world." (McNerney, S. 2011)
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/a-brief-guide-to-embodied-cognition-why-you-are-not-your-brain/

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The theory of mind/body dualism, influenced by the writings of Rene Descartes, asserts that the mind and body are two separate entities. That is, that they can both exist independently of the other. The mind is considered to be an immaterial thing which is responsible for intellect and reason. Whilst the body is seen as a material object, considered responsible for excess and unruly emotion. The theory of dualism purports that the body is not 'the self' but is purely an outer shell. The body therefore limits 'the self'. For example the body may be too weak or too tired to fulfil the minds desires. Throughout history the mind has been considered superior to the body. The body must be suppressed or tamed, in order for us to be human. Those people who are deemed to have failed to obtain control over their bodies are reviled. (Richardson and Locks, 2014)

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“switching your consciousness off”.
States of Mind, was an exhibition in London, earlier this year, which explored the connection between mind and body. One entry is a video which records the moment a patient goes under a general anaesthetic. The video aims to explore the realm between consciousness and unconsciousness. Descartes believed that without a functioning mind, we are no longer human. But is that true of coma patients?

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They hover between worlds. One woman seems blissful, smiling with acceptance. Another looks terrified as her big eyes flicker and roll. Aya Ben Ron's film Still Under Treatment is a troubling and eerie study of patients being anaesthetised prior to surgery. Anaesthesia surely ranks with antibiotics as one of the pillars of modern medicine, allowing us to undergo surgery without knowing it. Yet the expressions of yielding and resistance on the faces of the seven patients in Ben Ron's film and the total oblivion that descends reveal how mysterious this moment is when something is nulled inside them, when they are "put to sleep".

"Physiologically it's different from sleep - it's dreamless", explains Kevin Fong, a consultant anaesthetist at UCLH hospital in London. He says it's more like "switching your consciousness off". How that idea would have fascinated René Descartes, the man who famously said "I think therefore I am". Aya Ben Ron's film is showing at the Wellcome Collection in an exhibition called States of Mind, which begins with this great 17th-century scientist and philosopher's illustration of a dissected brain, from his book De Homine, published in 1662. Descartes' engraving shows the soft grey matter - a cauliflower crossed with a deflated balloon - cut open to reveal the pineal gland. He identified this precise place in the human brain as the exact spot where the mind or "soul" communicates with and controls the body.

For Descartes, we are actually two things, "a soul and a body. First I must describe the body on its own; then the soul, again on its own; and finally I must show how these two natures would have to be joined and united in order to constitute men who resemble us." His belief that the mind is a separate thing from the body - often called "Cartesian dualism" - is an accurate description of what it feels like to be human. Call it mind, soul, or consciousness, but we feel as if there is something inside us that is not mere matter, that is aethereal and invisible and is the me writing this, the you reading it. Consciousness is everything.

The moment Aya Ben Ron's anaesthesia film records is one that has gripped artists for centuries. It is the moment the mind dies, or the moment - if you prefer - the soul leaves the body. The sculptor Gianlorenzo Bernini, a contemporary of Descartes, portrayed a woman on her death bed. Like a patient going under anaesthetic, the Blessed Ludovica Albertoni falls back and closes her eyes, conscious right up to the moment her soul leaves her flesh. What has happened to her? Where does the conscious person go when the body dies? Hans Holbein ponders the same mystery in his painting The Dead Christ in the Tomb. A corpse with eyes wide open lies sealed in a rectangular box. His eyes are terrifying because there is no consciousness in them. They look without seeing. Can this body without a mind really be resurrected?

William Blake, in an illustration to Robert Blair's poem The Grave that is displayed in the States of Mind show next to Descartes' brain, answers with a resounding yes. As a male corpse lies forsaken on a slab, a pale form rises out of it - the soul set free. She is feminine. To Blake, the gulf between our consciousness or soul and the fleshy vehicle we walk around in is so vast that spirit and body can be pictured as opposite in gender.

Blake's vision reveals how hard it is for us to imagine the end of consciousness. The me that is thinking this appears to me so sovereign, so intricate that it seems impossible to ever switch me off permanently. And, in fact, there are many states between waking and coma, conditions in which the mind is asleep yet conscious. Henry Fuseli's hideous 1781 drawing The Nightmare is one of the great images of such states in art. Fuseli created this infernal vision of a demonic being that squats on the chest of a woman who lies helpless in death-like sleep, just when the Gothic novel was seizing hold of 18th-century imaginations.

Yet Emily Sargent, the curator of States of Mind, sees this still-shocking image as having more to do with medicine than Gothic fiction. Fuseli, the exhibition shows, was friendly with doctors who were doing pioneering research on the nature of sleep. The Nightmare, Sargent argues, is actually a scientific illustration of sleep paralysis, when the normal paralysis that keeps us from harming ourselves in our sleep fails to disengage as we awake: "Regaining consciousness, the person finds they cannot move and may feel a crushing sensation in their chest."

In an opposite sleep disorder, the neural circuits that should paralyse the sleeping brain don't fire. In a terrifying medical video shot in a sleep laboratory, a man acts out his recurring dream of being attacked and having to fight for his life. He thrashes about and punches the bed in his sleep. He had to tie himself to the bed for years to stop himself attacking his wife in his sleep. In another frightening exhibit, newspaper articles tell the recent story of a Manchester man who killed his father while sleepwalking.

The realm between consciousness and oblivion is a dangerous place. It is a state in which we can be manipulated. Goshka Macuga has created a spooky mannequin of the Somnambulist from the 1922 German film The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. In this masterpiece of horror, a sleepwalker is controlled by a sinister magus and made to do evil without knowing it. Macuga's Somnambulist is as dead-looking as Holbein's Christ. Like a clay golem, Macuga's inert figure looks as if it's waiting to be controlled by some evil scientist.

So is the sovereign consciousness that Descartes thought so free and so capable of reason really in control at all? Are we all somnambulists, our conscious selves mere patchworks of sensory information and memory that are full of holes and lesions? A work by Shona Illingworth documents the experiences of Claire, a woman whose damaged brain does not retain memories. One way Claire copes with her amnesia is to have an automatic camera hung around her neck that constantly takes pictures of her day from her point of view: sometimes one of these pictures can trigger a memory. It's eerie looking at photographs of a trip to St Kilda: aran sweaters, mountains, dark water all held in a prosthetic memory bank.

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An infernal vision ... The Nightmare by Henry Fuseli from 1781 may have been a depiction of sleep paralysis

To live without memory is still to be alive. Yet the final frontier of consciousness, where only advanced scientific research can go, lies beyond the mind as we know it. The people Aya Ben Ron films going under anaesthetic will wake up. Many coma victims do not. Some will open their eyes but be completely unresponsive - the brain so damaged that the patient is in a "persistent vegetative state." Only the brain stem still works; the mind - according to most neurologists - has gone. So what are the flashes of light in an experiment shown here that seem to show reactions to questions in the brains of such people?

Descartes would say that a body without a functioning mind is no longer human. Yet we know - from our own sleeping - that consciousness is the greatest enigma there is. One of the most compelling exhibits in this exhibition is a collection of notes and models by Francis Crick, who along with James Watson discovered the structure of DNA. This great scientist of our age spent much of his later life trying to discover the neurological basis of consciousness. He didn't even get close.

States of Mind is at the Wellcome Collection, London from 4 February-16 October
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To oblivion and beyond: art and science at the edge of consciousness

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From William Blake's vision of a soul leaving the body to Goshka Macuga's creepy somnambulist, a new exhibition explores the mysteries of the mind - but are we any closer to finding the answers Descartes was seeking when he dissected a human brain more than 350 years ago?

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"There is a lack of a mutually acceptable vocabulary with which to discuss how minds and bodies interact, within social contexts, to produce illness."
There is growing evidence to support the use of techniques which focus on the mind when dealing with physical illness that has no apparent medical cause. Rather than purely focusing on physical interventions, the use of placebos and mindfulness, for example, are proving effective.

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There are certain kinds of illnesses that seem to cause great distress to doctors; and there are certain kinds of patients that medicine seems almost incapable of helping. It can seem to some people that doctors are almost hostile to them. We often read in illness memoirs of doctors who have been dismissive, and patients being told: "it's all in your head", "you're imagining it", "your symptoms aren't real" (whatever that means).

I have in mind a patient I saw last Monday morning. Mr Hutchens (not his real name) has been depressed for many years, since losing his job because of his chronic back pain, sustained after an apparently minor road accident. His scans and x-rays and blood work are all normal, except for a wee bit of age-appropriate wear and tear. But immobility has caused him to put on weight, and then develop type-two diabetes, and this combination of irreversible events have caused his pain to worsen. He takes tramadol, a powerful, commonly prescribed narcotic painkiller - definitely your go‑to drug if you're recovering from surgery, which was its original purpose, but now, it seems prescribed for pretty much everything; and gabapentin - a drug originally licensed for epilepsy, but never quite finding a home, until it was relicensed for pain. Now it seems it is prescribed for, again ... pretty much anything.

There is an edge to him, a sense that he feels a little hostility to me, which I fear may be explicable. The last time I had seen him, in what evidently came across as aggressive smugness, I had tried to tell Mr Hutchens that his heavy doses of narcotics and sedatives were the problem, not the answer, and he needed to cut down the drugs, take some exercise, and stop smoking. He said easy for you to say pal - which it is - and then accused me of trying to tell him, in my clumsy way, that his lifetime of pain was "all in his head". And that I was telling him that his pain, somehow, as a consequence, was less real. Which, in a way, I was. Which, in a way, perhaps, it is.

There are things that scientific western medicine is brilliant at. Fixing a broken bone, for example. It's comparatively simple to do good science on a thing like that - a broken bone has a stable and uncontestable nature in the world, so fixing broken bones is something we know exactly how good we are at doing. But medicine isn't all like that - in fact most of it isn't. We have brains attached to these bags of bones, and these contain a whole, different world of experience and perception; these brains do their own thing, irrespective of what our science tells us should be happening in their bodies. In many, even most, cases, we haven't a hope of curing the distress experienced by these brains if we simply address the metrics of the bodies they're carried in. That's why, however much I up his painkillers, and prescribe new, better, fancier ones, Mr Hutchens's pain will, stubbornly, never get better.

There is a lack of a mutually acceptable vocabulary with which to discuss how minds and bodies interact, within social contexts, to produce illness. There is something about the either/or way that we use to conceptualise the problem that makes attempts to address and talk about it fraught with misunderstanding and antagonism. Relationships between people and their doctors will always be frustrated until we can find a way through this. How to get traction on this big, unanswered question in medicine is the challenge to which Jo Marchant sets herself in Cure.

When writers talk about healing the mind, or spirit, or soul, they often abandon decent standards of evidence and rationality, and stop making sense. But this is Dr Marchant's territory. Writing with simplicity, clarity and style, and covering an enormous range of material, she surveys with grace what we think we know, and what we would like to know, about the mysterious and troubling relationship between our minds and our bodies.

After a too brief introduction of what has become known as the mind/body problem, she reviews the science of what is understood about the function of placebos, and their extraordinary power to make people feel better. She says, as anyone who has been loved as a child already knows, that "kissing it better" really does work. But she asks how? And then pursues the question. What can be the mechanics of such a thing - a release of endorphins?

She develops a deep discussion of how language, meaning and culture determine how people experience illness, and how those in turn determine their responses to technical medicine, ritual, placebos and caregiving. She illustrates this with vivid testimony of her own, witnessing the power of compassionate care in the alleviation of her own pain during childbirth, and contrasting her experiences of technological, hospital, doctor-led obstetrics with a home delivery, performed by a caring midwife, whom she had had the chance to get to know well.

Things take a more contentious direction as she moves to discuss the potential role of hypnosis in the management of irritable bowel, and then to the battleground of chronic fatigue syndrome, and the extraordinarily polarising effect that this devastating condition has on patients, their carers and their doctors.

She surveys a range of innovative, nontraditional interventions for the treatment of severe pain, and it is here that I think she misses a trick. She references, too briefly, the epidemic occurring in the US of prescriptions for the powerful narcotic, oxycodone, for non-specific pain, then seems to stop just when I wanted her to go much further. Chronic pain of unclear physical cause is the clearest example that one could ask for of complex, perplexing, mind-body medicine, and our common solution - of doping sufferers with powerful narcotics and sedative anticonvulsants, could well be, in my opinion, the next medical scandal.

From about this point on I became increasingly uncomfortable. She talks about "mindfulness" in medicine, and I flinch a little. She cites research that offers evidence for the physical connectedness of our brains with our immune systems via our vagus nerves, and the potential role for "biofeedback" in the management of ... just about everything. And I begin to think: really? Near the end we find ourselves in the long queue for the healing waters of Lourdes, investigating the curative power of religious faith and miracles, and my anxiety levels have grown uncontainable and my bullshit detector is going off.

But Marchant is level-headed, always with one foot planted in the worlds of science and reason. Though open-minded, she is rigorous, her gently sceptical tone reassures, and she gracefully skewers quackery. Many of the claims she makes in her balanced, compassionate book can seem self-evident in retrospect - "believing in an angry or judgmental God seems to make people more stressed" - but are perhaps all the more important for that.

As she says: "Taking account of the mind in health is actually a more scientific and evidence-based approach than relying ever more heavily on physical interventions and drugs." And its neglect by doctors and researchers acts to the detriment of us all.

* Peter Dorward, an Edinburgh GP, is the author of the novel Nightingale, published by Two Ravens Press. To order Cure for £12.99 (£16.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
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Cure: A Journey Into the Science of Mind Over Body review - can illness be 'all in your head'?

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There are certain kinds of illnesses that seem to cause great distress to doctors; and there are certain kinds of patients that medicine seems almost incapable of helping. It can seem to some people that doctors are almost hostile to them.

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"it’s about the nature of the human condition, and the strange, sometimes glorious lengths to which people go in attempt to escape it."
This man was so fed up with being a human, he transformed himself into a goat! U.K. designer Thomas Thwaites wanted to see if he could escape from being human for a while. He wanted to try and quiet the chattering human mind and just be in the present moment. He built an exoskeleton to try and inhabit the body of a goat and used "hallucinogens and transcranial magnetic stimulation, which temporarily suppresses the areas of his brain responsible for speech" (Dunne, C. 2016)
http://hyperallergic.com/292897/sick-of-being-human-a-designer-transformed-himself-into-a-goat/

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"The philosophy teaches non-dualism, the idea that there are no substantial differences between individual elements of the physical and spiritual worlds."
People from all over the world travel to this spiritual centre in Southern India to learn the art of unity. That is, the combining of yoga poses with mediation and chanting to unify mind and body. Where does the belief come from that if we can master unity of body and mind, hence achieving embodiment, then we will attain happiness? Is this really the key to happiness?

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Every year, people of all ages, races, and creeds journey from around the world to reach Arsha Vidya Gurukulam, a secluded forest ashram in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu. There, they spend three years reading, meditating, and learning Sanskrit. Why? They're seeking the answers to life.

But enlightenment is easier said than done, according to Swami Dayananda Saraswati, the central figure in the new documentary Gurukulam. A folksy, unassuming guru clad in bright orange robes, Saraswati-who died last year-was one of the leading practitioners of the school of Hindu philosophy known as Advaita Vedanta. The philosophy teaches non-dualism, the idea that there are no substantial differences between individual elements of the physical and spiritual worlds.

Today, many Westerners primarily associate Hinduism with yoga. But gurus like Saraswati go deeper, and help interested learners understand the philosophy of unity that lies beyond chanting and poses.

To tell the ashram's story, Gurukulam breaks from traditional documentary style. Co-directors Jillian Elizabeth and Neil Dalal didn't put any narration or talking heads in the film, and they don't give the history or philosophy behind Vedanta.

Instead, the film is an immersive sensory experience that uses quiet pacing and dreamy rhythms to plunge the viewer inside the daily rituals and meditations of the swami and his students.

Speaking from Alberta, Canada-where Dalal is a professor of South Asian philosophy at the University of Alberta-the two filmmakers talked about what the yoga craze gets right (and wrong) about Hinduism, the unique progressive nature of Saraswati, and why they didn't want the movie to explain too much.
What makes Advaita Vedanta such a unique school of Hindu thought?
Dalal: It traces its lineage directly back into some of the oldest spiritual philosophical texts. It's the oldest living non-dual tradition in Indian philosophy. Those texts, the Upanishads, people date to different periods-most scholars date them to the ninth century B.C.E.-and we don't know the exact history, but it seems to have continued, certainly from around the sixth century C.E. to the present.
Can you define non-duality for me?
Dalal: It's the philosophical theory that in the ultimate reality, there are no distinctions or differences-no qualitative differences and no substantial differences. We live in a world of duality-you and me, the objects around us-but [non-duality is] arguing for something like a unified field of existence. Advaita Vedanta has had a massive influence in the history of philosophy.

Elizabeth: And not just philosophy, but also the spiritual traditions of India and what has come out of [them], such as what's happening in the West here with yoga. There's a lot of talk about "we're all one," and "I bow to the divine in you, the divine in me." All this stuff comes out of this non-dual idea.
Since you brought it up: In the West, we most closely associate this school of thought with yoga. Is that a positive thing for Hindu philosophy, that we've embraced the mind-body-wellness part of the equation, or is something being lost?
Dalal: That's a good question. It deserves a complex answer, and it's actually become quite political in recent years. Yoga really is, in the West now, a wellness, holistic health type [of] tradition. It incorporates elements of meditation, things like that, but it's really about wellness. I think the Indian traditions include that, but the traditions themselves go much deeper and further, generally, than what you would find in your average yoga class.

I think it's great that yoga is continuing to grow at an exponential rate, but from the traditional perspective I'd see it more as a stepping-stone to something much deeper and bigger than simply developing wellness or physical health or stress reduction. Because what they're all talking about, ultimately, is an inquiry that radically changes your very self-identity. Yoga is so big and so vast, even just in the West, so I can't stereotype that. But popular yoga hasn't really delved into that in the way tradition does. I think there are big pieces missing.

Elizabeth: The proliferation of yoga in the West is quite amazing-the fact that something even remotely Eastern, that's spiritual, has so much exposure on such a massive level. It's something that's very exciting culturally, because people are looking for something different and looking for change. But of course, something gets lost in the process too, as they try to reinvent it for their own lifestyle.

Dalal: Western yoga is also part of a vast, neoliberal commodification, and to market it means stripping away a lot of elements that are not going to work in the market. So deeper philosophical study, reading these texts, engaging the culture in any way-these things don't sell as well. Nowadays it's things like "beer and yoga" or "wine tasting and yoga." It's such a saturated market, and it's so competitive.
The film has a very observational approach, where you don't explain what's going on. What did that allow you to do with the material?
Dalal: A big part was trying to get the phenomenological experience for viewers, of actually being in the place and space, and not having it mediated by a narrator, who tends to be a white male. That sort of "others" the community. The moment an [image] has somebody telling you what to think, you're not really having the experience of being there. We're trying to slow the film down to gain this sense of raw, sensory immersion, and not tell viewers just what to think, not to construct it too much, to allow people to have their own response.

Elizabeth: We really removed the descriptive aspect of "what is Vedanta, what is this tradition, what is the dot that people put on their forehead?" Because when you arrive there as an outsider, you're not going to know those things immediately. The film was not created to give somebody information about culture and a community. What we really wanted people to do was experience it as though they were in the place.
So you don't think a knowledge of Vedanta is necessary for understanding the film?
Dalal: I don't think it's necessary. It's only going to help. You can go to Wikipedia and read 10 minutes on Vedanta, or read a little paper. That's not what we were trying to do. We were trying to give people the experience of what it would be like to study Vedanta. If we just described what Vedanta is, people would come out of the film and go, "Oh yeah, I kind of know what this is, I can go tell someone: A, B, C, D." Rather, it's partly poetic.

In the teaching tradition of Vedanta, you're not supposed to just listen and say, "Oh, I got it." Because if you think that, you probably didn't get it. So there's a resistance in the film to an overly facile decoding of what Vedanta is and what the spirituality of this community is. That can be really disconcerting to some viewers who want everything packaged in digestible, bite-size chunks.
The students that we meet come from different backgrounds, from all over the world: there's an American professor, a former U.N. diplomat. What did they all have in common?
Elizabeth: They're all intellectuals. It was very clear that they're all interested in deeper inquiry. People who ask a lot of questions end up at the ashram. In the Indian community, there's also that, but there's also the religious, cultural component where they're looking to have more in their lives.

Dalal: They don't separate an intellectual, cognitive kind of pursuit from a spiritual pursuit. And that's a polarity that's taken root in the West: Generally, if you're thinking too hard, you're not being spiritual. Philosophy and spirituality have been divorced. In these traditions, they don't see it that way.
The swami is a very open person in the film-he jokes about how people misunderstand the concept of enlightenment. How did his personality affect his teachings?
Elizabeth: It made him more accessible, attractive, to the average person who normally wouldn't be attracted to such a tradition. He knew a lot about the world and he knew a lot about the West. He has an ashram in Pennsylvania. He was teaching people in California in the seventies, mostly Californians who weren't of Indian background. It gives him the ability to connect to people, and people are attracted to that. If they're looking to understand themselves, they want to connect with their teacher.

Dalal: He was supersharp intellectually, and progressive, despite coming from an Orthodox village himself. It was controversial early on, in the sixties and early seventies, that he was teaching in English, for example. And he was allowing women to study, and people from various classes and castes.

Elizabeth: And treating them as an equal, too, whereas in the Buddhist tradition, that's not necessarily true.

Dalal: Allowing foreigners to study, and all this. He lived abroad so much and traveled the world doing talks at the U.N., interfaith conferences. I think the general sense is that he walked his talk and he was the real deal. When I first encountered this particular lineage and probed them philosophically, they had a real command of the tradition. The inference I was making from that was that, well, Dayananda must really know his stuff. He's not just a one-hit wonder: His students are really knowledgeable.
Saraswati died last year. How has his death affected the ashram community?
Dalal: It's devastating to have your guru, your beloved teacher, pass. But I think his health had been so bad-he actually flatlined twice on the hospital table over the last 15 years-on some level the students have been gearing up for it. I think the community's doing well.

Elizabeth: He's been documented very well within the community. There are many books written and audio recordings of him. People say, "Oh, he's still with me."

Dalal: It's almost like he's incarnate in his teachings, whether through books, audio, DVDs, or through his students who are teaching now. There's a theological view that he's no longer with us in his physical body, but he's still with the students through their own knowledge and their own growth.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
Andrew Lapin is a film critic and journalist who has written for NPR, Vulture, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, and many other publications. Follow him on Twitter.

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Beyond Yoga: Explore Life Inside a Hindu Spiritual Center

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Every year, people of all ages, races, and creeds journey from around the world to reach Arsha Vidya Gurukulam, a secluded forest ashram in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu. There, they spend three years reading, meditating, and learning Sanskrit. Why? They're seeking the answers to life.

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The Alexander technique aims to achieve psycho-physical unity. The belief is, that there is an outward manifestation of our inner emotions.