Exploring Human Nature

Much effort has gone into taking humans out of nature. But you can't take the nature out of humans.

No one says it outright. It’s implicit in the messages. For centuries, we’ve been creating ‘society’, setting humans aside from nature. Sometimes above nature. We call it progress. Invention. We became enamored by what we could do with our prefrontal cortex. Reason. Examine. Evaluate.

Whenever we engage the cortex to think, to understand something, it will be done through the predisposed mental model already held. When we only look at mechanics and behaviors through a cause-effect lens, we draw all of the conclusions through that lens. I kindly refer to this as the ‘man as machine’ paradigm.

To expand your perspective, consider a list of attributes of our human nature, beyond the mechanics of organ systems and behaviors. These more complete ways of understanding are ‘known’ across disciplines, yet outside the prevailing models of healthcare and business.

Even education has implicitly shifted to getting kids to know things, getting kids to behave. Yet, particularly for children, behavior is communication.

How do I know these to be true? I don’t. I can’t prove them. No one can prove a model right or wrong. We can only find evidence, explore it in real life, and stay open to signals to continue learning.

In my previous work in guiding research design and how to make decisions with data and information, I learned to watch for signals that a model was insufficient. An empirical or theoretical model was often helpful, yet so were outliers and situations that didn’t fit it! They give us clues on how to expand the model to be more helpful. It is never right or complete. This is the part that has been lost with proving solutions that are attached to profit (and defending against any suspected harm).

In the present, here are some signals that led me to question the current models of how to take care of humans:

• We are spending tens of billions of dollars on stress management and stress, per APA, is increasing. We can say the same for diabetes, heart disease, obesity, etc.

• Despite advances in technology, the prevalence of ‘medically unexplained symptoms’ persists. People are told it’s in their head. Or they just have to live with it.

• People are alive longer, yet living less. The US has one of the highest gaps in the world between lifespan and healthspan, which measures the years spent living without life-altering health condition. The gap is estimated to be 12 years.

• Many of the clients I worked with in my therapy practice reported being in therapy for decades and feeling worse than they ever had.

They showed up with a range of physical, emotional, mental, and relational issues.

So as I worked with them, I brought what I knew about problem-solving, modeling, research, and facilitation to our process. As a licensed therapist, I had to assign a diagnosis and define a treatment plan. Beyond that, I saw the symptom as the measurement - the information that would let us know when we made a meaningful change, not the thing to solve. We went to work understanding the relationship between symptoms. Following the symptoms to their natural causes and contributions became the work. Building conceptual models of each of them as unique human beings. Yes, patterns across people were helpful, and each person was unique.

So here’s the list of attributes of human nature to expand your understanding of you. The general expansion is to embrace our systemic, dynamic nature. We are ever-changing, making the concept of an ideal human irrelevant. We are all as we should be, given the totality of our lived experience.

1. Whole organism

   1. Human functioning happens as a whole organism. People who first studied human anatomy created organ systems. Over the years, they fragmented physical, emotional, mental, energetic, and social functioning. It is now understood that we function as a whole. Everything is not just interconnected; it is inseparable. As an example, future cognitions (self talk) are informed by the felt experience of the cells and tissues in utero.

2. Dynamic

   1. Humans are dynamic. Constantly changing in response to the internal and external environment. In the simplest data scenario, you are a walking, talking time series with much variation by nature. Nothing about us is static. Nothing about us is operating in isolation from other things. Our adaptive intelligence is constantly detecting, measuring, assessing, communicating, determining if something needs to be done - for a stimulus in the moment or for long term survivability.

3. Cycles and rhythms

   1. It is natural to have cycles and rhythms. We have innate biology to shift in unison with daylight which is referred to as circadian rhythm. In addition, there are the ultradian and infradian rhythms. Our productivity is best understood through a lens of individual cycles of activity and rest; everyone is different in their cycles. When we listen to the body’s cues it wants a break, our activity portion of the cycle can produce more or be more focused and effective.

   2. No one, by nature, has static (flat line) activity / productivity. Ideologies of productivity and keeping biomarkers at a ‘target’, work against natural cycles.

   3. We’ve societally designated ‘adult’ by an age associated with a right (voting) or responsibility ( the draft). Designated an age at which development is ‘done’. Yet this is a false ideology. We continually have cycles of restoration and growth, without age limit.

   4. Humans are primarily water, along with much open space in the cells. The primary communication of cells is through fluids that move by vibration. Most of the fluid in the body moves around without a pump. It is unnatural to think that ocean tides would be influenced by lunar cycles but not the water in the human body.

4. Development is contextual

   1. Humans are dependent on “just right” nurturing for healthy development.

   2. This starts at the cellular level.

      1. Too much from the environment, the cells adapt for rigidity.

      2. Too little from the environment, the cells have to conserve and determine what to give up.

   3. And so on through each scaffolded level of development. The ACES study is the tip of the iceberg on how our childhood experiences are dynamically linked to future health. More on this later.

5. Innate Adaptive Intelligence

   1. How you are functioning in the present is an artifact of the totality of lived experiences that shaped your regulating patterns. Our adaptive intelligence starts with what our ancestors fed forward to increase our odds of survival. If they did not restore their nervous system from imprints of overwhelming experiences, the egg and sperm brought with them information to equip the cell and unfolding imprint, to survive through the same things, even if they are not an actual part of our life.

6. Implications of our Adaptive Intelligence:

   1. Constant surveillance and automatic decision making. Choice is not always available, particularly with children.

   2. The concept of ‘side effect’ makes no sense. If you put a foreign substance into a human, its adaptive intelligence system will assess it as safe or dangerous. It will, on the person’s behalf, either defend the body from it or put in motion the communication of necessary adaptations to its presence . There’s nothing ‘side’ about the implications of a medication, replacement joint, new food ingredient, or skin product ingredient.

   3. The response will be dynamic and individual. Measuring an average effect is meaningless unless we are going to only use the product as a group of 100. We don’t; we are looking for a resolution to our unique context.Your biocomputer, a sophisticated control system throughout the whole organism, integrates the functioning of the system of systems. We hear comparisons that the brain cannot process as fast as a supercomputer. But it’s limited to the cortical processing.

   4. There is no supercomputer that comes close to the sophisticated processing of sensory reception internally and externally, communicating and transferring information of multiple forms, assessing and activating responses 24/7/365 since you were a single cell.

7. Personality

   1. What we call personality is the artifact of the first 1000 days of adaptations. We’d be better off to drop the static identity of personality and lean into our ongoing capacity to restore, renew, and regenerate. This is the essence of health, wellness, and well-living.

8. Neuroplasticity, Cellular Regeneration

   1. Our psychophysiology has the capacity to regenerate, restore, and renew. The goes down to cellular regeneration. We cannot make it happen, only provide the environment so that it can. Neuroplasticity is through the nervous system, not just the brain.

   2. The more we can support the body’s natural capabilities, the less confused our biocomputer. Remember, every unfamiliar thing we present to it must be assessed and passed around to determine if the body needs to defend from it or adapt to deal with it for the long haul.

   
   

Our functioning at any point in time is an artifact of the adaptations of necessity. It is natural for this to be a combination of those for growth as well as some for survival.

Again, this is an indication of our adaptive intelligence. It just happens, by nature. And we are not stuck. We never lose our adaptive intelligence. By working with it, we can restore and renew the imprints of what had been too much or what was under-supported.

We are fascinating creatures, and you are nothing shy of absolutely amazing!

In summary, drop the model that you are a collection of parts like a machine. We are a system of computers with a biocomputer that is programmed through early life experience and can be rebooted and restored naturally. If you want to step away from machines entirely, imagine a garden. With the appropriate mix of environmental elements, we flourish. Yet we constantly have to adapt to not enough or too much. It happens naturally.

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Which of these might give you space to be less hard on yourself? It is not possible to be the perfect specimen. We can restore dings and dents, but that’s different than the ‘fixing’ paradigm.

To restore, we follow the trail of ‘what would the bodymind have in its algorithms so that <insert a symptom of behavior> now happens naturally?

This might be for persistent pain, recurring movement, low energy, hypervigilance…anything that matters. How might this be natural given my trajectory?