"Footnotes to Introduction"
Footnotes 1:-
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"Dr. Mario E. Martinez, a clinical neuropsychologist, established the Institute of Biocognitive Psychology in 1998.
He developed a theory of mind-body-culture called Biocognition that suggests how cognition and biology coemerge with their historical culture in a bioinformational field that seeks maximum contextual relevance. The Biocognitive model evolved from research in the interdisciplinary field of psychoneuroimmunology and in medical anthropology. It proposes that cognitive interpretations are communicated linearly and locally through the immune, nervous and endocrine pathways and are expressed in manifest portals throughout the body.
At the same time, the Biocognitive communication is impressed non-linearly and non-locally in the totality of the bioinformational field (all cells). This concept of developmental biocognition, assumes that our thoughts and our biology are dynamically interwoven with our historical culture and cannot be reduced to their components. Consciousness is viewed as a coherent expression of inseparable cognitive, biological and historical culture parameters that coemerge in a bioinformational field.
In this model, disease is defined as a dire conflict between our bioethical codes (belief templates) and our behavior. When a bioethical conflict remains unresolved, it triggers a chronic stress response that compromises our biological functions at their most genetically vulnerable levels. Biocognitive theory refutes the concept that divides disease into organic and mental pathology. It proposes instead that both components are inseparable from their contextual relevance.
Biocognition argues that the life sciences must transcend Newtonian reductionism and Cartesian dualism as well as their consequent upward and downward causalities where mind and body remain divided and one entity originates from the other. Biocognitive theory offers the concept of coemergent contextualism as an alternative to attributing cause to the simplest level of the organism where cognition is explained microbiologically or to the most complex where organic processes are attributed cause at the level of consciousness.
Coemergent contextualism attributes cause to the biocultural histories that are simultaneously exchanged between communicators in a shared bioinformational field that seeks contextual relevance. This process of communication decontextualizes bioinformation into unstable traces fractals (non-linear) during storage and recontextualizes the traces into biocognitions (linear) during retrieval based on the contextual relevance demanded by the bioinformational field. Coemergent contextualism requires linear and non-linear processes as well as local and non-local events.
Consequently, Biocognition embraces non-linearity and non-locality concepts that, although well established in complexity and quantum theories respectively, are only beginning to be explored in the cognitive and biological sciences."
Extracts from presented papers:-
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Footnotes 2:-
Professor H. A. Magnus' report was as follows:
"The specimen consists of a roughly elliptical piece of warty tissue measuring 1.5 by 0.7 centimetres. Section shows a massive degree of hyper-keratosis [layers of horny overgrowth], the average thickness of the keratin layer being 1.5 millimetres. The keratin [a fibrous protein found in nails, hair and horns] is laminated [arranged in plates] and has produced many fissures in the underlying epidermis, which is atrophic [wasted] and in places thinly drawn out into the keratin. The papillae [protrusions] are elongated and narrow (alpine papillae).
There are no other changes in the corium [lower skin] apart from a marked deficiency in elastic fibre, only occasional fragments of which are present." A. A. Mason, the Senior Registrar of the Queen Victoria Hospital whose case this was, writes:
"The improvement in the patient's mental state has been as dramatic as his organic improvement. Previously his chooling and social contact had been reduced to a minimum, his sensitivity towards his smell and appearance causing him to become lonely and solitary, with a hopeless attitude towards future friendship and employment.
Now he has become a happy, normal boy, though still educationally retarded, and is already being employed as an electrician's assistant. From this response to hypnosis one of two inferences may be drawn. Either there is a hitherto unsuspected psychic factor in the aetiology [causal history] of the disease or this is a case of congenital organic condition being affected by a psychological process.
A combination of both these factors is of course a third possibility. Whichever is true, the improvement in this case seems to be totally unprecedented, and was effected after the failure of all recognised methods of treatment."
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Footnotes 3:-
"Pharmacological manipulations of the alpha 2-noradrenergic system. Effects on cognition byCoull JT
Electrophysiological and neurosurgical lesion studies with experimental animals have implicated the ascending dorsal noradrenergic bundle of the locus coeruleus system in cognitive process such as memory, learning and selective attention. However, it has also been suggested that noradrenaline (norepinephrine) is crucial in certain cognitive functions associated with the frontal lobes, particularly the prevention of distractibility by irrelevant stimuli.
The alpha 2-receptors of the prefrontal cortex appear to be of particular importance in this respect. Studies with humans and experimental primates provide substantial support for this view. The aged primate brain is prone to degeneration of the locus coeruleus, as well as profound catecholamine depletion in the prefrontal cortex, and so is ideal for psychopharmacological investigation of the role of noradrenaline in frontal lobe function.
Elderly monkeys show deficits in performance of the delayed response task, which can be reversed directly by both the mixed alpha 1/alpha 2-agonist clonidine, the more specific alpha 2-agonist guanfacine and also, indirectly, by the alpha 2-antagonist yohimbine. It is suggested that these results can be explained by an attenuation of the distracting properties of irrelevant stimuli following stimulation of noradrenergic activity.
Conversely, distractibility is magnified whenever noradrenergic activity is reduced. This is supported by similar findings in psychopharmacological studies of healthy humans. The exception to this is when the locus coeruleus is likely to be firing, e.g. in times of stress or when novel stimuli are encountered. Clonidine attenuates locus coeruleus firing on such occasions, and so counteracts any beneficial (or deleterious) effects of stress on task performance. alpha 2-Adrenoceptor agents have little therapeutic value in patients with dementia of the Alzheimer's type.
However, they may have some clinical use in patients who have a cognitive symptomatology similar to that of patients who have received neurosurgical excisions to the frontal lobes, e.g. deficits in working memory, executive function or focused attention, with relative sparing of episodic short term memory. Patients with Korsakoff's disease, attention deficit disorder or schizophrenia may benefit from treatment with alpha 2-agents. In particular, idazoxan has putative therapeutic effects in patients with a neurodegenerative disorder, namely dementia of frontal type."
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