Nervous System Conference

Another day and another conference. This one sounds like a breath of fresh air though. It's tag reads,

Nervous system, From stem cells to behaviour in the normal and diseased.

In my head that became-the nervous system, from cells to the way their function translates directly into behaviour. In other words, seeing the nervous system in the same kind of way we see the liver, kidneys, heart, lungs etc., anatomy as function and function as anatomy.

Rather than as if our behaviour is somehow different from the anatomy that enables the transmission of the impulses that become said behaviour/s.

This also added to the sense of bonhomie [which is of course transmitted, felt and perceived by my nervous system.]

...this meeting will include a balance of topics on human and animal models of neural development and disease:

The prospect of real science feels fresh and friendly in comparison with the stale hatefest wrought by pseudo-science. Hopefully this means/includes mapping more fully the healthy anatomy of the human nervous system. The nervous system is the system of the era we are living in. It is where many real battles around health, bodily autonomy and our understanding of ourselves and other living beings will be fought and we've barely begun to get to grips with that.

When it comes to function and health, we need to learn better how to make the nervous system interrupt itself. That, not drugs will be the way of the future. Medical and scientific professionals have failed to come to grips with this, or actually, some of them probably sense this and want to smoother any possibility out of existence.

Big pharma suits many of the way they wish to continue practising medicine.

It would be nice if this conference led in some way to the end of the tiresomely redundant Cartesian-dualism age, where people behave as if the brain is some kind of ethereal imperceptible essence of self and the mind isn't part of the body-even to the extent of at times seeing it as separate from the brain!

This all feels a bit Stone Age. I have to keep reminding myself that it still has currency.  Even to the extent that folks argue about things in an either/or way, rather than it isn't quite the right frame. i.e. "Either ladies should be able to cross their legs when they sit down, or they should keep them together without such."

That framing of women isn't a given is it? I mean, "ladies"?!

The internet is a surprise in that way. I expected it somehow to be ahead of the meatspace mainstream opinion. Perhaps due to the appearance given of constant technical innovation. Uncommonly heard rationale does feature on the nets and that makes the news to the extent of re-shaping consciousness about it.

When you actually get on it, what hits like a wall is how much of the time the opposite is true. The sheer extent of parochial idiocy and mental indolence is at times, thought-stopping. Vast oceans of people who cannot be bothered to invest a breaths worth of energy in understanding their own "opinions" let alone grasping anyone else's.

Yet do not let that stop them from disagreeing virulently with what they haven't even perceived correctly if at all, behaving like children learn to get out of in kindergarten [or should], that other people exist who work to whole different rules than they. Instead, everyone is exactly like them, thinks exactly like them. At the same time they think anyone who they perceive as differing from them is a space alien from a planet far away. Who lives only to try and knock a modicum of the most obvious reason or sense into their bone heads.

I'm digressing.

The "I live in this body" orientation could be on the long or short road to being put in its place, i.e. quaint obsolescence. That's not yours or my decision. It's that of those who'll be going to this conference and similar.

It's when they're ready.

So watch their space.