Most complementary medical models are vitalist in essence, and each one tends to attribute health to some harmonic dynamic that revolves around some innate directive essence whose sole purpose is to maintain an optimal strategy of well-being. All such medical models passionately defend the overwhelming importance that can be attributed to such an innate director that ultimately seems to bind the economy of the whole organism into a finely attuned orchestra. So much has been written on this ineffable ‘energetic innate’ that innumerable parallels can be sought in most ancient philosophic traditions, the Chinese Taoists, for example, speak of ‘Qi’, the undifferentiated primal energy pervading the universe, that motivates life and must be balanced and nurtured back to harmony in order to create well-being in Chinese medicine. Similar concepts are found in other ancient medical models, including the homeopathic model, which tends to cultivate and attribute similar properties to the ‘vital force’. But even though this vital force or energy is impossible to grasp, measure, quantify, or isolate, immaterial yet essential, it informs and defines the very nature of balance and well being according to many complementary medical models. Though it would be impossible to do justice to the sheer all encompassing meanings that can be attributed to such an ‘innate’ essence, two aspects that can be universally agreed upon are, that it is ‘endowed with formative intelligence i.e. it intelligently operates and forms the economy of the whole organism, and it can be subject to change, in other words, it may be flowing towards order or disorder; be sick or normal.

Such an interpretation leads to such an anthropomorphic flavour that at times, one wonders if one is dealing with a ‘ghost in a machine’ albeit one with an overwhelming investment in complete control of the entire organism. Nevertheless such a metaphor may have more than a ring of truth to it, since recent advances in neuro-biology and cognitive psychology have begun to uncover some strange paradoxes about the nature of consciousness and its capacity for awareness.

The New Scientist published an article recently commenting on this strange dichotomy about awareness that has only recently come to light

‘The Zombie in question, of course, is just a metaphor. But it is a powerful one that is increasingly being used by psychologists and neuro-scientists to capture a division in our mental life that is at one level mundane, and at another, deeply strange. The division is between what your conscious self sees, smells and hears as you go about your daily life and what your brain and body unconsciously register is "out there- and needs dealing with. The two are not always the same’.(1)

What has always been apparent to the individual is the sudden lack of restraint over his emotive outbursts, for example, when profuse blushing occurs over some matter and one is hard put to retain one’s dignity, or his reflex reactions that have saved him in a dire situation. Such reactions were once accepted as part of the innate reflex topography of the conscious mind, but in the past few years, neuro-scientists have begun to probe far deeper and uncover a depth of non-conscious cognition that had until very recently never ever been envisaged or even properly understood.

‘’ We have this assumption about ourselves that mind and consciousness are synonymous, that we're aware of everything that's important,' says Philip Merikle, a psychologist at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, who studies unconscious perception. 'The more we establish the unconscious influence, the more we realise we're not [aware]." (2)This is a strange discovery indeed, to suddenly discover that our conscious minds play a minor role in a ghostly dance that is dramatically underpinned by some very clear perceptual and information processing skills that seem to reside in parts of the body and mind that are totally inaccessible to our waking consciousness. It is disturbing that one’s supreme faith in our rational and cognitive functions is suddenly forced to acknowledge or even play second fiddle to some mysterious non-conscious activity that appears to actively play a part in the very drama of life even when seemingly absent from our conscious vista. Yet the evidence from neuro-biology is so overwhelming for this puppet show played out between conscious and non-conscious activity, that it seems strange that it should still fly in the face of all common sense.!! It is a supreme irony that only when we fall so very sick, that we are forced to acknowledge the presence of some profound innate depth or intuitive intelligence that offers succour and strength. Today neuro-biology has been forced to shift the centre of control and global awareness away from the meaner offerings of a conscious mind to the profound depths of an ‘embodied mind’ which takes pride not only in ‘mere housekeeping’ but also plays an essential role in interpreting categories, determining emotive reactions and other high level cognitive operations which have been traditionally only associated with conscious awareness. (3) While neuro-biology has been forced into acknowledging such a profound puppet show, most complementary models of medicine, can breath ‘a sigh of relief ‘ that vitalism albeit in the form of ghostly whispers has always addressed its focus towards the very depths and entrails of some embodied intelligence.

In searching for a defining word for the ‘active participatory nature of the unconscious mind’, a number of words, by various authors, have been used to define its psychobiological role, though my own preference is for the term ‘the embodied mind’. Other terms have been used to define this area of inquiry, for example Guy Claxton (4) calls this whole area ‘the undermind’, other neuro-biologists in this field have coined the term ‘ cognitive unconscious’ (5) but I feel that the term ‘embodied mind’ has the most powerful resonance with our own term the ‘vital force’.

Before embarking on a brief summary of the some of the evidence that has forced neuro-biologists to accept the workings of the ‘embodied mind’, I would like to address the estimates of how much information the conscious mind is actually capable of processing by turning to a computer metaphor. In a textbook on Neurophysiology, Professor Zimmermann concludes one chapter with the following

‘We can therefore conclude that the maximal information flow of the process of conscious sensory perception is about 40bits per second, many orders of magnitude below that taken in by receptors (nerve endings). Our perception, then, would appear to be limited to a minute part of the abundance of information available as sensory input’. (6)

This fact has been known since the 1950’s but has hardly made much mark on our culture. Nevertheless it is truly astonishing to realize that millions of bits of information flood in through our senses every second of the day. But our conscious processes condense this vast amount of information down to a maximal amount of 40 bits of information, practically no information at all.

Tor Nirretranders  (7) insightfully states ‘Every single second, every one of us discards millions of bits in order to arrive at the special state known as consciousness. But in itself, consciousness has very little to do with information. Consciousness involves information that is not present; information that has disappeared along the way. Conscious is not about information but about its opposite; order’.

Another physiologist D. Trinker, at a lecture summarized the above even more clearly

‘Of all the information that every second flows into our brains from our sensory organs, only a fraction arrives in our consciousness; the ratio of the capacity of perception to the capacity of apperception is at best a million to one---that is to say, only one millionth of what our eyes see, our ears hear, and our other senses inform us about appears in consciousness’,

He continues later,

‘ Metaphorically, consciousness is like a spotlight that emphasizes the face of one actor dramatically, while all the persons, props, and sets on the vast stage are lost in the deepest darkness. The spotlight can move, certainly, but it takes a long time for all the faces in the chorus to be revealed, one after the other, in the darkness.’(8)

In other words our ability to process information is severely limited by our conscious mode of awareness, in fact more research has shown people can only distinguish only about four to eight things from each other, and the capacity has a prime width of only 16 bits per second. The question is how can we manage to live with such an experiential mismatch without becoming overwhelmed or paralysed by the awesome complexity of the mind/body process. The answer lies, of course in hierarchical organization. (9) Although the data that enters consciousness is very small in quantity, it is of a very high quality. Sensory information is filtered and condensed so that only relevant information is presented to the conscious mind, making awareness look like a kind of executive director in a large cooperation that is ignorant of the day to day running of the company. He perceives his company’s activities through highly condensed summaries and rarely ventures down to the shop floor. The executive handles very little information but it is of very high quality. He gives very few commands, but they are very effective. This particular model of the mind that gives the conscious mind an essential role in the running of the organism, is a common sense view of reality that has prevailed over many centuries. But today new evidence seems to point to an unbelievably sophisticated ‘subconscious or embodied mind’ that seems to process information and make many decisions without even a murmur or reference to our conscious states of awareness.

Daniel L. Schacter, (11) a leading expert in the field of memory loss, describes in detail the ability of amnesiac patients to learn and retrieve information from a past experience without being aware that he/she is relying on memory. He has conducted experiments for over a decade in what is termed ‘implicit memory’; when people are influenced by a past experience without any awareness that they are remembering it. It has been shown that amnesiacs who may be unable to remember an experiment an hour ago, when a board was held up with a simple word ‘button’ on it, may when asked to fill in the word in the blank space after ‘but…..’ invariably mouth the word button. Even more impressively they manage to write down as many words as those who have no memory problems.

Invariably D. Schacter, now asked the question, if letter cues seemed to tap into some sort of non-conscious memory that is preserved in amnesiacs, surely it would be possible to tap into something similar in healthy individuals? An experiment was designed to find this out, his reasoning was simple. If letter cues tap into a form of memory that is spared in amnesiacs, then one might be able to elicit such a memory in healthy volunteers. This experiment, was carried out by studying a set of words, say assassin—octopus---avocado---mystery. You were then told to go about your business, and then later asked to take a couple of tests. First one is shown say twilight ---assassin---dinosaur---avocado, and presumably you pick these out easily. Next words with missing letters are shown say ch------nk, o-t--us and bo—y—n and av--a-o, two fragments were very difficult (ie chipmunk and bogeyman) but the other two seem to spring out at you octopus and avocado, ie your memory had been primed, this means that the words on the list seem to prime your ability to come up with the correct solution when you tried to complete the fragment.

Conscious memory was, naturally far less accurate after a week than an hour, but it was clear from the experiments, that some non-conscious process was responsible for priming. It was found, as more research was carried out, that amnesiacs who were asked to think back to a study of words, like the test above, behaved very poorly, but when asked to guess or provide the first word that comes into their mind, they invariably did as well as those without memory problems!!

By the1980’s controversy over these results and others led to an examination of how we inevitably thought about memory. A clear distinction was drawn between explicit memory which we consciously remembered and implicit memory which clearly referred to that memory that was primed or learnt as a skill by an amnesiac but still had no explicit memory of that occasion. This clearly demonstrated the dangers of subliminal perception, as it was shown by further experiments in the 1980’s that individuals were shown to have preferences and feelings that could be shaped by specific encounters that people do not remember explicitly. It was even shown that amnesiac patients could have implicit memory for emotional experiences that they could not remember explicitly.

Do these experiments on implicit memory uncover intimations of the ‘vitalist ghost’, or some innate embodied intelligence that whispers silently to the conscious mind giving directions like a theatrical prop whose sole purpose is to steer effortlessly the star performer ‘the conscious mind’. At least the evidence from modern neuro-biology does inadvertently argue for some sort of ‘Zombie’ or innate processing system that at least might be used to curry favor with the Kentian definition of vital force, as our purpose in this article is to try and construct a possible undercurrent of ‘intelligence’ that might at least seem to play an essential role in limiting the ‘arrogance of the conscious mind’.

An example of the peerless embodiment of mind was clearly demonstrated by a famous experiment carried out by Daniel Schacter.(12)

In 1980 a woman he calls Barbara, was happily married and held an office job in a large company. She then became severely ill and contracted encephalitis, which she survived but was left with a profound amnesiac syndrome. After this Barbara could no longer handle the pressure of her job, but her company aware of her plight found a simple clerical job, which she managed to do as it, was essentially a simplified of her previous job. But a few later, her job was about to be replaced by machines, and the company asked D Schacter whether he could train Barbara to do a new job. Although her explicit memory was very poor, D Schacter, believed that he could tap into the implicit memory of the amnesiac and teach it knowledge and skills which it could use with specific day to day problems. In six months after a complex system of priming, he managed to train Barbara to do and carry out a complicated job flawlessly. But the interesting point was that Barbara’s explicit memory was no better and though she carried out the job flawlessly, she was only partially aware of its nature or complexity. In other words here we have the bizarre situation of a job done at the office, carried out by a non-conscious process, yet the individual at hand, has only a glimmer of awareness of her flawless performance.

The conscious mind possesses peerless agility but at any given moment in time one is frankly conscious of very little at all!!

For an innate or ‘embodied mind ‘ to take decisions and evaluate processes that are essential to the survival strategies of the whole mind/body complex, it must be able to perceive and take decisions unconsciously. The most successful experimental strategy to demonstrate this fact has been to show that a stimulus can have qualitatively different consequences on cognitive and affective reactions depending on whether it was consciously or unconsciously perceived. In addition, recent studies of patients undergoing General Anaesthesia have shown that the effects of stimuli perceived unconsciously during surgery can last for up to approximately 24 hours.

A number of studies have been carried out providing compelling evidence for the importance of unconscious perceptual processes in influencing our reactions to stimuli.

In experiments conducted by Murphy and Zajonc 1993 (13), subjects were shown a clearly visible Chinese Ideogram on each of a series of trials. The subjects were asked to indicate on the five-point scale whether they thought each Ideogram represented a good or a bad concept. The critical aspect of the experiment concerned what happened immediately before each Ideogram was presented. For one group of subjects, the presentation of each Ideogram was preceded by a picture of a human face that expressed either happiness (e.g. a smile) or anger (e.g. a scowl). For this group of subjects each face was presented for such a brief duration of time (4 m sec) that no subject reported awareness of the faces. For the second group of subjects, the same Ideogram and faces was presented, but the duration of each trade (1,000 m second) was sufficiently long so that all subjects reported awareness of the faces. The subjects in this second group were told to ignore the face and to concentrate solely on rating the Ideogram.

The important results found that only the briefly presented, unconsciously perceived faces influenced the subjects ratings of the Ideogram. When the subjects were unaware of the faces, they were more likely to rate the Ideogram as representing a good concept if it was preceded by a smile and they were more likely to rate an Ideogram as a representing a bad concept if a scowling face preceded it. In contrast, when the faces were clearly visible and therefore consciously perceived, the faces had little or no influence on the subject ratings of the Ideogram. Thus, the subjects were able to ignore consciously perceived faces and not let these faces influence their ratings on the Ideogram. However, when the subjects were unaware of the faces, the emotion expressed by the faces coloured their judgments of the Ideogram. These results demonstrate an important qualitative difference between conscious and unconscious perception in that our affective reactions to stimuli may be influenced to a much greater extent by unconsciously perceived information than by consciously perceived information.

Further experiments were carried out which revolved around the fact that unconsciously perceived words are coded differently to those consciously perceived. It was found that the way a stimulus is coded varies depending on whether it is unconsciously or consciously perceived. When a stimulus is unconsciously perceived, meaning or semantics is the predominant road. However, when a stimulus is consciously processed, structural or surface characteristics become more important. Thus, different aspects of a perceived stimulus may determine action depending on whether the stimulus is consciously or unconsciously processed.

This is an interesting observation since we, as homeopaths pickup much intuitive and unconscious aspects of a patient and therefore will tend to prejudice our preconceptions without even realizing the fact that we are doing so. More experiments validate this problem of prejudice since it has been clearly shown that unconsciously perceived information leads to more automatic reactions that cannot be controlled by the perceiver.

For an innate or embodied intelligence to be able to process or influence the mind/body complex, there must be a period of time over which this can be done. Two sources of evidence suggest that the influence of unconsciously perceived stimuli can endure for many hours.

1.Poetzl Phenomenon

Poetzl  (14) studied the impact of unconscious perception on the manifest content of dreams. In his study, subjects were shown a complex picture of a natural scene for a brief, 100msec exposure duration. Immediately following the presentation of the picture, Poetzl measured the subjects conscious recollection of what they had seen by asking them to describe and to draw everything they remembered about the picture. Poetzl then asked those subjects to record any dreams they had that night, and to return the following day. When the subjects returned the next day and described their dreams, Poetzl discovered that the dream imagery contained aspects of the original picture that the subjects had failed to report the previous day when he had asked then to indicate everything they remembered regarding the picture. The important implications of his findings is that unconsciously perceived information can remain in memory for many hours.

2. The anaesthesia phenomenon

After a meta-analyses of evidence investigating memory for events during general anaesthesia, it has been found that there is considerable evidence of memory for specific information presented during anaesthesia, as long as the memory test is administered within 24 hours following surgery. It has also been concluded that unconsciously perceived information can have a relatively long staying impact.

The research findings illustrate how it is possible to distinguish conscious from unconscious perception, and just what an important role our unconscious perceptions together with our hidden prejudices can play in taking a case history of a patient.

This peculiar anomaly was first described in detail by Lawrence Weiskrantz, (15) who noticed something extraordinary about some brain-damaged patients. He started to study a man who had damage to his occipital lobes that are necessary to see the external world. When a light was flashed in the part of his visual space affected by his brain damage, he claimed to see nothing. But when he was asked ‘to guess’ the location of the flash, he performed extremely accurately. In other words the patient seemed capable of perceiving objects unconsciously and the term ‘blindsight’ was given to this phenomenon. Today this anomaly has become an area of intense research since it challenges everyday notions about what the act of seeing involves and offers an opportunity to investigate how perceptions are actually constructed. It is certainly an intriguing phenomenon and recently evidence has been found supporting the theory that the brain processes conscious and unconscious perceptions in different parts of the brain. L Weiskrantz believes,

‘’ this secondary pathway is to some extent operating in all of us, although its activity seems to be more fully developed in people with cortical blindness. In other words, we may not realise it, but we probably all have the pathways used in blindsight. It would be a waste of effort for the brain to spend time making events conscious that don't really require it," Weiskrantz points out. "There are lots of times in life where we carry out visual discriminations without any awareness at all. It's when we're going on automatic pilot."(16)

It has even suggested that some aspects of blindsight may have a role as a defence or early warning system. Flashes and fast moving objects trigger some form of awareness in the ‘blindfield’ and it has been found that on unconscious perception, an individual can respond better to red , a colour often linked to danger. Another researcher has found that blindsight is even more accurate than previously believed possible, and is even capable of registering whole words. Though the skills continue to grow in the ‘blindfield’, it continues to baffle researchers and hardly appears to be some evolutionary throwback but may turn out to be yet another essential skill that the ‘embodied mind’ uses to maintain optimum states of well being.

‘’ A considerable amount of evidence indicates that as compared to consciously controlled cognition, the non-conscious information-acquisition processes are incomparably faster and structurally more sophisticated. They allow for the development of procedural knowledge that is "unknown" to conscious awareness not merely because it has been encoded (and entered the memory system) through channels that are independent from consciousness. This knowledge is fundamentally inaccessible to the consciousness because it involves a more advanced and structurally more complex organization than what could be handled by consciously controlled thinking.’’(17)

Much evidence is now being gathered which points quite clearly to a very sophisticated level of non-conscious acquisition of knowledge, that the conscious mind could not even begin to compete with or process with similar efficiency or clarity.

Results from a variety of tests provide substantial evidence that subjects that process certain information can not access that information or even realize that they have learned anything new (though the new knowledge consistently guides their behaviour).(18)

For example in one experiment all subjects were faculty members of a Psychology department, and were trained on a computer to non-consciously acquire a set of rules which allow them to efficiently find locations of a target on a computer screen, and thus perform better in the search task. When the crucial guiding rule that was built into the sequence of target locations was changed (i.e. became inconsistent with the previous rule) subject’s performance deteriorated. The subjects ironically were all Psychology professors, and knew the study involved non-conscious cognition and all tried hard to figure out the experiment. However, none of them came close to figuring out the change or even knew what type of knowledge they had acquired during the experiment. Moreover, even though the subjects noticed their decreasing performance, they all attributed it to causes entirely unrelated to the change. In another experiment , subjects (college students) were given an unlimited amount of time and offered a large monetary reward ($100) to uncover the "hidden" pattern in the stimulus material, which they had learned non-consciously before, as indicated by the predicted pattern of changes in their performance. Some participants spent many hours trying to find the clue; however, none of them managed to come up with any ideas even remotely relevant to the real nature of the manipulation.(19)

Further experiments have shown that the ‘embodied mind’ or ‘innate’ seems to have a number of modes of drawing non-conscious generalizations from the outside world, otherwise all these processes would exactly mirror events in reality, and this is clearly not the case. Common unreasonable biases, gradually developing irrational preferences for particular colours, places, people as well as common disorders, indicate that many non-conscious forms of obtaining knowledge develop not as a direct function of experience with the outside world.

It has been shown, for example, in a number of studies, that when stimuli are ambiguous, the non-conscious process may impose on such ambiguity pre-existing interpretive categories even if the stimuli ‘objectively’ do not match those categories. The resulting bias then self-perpetuates and becomes a set of subjective experiences that maintain internal consistency.

The point that can be made here is that this process of non-conscious acquisition plays an important role in the development of individual differences between people and the way they react to the environment. Thus can we ask, is this process of non-conscious information intelligent? If ‘intelligent’ means having its own goals and motivations that are triggered by the external activity then the answer is ‘no’ since much research in this area, seems to demonstrate that the information gathering process, is unbiased towards any specific contents and ‘impartial’ in the sense of being ready to process any information regardless of the perceiver’s beliefs or motivations.

If on the other hand ‘intelligence’ indicates a level of sophistication then the answer is a resounding ‘yes’.

As this non-conscious process of information acquisition is incomparably more capable in processing formally complex knowledge structures, and is faster, and "smarter" in its overall grasp, than our ability to think and identify meanings of stimuli in a consciously controlled manner. In other words the evidence points to a very definite asymmetrical bias in favour of non-conscious acquisition, as most of the ‘real work’ in terms of acquiring skills and interpretation of stimuli, goes on at a level to which the conscious mind is not only entirely unaware of, but cannot even access the ‘whys’ or ‘wherefores’ of that level.