Solving a Functional Problem in the Brain
Biomimicry is a problem-solving technique. The challenge I address in my health coaching practice is based on how the current healthcare system often looks at pain and illness in silo to the affected body part. Questions of behavior and lifestyle are not often associated with potential factors of suffering. Mental health challenges are not yet widely adopted as normal parts of life (though mainstream media is slowly changing its tune toward this recognition); and they are often seen as a weakness, an inability to perform, and can affect credibility in the workplace and between peers and family members. Those who take on this inner exploration to pursue deep dealing show courage, and their efforts will help them brave the storm of life.
Every sensory experience, perspective, and association to one’s internal and external sense of being is created entirely in the brain. This is to say that our sense of identity, the emotions we feel, the pain we experience, and our very perception of every aspect of human existence is conceptualized in the brain. This is a powerful statement, because this means pain is always real. It’s a callous statement for any practitioner to tell a patient that the pain is in their head. This statement—and relation to ailments like hypochondria or countless women over generations ignored and dismissed by doctors who couldn’t find a root cause of their suffering—misses the very real activity happening in the brain.
The presence of physical pain can be mistaken as an anatomical abnormality. The same neurons that fire in the brain when there is physical pain are triggered when there is emotional trauma. This is not to say some hereditary diseases are avoidable or that we can think our way out of some situations that have a linear path toward degeneration. In these cases, we can still use biomimicry as a functional problem solving technique to reduce suffering and associated perceptions around the illness and one’s place in the world.
Still, understanding the root of the cause of pain offers better long-term solutions than covering up the symptoms. To understand the underlying cause of pain, physical abnormalities must be first ruled out through proper channels in the medical system, performing scans, blood tests, and physical examinations by qualified healthcare practitioners is essential. When qualified physicians have ruled out the presence of abnormal anatomical findings, the process of understanding emotional trauma and past behavioral influence is one way to approach this problem under careful guidance. But as I’ve previously shared, a program must then be employed that is tailored to the unique individual in understanding, accepting, processing, and re-training the mind’s patterns to release and heal. An astute student of biomimicry would notice here that before we get down the path of human cleverness and define the solutions available, we would pause here to really clarify what functional problems are trying to solve.
It comes down to this: we want to learn how nature processes signals and adapts behavior first and foremost. Secondary functions would include asking how nature processes Information, senses signals, senses pain, senses body awareness, sends signals, cooperates between the same species, cooperates within an ecosystem, self-organizes, and maintains homeostasis. Understanding brain cognition, processing, and learning new behavioral patterns is essential in this context. Adopting Life’s Principles and living in alignment with Earth’s natural systems provides an excellent backdrop for functional rehabilitation. Creating a system of reward and support, while understanding the cyclical path of the healing process, is the goal.
