Psychoneuroimmunology

http://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-oxford-handbook-of-psychoneuroimmunology-9780195394399?cc=us&lang=en&

http://oxfordmedicine.com/view/10.1093/med/9780199696758.001.0001/med-9780199696758-chapter-27

Mind-body literature, in the form of magazines and self-help books on stress and healing, is full of definitive claims for the existence of powerful influences of emotions and psychosocial stressors on the immune system, leading to onset or progression of cancers or infectious diseases. This literature often makes explicit reference to research in psychoneuroimmunology to support these claims. Psychoneuroimmunology is a multi-disciplinary field that has grown rapidly during the last three decades at the crossroads of immunology, behavioural neurosciences, neuroendocrinology, and psychology. It studies mechanisms and functional aspects of bidirectional relationships between the brain and the immune system. Although still controversial, there is evidence that psychological events including emotions can and do influence the outcome of infectious, autoimmune, and neoplastic diseases via modulation of cells of the immune system. A surprising finding has been that immune events occurring in the periphery also affect mood, behaviour, and metabolism by modulating brain functions, thereby providing a biologically important link between the immune system and brain. The original discovery that activation of the innate immune system in the periphery causes clinical signs of sickness that are processed in the brain is now being extended to the involvement of the immune system in depressive disorders. This new information has solidified the idea that neurotransmitters, neuropeptides, neural pathways, and immune-derived signals such as cytokines are the minimal essential elements that permit the immune system and brain to communicate with one another. These new data offer the unexpected conclusion that the immune system is likely to be involved in not only how emotions affect health but also how immune events regulate the development and expression of emotions.

https://www.google.es/search?q=psychoneuroinmunology&oq=psychoneuroinmunology&aqs=chrome..69i57j0l5.521j0j7&sourceid=chrome&espv=210&es_sm=119&ie=UTF-8#es_sm=119&espv=210&q=psychoneuroinmunology+and+examination

http://user1741049.sites.myregisteredsite.com/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderfiles/psychoneuroimmunologycanpsychologicalinterventions.pdf

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0889159104000765


https://www.google.es/search?q=%22examination-related+anxiety%22&oq=%22examination-related+anxiety%22&aqs=chrome..69i57j0.7938j0j7&sourceid=chrome&espv=210&es_sm=119&ie=UTF-8


http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13632750802027663#.UmEJ3JRmWCI



http://www.hawaiicompassionatecare.com/uploads/PNI_Paper.pdf


http://www.acnp.org/g4/GN401000098/CH096.html


http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insomnio


http://scholar.google.es/scholar?q=insomnia+natural+or+sickness%3F&btnG=&hl=es&as_sdt=0%2C5


https://www.google.es/search?q=sleeping+rhytms+with+age&oq=sleeping+rhytms+with+age&aqs=chrome..69i57.8716j0j7&sourceid=chrome&espv=210&es_sm=119&ie=UTF-8

Engineering Biology and Society: Reflections on Synthetic Biology

1. Jane Calvert
2. http://sts.sagepub.com/content/18/3/405.short

Abstract

Synthetic biology, according to some definitions, is the attempt to make biology into an engineering discipline. I ask what is meant by this objective, which seems to have excited and energised many people and encouraged them to start working in the field. I show how synthetic biologists make a point of distinguishing their work from previous genetic ‘engineering’, which is described as bespoke and artisan. I examine synthetic biologists’ accounts of the differences between biology and engineering, which often oppose comprehension to construction. I argue that synthetic biology, like other branches of engineering, aims to meet recognised needs, and to make the world more manipulable and controllable. But there are tensions within the field—some synthetic biologists have reservations about the extent to which biology can be engineered, and ask whether it is necessary to develop a new type of engineering when working with living systems. After exploring these debates, I turn to some of the broader consequences of making biology easier to engineer, particularly the deskilling and democratisation of the technology. I end by arguing that because synthetic biologists are skilled at bringing together both technical and social forces, they are appropriately described as ‘heterogeneous engineers’.

Geocentric Media Ecology

Geocentric Media Ecology

October 14, 2013 § Leave a Comment

[Photo: Romain Jacquet-Lagrèze]

http://knowledge-ecology.com/2013/10/14/geocentric-media-ecology/

Media theorist Jussi Parikka has a very interesting essay published in The Atlantic on the geology of media. The essay is part of the ongoing series of “Object Lessons” edited by Ian Bogost and Christopher Schaberg. In the essay Parikka draws our attention to the relations between media technologies and geological elements — for example, to the copper, gold, lead, mercury, palladium, and silver deposits that are transformed into the components of electronic devices. By foregrounding the relationship between material resources and communication technologies, Parikka’s essay offers an important commentary on the geopolitics of media. While this is certainly a worthwhile call to attention, the second half of the essay continues into equally important, though less explored, terrain. On the communicative agency of the Earth Parikka writes:

By realizing the geological importance of the Earth for media culture, we might also acknowledge that the Earth is a communicative object itself. Not only that we keenly visualize, talk and imagine the Earth as an object through media representations — but that there would not be any media without the resource base offered by its geology. Even that the Earth as living creature communicates via the assembled resources it fashions and provides.

Half of this statement is practically self-evident. Humans need Earth’s finite, geological resources to produce technology — a claim no one would dispute. The second half, on the other hand, will strike some people as entirely credulous. The objection might goes something like this: First, Earth is not a subject, it has no intentionality, let alone the ability to communicate anything; it’s an inert, intention-less sphere of rock spattered with a thin, fragile layer of lifeforms. Second, while Earth may create the possibility for lifeforms such as ourselves to emerge — and is certainly subject to the effects wrought by those lifeforms — Earth is not itself one of those intentional creatures. To think otherwise would be simple, unjustified anthropomorphism. It seems this is the only legitimate response to such a provocative statement, but this is not the case. There is another sense in which Parikka’s claim is entirely justified, but we have to wrest ourselves of the idea that all beings fall along a single, bifurcated axis between subjects and objects — or living and dead things — for this option to come into view.

What do I mean by this?

We want to know, following growing interest in earth system science (itself spurred on by the work of James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis), whether Earth is alive or dead. The consequences of this question are straight forward: If Earth is alive we also want to know if it has some kind of subjectivity — something we can respond to — while if it’s dead we feel a bit better about doing with it as we please. But what if this is entirely the wrong spectrum of questions? What if what Earth is has nothing to do with being alive or dead, intentional or inert? I want to suggest that as long as we conceptualize Earth along this axis of concepts — as alive or dead, as subject or object — we will never really get a good grasp on what this thing we’re all standing in is. After all, what justification do we really have that subjects and objects are the only kinds of things out there, anyway? We need greater diversity in our descriptions of the kinds of entities that exist in the cosmos.

Parikka starts to get at this problem when he suggests Earth is a communicative entity. If we think of Earth outside the living-dead, subject-object straightjacket the idea of its communicability becomes more interesting and plausible. Earth communicates, but not like any human or other intentional subject. Earth has agency, but it’s not really a living being — nor is it a zombie (“charnal ground”), a cybernetic system (“self-regulating machine”), or mythic god (“Gaia”). Though each of these descriptions may have some truth to them, the point is these are all hybrids based on the same faulty ontology. I for one would prefer a strict dualism to such an awkward and noncommittal compromise. But if Earth is neither subject nor object, neither alive nor dead, what is it? I have started to sketch out an answer. In a talk I gave earlier this summer I suggested that media ecology needs to head in a new direction. In that paper I argued we need to develop ageocentric media ecology, which I later suggested could be part of a larger turn to a new geocentrism.

A key element of geocentric media ecology is attending to the relations between geology, media, and politics. This kind of analysis is already underway in science and technology studies, actor network theory, and political ecology, and is also noted by Parikka in his essay. With Parikka I am interested in developing the connections between geology and media, and also improving ways to conceptualize Earth’s communicability. Where I may differ from Parikka is in my conception that Earth is itself a kind of medium; in other words, Earth is not just what makes possible the production of media technology, it is itself an independently aesthetic entity — a planetary medium — and its geoevolutionary processes are driven in large part by aesthetic values. We can arrive at this impression through the work of Alfred North Whitehead. In one of my favorite passages to quote Andrew Murphie writes:

Whitehead presents a little remarked upon but comprehensive “media theory” that resituates media in the world (that is, media events are not “bifurcated” from the rest of the world, in for example a “signal [medium] versus noise [world]” configuration). More dramatically, Whitehead writes of the entire “world as medium.” Whitehead’s philosophy here pre-empts significant aspects of McLuhan’s media theory. The medium is the message indeed, but the medium is also the world. So the very complex signal mixing that is world is the message. In Whitehead’s media philosophy, there is no “bifurcation” between different types of signal (technical or natural, for example). It is all world(s) as medium.

Earth is a kind of medium, and we are inside of it. We are not just dependent upon Earth for its resources to produce media technologies, Earth is itself a medium involved in terrestrial evolution. As is the case with all ecologies, there is here a breakdown between structure and content — organisms are not evolving on Earth; rather, Earth is both condition and participant in what evolves. By thinking of Earth outside the subject-object ontology, we are freed from relating its identity to our own; Earth does not have to be anything like humans for us to treat it as an entity in its own right, issuing its own unique imperatives.

That’s not a full answer to the question of what Earth is, but it marks a direction worth pursuing and I’m glad to see others like Parikka pursuing it along similar lines.

Günther Witzany. Life: The communicative structure

[BOOK] Life: The communicative structure

G Witzany - 2000 - biocommunication.at

Witzany, Günther: Life: the communicative structure: a new philosophy of biology/ Günther
Witzany. Übers.: Michael Stachowitsch. - Bürmoos, Vogelsangstraße 18c: G. Witzany, 2000
([Norderstedt] : [Libri Books on Demand]) Einheitssacht.: Natur der Sprache - Sprache der ...

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[CITATION] Bio-Communication

G Witzany - 2007 - Umweb Publications

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mitdenker.at [PDF]

Natural genome-editing competences of viruses

G Witzany - Acta Biotheoretica, 2006 - Springer

ABSTRACT It is becoming increasingly evident that the driving forces of evolutionary novelty
are not randomly derived chance mutations of the genetic text, but a precise genome editing
by omnipresent viral agents. These competences integrate the whole toolbox of natural ...

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biocommunication.at [PDF]

Noncoding RNAs: persistent viral agents as modular tools for cellular needs

G Witzany - Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 2009 - Wiley Online Library

It appears that all the detailed steps of evolution stored in DNA that are read, transcribed,
and translated in every developmental and growth process of each individual cell depend
on RNA-mediated processes, in most cases interconnected with other RNAs and their ...

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[CITATION] The Logos of the Bios 1: Contributions to the Foudation of Three-leveled Biosemiotics

G Witzany - 2006 - Umweb Publications

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mitdenker.at [PDF]

Serial endosymbiotic theory (SET): the biosemiotic update

G Witzany - Acta Biotheoretica, 2006 - Springer

ABSTRACT The Serial Endosymbiotic Theory explains the origin of nucleated eukaryotic cells
by a merg- ing of archaebacterial and eubacterial cells. The paradigmatic change is that the
driving force behind evolution is not ramification but merging. Lynn Margulis describes ...

Cited by 15 Related articles All 8 versions Cite

nih.gov [HTML]

Plant communication from biosemiotic perspective

G Witzany - Plant signaling & behavior, 2006 - landesbioscience.com

Abstract: As in all organisms, the evolution, development and growth of plants depends on
the success of complex communication processes. These communication processes are
primarily sign-mediated interactions and not simply an exchange of information. They ...

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[CITATION] Natural genetic engineering and natural genome editing

G Witzany - 2009 - Wiley-Blackwell

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[PDF] Explaining and understanding LIFE

G Witzany - SEMIOTICA-LA HAYE THEN BERLIN-, 1998 - biocommunication.at

Jesper Hoffmeyer shows us the direction of one of the next fundamental changes of
paradigms in the history of science. In his intention to explain life processes in the light of
semiotics he has gone beyond established biological mainstreams. He recognized, that ...

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[CITATION] Natur der Sprache-Sprache der Natur

G Witzany - 1993 - Königshausen & Neumann

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1. Biocommunication - About - welcome

   www.biocommunication.at/‎

   From 1987 to 1990 I developed a THEORY OF COMMUNICATIVE NATURE > Living Nature is structured and organised by language and communication within ...

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3. Philosopy - Biosemiotic

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   Explaining and understanding LIFE. The biosemiotic model and some suggestions in the light of pragmatics of language.
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   Bio-communication of Plants Günther Witzany telos ...

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11. Günther Witzany (Author of Natur Der Sprache, Sprache Der Natur)

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    Günther Witzany is the author of Biocommunication in Soil Microorganisms (0.0 avg rating, 0 ratings, 0 reviews, published 2010), Biocommunication of Plan.