Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- List of boxes
- Acknowledgements
- 1 The two philosophies: health, disease, medicine and psychotherapy
- 2 The body's mind: psychoneuroimmunology, stress and adaptive response
- 3 Personality, disease and the meaning of infornet dysregulation
- 4 Networks and their properties
- 5 The causes of dysregulation: associative learning, food intolerance and the effects of stress throughout the lifespan
- 6 The causes of dysregulation: supervised learning, repetitive strain injury, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, chronic fatigue syndrome and depression
- 7 The causes of dysregulation: asthma and precursors to specific disease
- 8 Three different types of psychologically mediated therapy: placebos and the art of medicine, psychotherapy and complementary and alternative medicine
- 9 Therapeutic mechanisms
- 10 Finding the pattern: health in modern society
- 11 Infornet theory in perspective
- References
- Index
11 - Infornet theory in perspective
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- List of boxes
- Acknowledgements
- 1 The two philosophies: health, disease, medicine and psychotherapy
- 2 The body's mind: psychoneuroimmunology, stress and adaptive response
- 3 Personality, disease and the meaning of infornet dysregulation
- 4 Networks and their properties
- 5 The causes of dysregulation: associative learning, food intolerance and the effects of stress throughout the lifespan
- 6 The causes of dysregulation: supervised learning, repetitive strain injury, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, chronic fatigue syndrome and depression
- 7 The causes of dysregulation: asthma and precursors to specific disease
- 8 Three different types of psychologically mediated therapy: placebos and the art of medicine, psychotherapy and complementary and alternative medicine
- 9 Therapeutic mechanisms
- 10 Finding the pattern: health in modern society
- 11 Infornet theory in perspective
- References
- Index
Summary
Infornet theory is a theory that proposes a new type of disease concept: that of dysregulatory disease. Dysregulatory disease can be contrasted with the specific diseases that are familiar to modern Western medicine. Specific diseases have a unique pathophysiology. Dysregulatory diseases do not. Dysregulatory diseases have a biological basis but one that does not appear in terms of gross pathophysiology. Instead, dysregulatory diseases have unique activation patterns within a network system. Unlike specific diseases, dysregulatory diseases vary continuously along several dimensions.
Infornet theory can be seen as an extension of other, earlier ideas. The concept of ‘embodied cognitions’ is based on the proposition that bodies need minds, and the mind functions to interact with the environment. Cognitions are therefore embodied not just in the brain, but in the way the body interacts with its environment (Wilson, 2002). Although infornet theory shares this perspective, it goes beyond it in one significant way. In the case of embodied cognition, the meaning that is investigated is the meaning familiar to psychologists, and in many cases available to consciousness. By contrast, infornet theory suggests that meaning is encoded within the body that may not be accessible to consciousness. That is, there is another form of meaning that exists in the body, a meaning that occurs because the body is in part a network system and that drives health processes. Infornet beliefs are not part of an unconscious mind – they are a different type of concept entirely.
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- Information
- The Origins of Health and Disease , pp. 304 - 311Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011