Cognition in Traditional Chinese Medicine

Cognition in Traditional Chinese Medicine
By: Kate Maxey
August 12, 2006

“Mind is not a thing but a process,” writes Fritjof Capra in his article “The Santiago Theory: ‘to live is to know’.” Capra is writing in response to Maturana and Varela’s concepts and goes on to describe this process of living as cognition, the activity that occurs in every living system (being) as the environment and all of the gradients within the system react, create change, and “bring forth a world.” This concept of life being created as it is “known” embodies a similar space where Taoism, and subsequently TCM, considers the inseparability of perception and action, structure and function, yin and yang, Mind and Spirit to exist.

If the mind is a process, then the brain, Capra explains, is “a specific structure through which this process operates. The relationship between mind and brain, therefore, is one between process and structure.” In TCM the concept of Mind is synonymous with Spirit, and the brain, even as a structure, is never mentioned. I think it is not specified because the entire body is considered to participate in the cognition that makes way for the Spirit to flow freely. Nigel Wiseman defines the Spirit-Mind as having the “capacity to think, feel, and respond.” Just as Capra believes: the Mind is the process and the structures form an essential network that cannot be separated from the process itself.

This can be related to the scientific term tensegrity, used in cellular biology, which is a contraction of tensional and integrity. It refers to how the physical forces within the cell interact to form a stable bio-mechanical architecture. The word refers to the structures that are mechanically stable because stresses are distributed and balanced throughout the entire structure, not because the individual components have great strength. Capra’s view of the cognition of living organisms also takes into account the multi-layered dimension from which life springs forth: “It does not react to environmental stimuli through a linear chain of cause and effect, but responds with structural changes in its nonlinear, organizationally closed, autopoietic network.” In Chinese medicine the qualities of yin and yang create this tensional integrity: 1) opposition 2) interdependence 3) mutual consumption 4) intertransformation. The Spirit-Mind, therefore, may be considered our perception, which is the link between heaven and earth and determines what form our life process takes.

James L. Oschman PhD sheds new light on the Traditional Chinese Medicine perspective in his writings about the physiological structure and function of the human body:

"The connective tissue and fascia form a mechanical continuum, extending throughout the animal body, even into the innermost parts of each cell. All the great systems of the body—the circulation, the nervous system, the musculo-skeletal system, the digestive tract, the various organs—are ensheathed in connective tissue. This matrix determines the overall shape of the organism as well as the detailed architecture of its parts. All movements, of the body as a whole, or of its smallest parts, are created by tensions carried through the connective tissue fabric. Each tension, each compression, each movement causes the crystalline lattices of the connective tissues to generate bioelectrical signals between every part of the body and every other part. This communication network within the fascia is none other than the meridian system of traditional Oriental medicine, with its countless extensions into every part of the body. As these signals flow through the tissues, their biomagnetic counterparts extend the stories they tell into the space around the body. The mechanical, bioelectric, and biomagnetic signals traveling through the connective tissue network, and through the space around the body, tell the various cells how to form and reform the tissue architecture in response to the tensions, compressions, and movements we make."

Oshmann is focusing on connective tissue, what some may consider a structure, as it has form or can be held, maybe even measured. But he does not separate it from the energy, which is simultaneously accommodated and determining, as it makes an infinite number of connections along the framework. I would consider the tensegrity that exists within our bodies to be the Mind-Spirit of the Neijing and the cognition that, as Varela puts it, allows “mind and world (to) arise together.”