Did you know you might be living in the golden age of brain science? Our understanding of the human brain is expanding so rapidly that some scientists are calling it such. Yet, there is so much to discover that others liken the brain to a vast, unknown frontier. One thing is known for sure, though — to understand the brain is to understand ourselves.
But for much of human history, the brain was not held in such high regard. The ancient Egyptians, when preparing bodies for mummification, would discard the brain while preserving the organs deemed more important for one’s journey into the afterlife, like the heart, lungs, and liver. In some of the most ancient medical texts, the functions of the mind are usually assigned to the heart, not to the brain. The brain was dismissed as mere cranial stuffing.
Today, even primary school kids have some idea about the brain and its function — that it’s a gray, wrinkly thing we use to think. And few people would dismiss its importance. For us, to lose our brains’ functions is to lose ourselves, and we thus dread the thought of dementia or brain injury, placing these among the worst of all possible fates. We now know that the brain is not just important, but is the very mediator of wellness. The health of the body can no longer be separated from the health of the brain, and the health of the brain cannot be separated from the health of the body.
The transition of how we gradually came to view the brain so differently parallels the story of how people have related to health and wellness in general. Like so much else in human cultures, perceptions of what it means to be “healthy” have varied drastically throughout the past. Yet, these views can be generalized into two basic perspectives — holistic and mechanistic.
For much of human history, the conception of health has been holistic — focusing on the totality of the human being, rather than looking for the root cause of an illness within a particular organ or bodily function. In tribal societies, to this day, when someone is sick, no distinctions are made between body, mind, and spirit. An illness represents a disruption in the proper natural balance of things, and the individual is likely to be brought back into balance through the use of herbs, spiritual rituals, and energetic purification. Maintaining health, therefore, is a matter of understanding one’s relationship to the whole — to the whole of one’s tribe, to the whole of the earth, and to the whole of one’s own being.
The mechanistic point of view, which rose to prominence in the Western world along with industrialism, perceives the body as a machine. Symptoms of diseases are singled out for direct treatment, and the causes underlying the disorders are assigned to malfunctioning processes in the body. This viewpoint, at least at first glance, seems the most scientific — isolating and quantifying everything according to its separate form and function.
For those of us growing up in the Western world, this viewpoint now seems normal, even “traditional.” Yet, the holistic view (the truly traditional one of the two) has persisted, leading to a kind of intellectual battle between those who advocate a holistic approach to health and those who prefer the mechanistic one. In the 20th century especially, attempts were made by the medical establishment — which advocates the management of symptoms through pharmaceuticals and other scientifically validated treatments — to limit the practice of more holistic approaches to health, such as naturopathy.
