Past Papers

About time: the lost ingredient of healing

Kyra Pollitt

The third in our occasional series of excerpts from student papers, this shortened article is adapted from Kyra Pollitt’s dissertation, submitted for the Diploma in Herbology at Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, class of 2020. The complete, fully referenced paper can be found on academia.com. If you have a past paper you would like to share, please contact us at herbologynews@gmail.com.

Archaeological finds from twenty thousand years ago suggest European hunters carved lines and holes in sticks and bones to record lunar phases (Honoré, 2005; MacGregor, 2010). Similar activities were undertaken by the Sumerians, the Babylonians, the Egyptians, the Chinese, the Mayans, and the Aztecs (ibid; Bronowski, 1973; Grun, 1982). Each of these ancient cultures sought to resolve the chaotic human experience of time through observation of external, often inanimate, distant, and regular phenomena— the sun, the moon, the stars, the tides. In Chinese, Hindu, Buddhist, and Shinto traditions, this externalized time came to be perceived as cyclical; in the Western Christian tradition, as linear (Fisher & Luyster, 1990; Young, 2005; Gallois, 2007). Yet, despite what such efforts would have us believe, human time isn’t a single entity, and it isn’t straightforward either.

Our sense of time is composed by ‘separate neural mechanisms that usually work together but can be teased apart in the laboratory’ (Eagleman, 2008). It’s the flexibility of these mechanisms that allow us to feel time passing quickly when we are busy or distracted, and more slowly when we are paying close attention to its flow (Glicksohn & Myslobodsky, 2006; Grondin, 2010). The contentions of this essay are threefold: that illness, dis-ease and injury are states that can distort our lived experience of time by altering the flow of attention; that contemporary digital lifestyles also cause disruptions in our experiences of time, which in turn invite dis-ease; and, finally, that these distortions fuel the modern preoccupation with fast-acting medicines, which themselves can disrupt the body’s ability to heal itself more deeply.

The science bit: how we perceive time

Our sense of time— our chronesthesia —is subjective. It is generated by the brain, using our awareness of the world, called noetic consciousness, and our awareness of ourselves in time, our autonoetic consciousness (Tulving, 2002; Brown, 2008). These temporal constructions are deeply malleable. Within the brain, smaller intervals are handled by the senses and some automatic processing. Incoming signals from each of the senses are processed at different speeds, with our neurocognitive machinery working to a default 3-second ‘temporal window’, so that the brain estimates time according to the number of ‘events’ that occur (Brown & Boltz, 2002; Eagleman 2008). Our feeling of duration mirrors the amount of neural energy used to encode each stimulus, each event (Eagleman, ibid). That’s why, in moments of crisis, the amygdala may form ‘denser-than-normal’ memories, recording more events than usual, and producing that sense of elongated time familiar to fans of The Matrix.

Longer intervals of time are processed by deeper cognition, but there is still great malleability here. We are able to make future arrangements, and to remember and follow time-based plans, by using our ‘prospective memory’ (Glicksohn & Myslobodsky, 2006; Labelle et al, 2009), but ‘the timing expectations of motor acts and sensory consequences can shift in relation to one another, even to the extent that they can switch places’ (Eagleman, 2008). Our expectations of how long things will take and when they will happen, as well as our recall of when things happened and in what order, can easily become confused.

The social bit: how we ‘do’ time

That we presume time to be an objective, external commodity— a thing —is clear from the language we use to classify and describe it. We ‘measure’, ‘mark’, ‘take’, ‘use’, ‘pass’, ‘borrow’, ‘steal’, ‘waste’, ‘spend’ and ‘buy’ time. We equate time with money. We regard time as something ‘precious’ that can be ‘carved out’, ‘set aside’, ‘stored up’, ‘frittered away’, ‘lost’ or ‘killed’. Crucially, all these metaphors fail to recognize what Schutz (1974:48) calls ‘lifeworldly time’:

The pregnant woman must wait until the time of delivery. The farmer must wait until the right time comes for sowing, or for the harvest. In waiting we encounter a time structure that is imposed on us.

This gap between the way we like to talk of controlling time, and the reality of lifeworldly time, perhaps gives rise to the greatest contemporary malaise. We try to increase our sense of control by distancing ourselves as much as possible from those pesky, untameable lifeworldly things— but the sense of security we seek comes at a price. Giddens (1999:46,47) suggests:

A society living on the other side of nature and tradition— as nearly all Western societies now do —is one that calls for decision making, in everyday life as elsewhere. The dark side of decision making is the rise of addictions and compulsions… Where tradition lapses, and lifestyle choice prevails, the self isn’t exempt. Self-identity has to be created and recreated on a more active basis than before…

In striving to create and re-create self in this way, individuals appear increasingly unable to reconcile control of and submission to time. In 2001, the Japanese government recorded 143 deaths caused by overwork (karoshi); a 70% increase in the use of amphetamines was recorded in America between 1998 and 2004; and British government figures reveal the average working parent spends twice as long dealing with emails as playing with their children (Honoré, 2005). Sontag (1998:89) attributes such habits to ‘future-mindedness’— the ‘distinctive mental habit, and intellectual corruption’ of our times.

Time and contemporary lifestyle

Whilst many questions remain about the brain’s co-ordination, its coding of signals, and its ability to speedily recalibrate, two aspects of the brain’s malleability are particularly significant here. The first is that, since duration judgments are created from visual stimuli (Eagleman, 2008; Grondin & McAuley, 2009), our sense of time passing can be altered by exposure to a flickering stimulus, such as a digital screen. Some research suggests that a person’s adaptation to a flickering stimulus can even result in distortions that continue beyond screen time (Johnston et al, 2006; Eagleman, 2008). Even the colour of our digital screens may corrupt our delicate sense of time (Gorn et al, 2004). So, the digital society we are creating is also badly distorting our chronesthesia— both when we are using screens and after we have switched them off. It’s no coincidence that children have difficulty judging how long they’ve been playing their favourite computer game.

The second relevant insight from neuroscientific research, is that for the brain to develop a sense of time, humans need to experience causality by interacting with the real world (Stetson et al, 2006; Eagleman, 2008). Those ancient peoples had it right when they were looking for anchors in the sun, moon, stars, and tides. Meanwhile, we modern folk— and our young, in particular —are becoming increasingly lost in the unanchored, timeless, online, digital stream. Although Western societies no longer recognize it,

people are an essential part of the environment; they are as real as trees, rocks or skyscrapers, and their interactions with each other and with places ...influence their health and well-being. (Lindheim and Syme, 1983)

Who needs time? Time and the human body

The problem with creating a controlled digital world is that, as biological creatures, we remain profoundly sensitive to indicators of real world time. Blood pressure is thought to show sensitivity to the Schumann resonance (Mitsutake et al, 2005); and there is growing evidence not only that human fertility remains tied to earthly cycles (Huber et al, 2004), but that the month of our birth may determine our susceptibility to certain, seemingly unrelated, dis-eases in adult life (Martinez-Bakker et al, 2014; Boland et al, 2015).

Yet more than half the world’s population now live in cities (WHO, 2010), where there is growing ‘desynchronization’ from our Earth’s fundamental rhythms. As Stevenson et al (2015) point out:

humans in developed societies now spend the vast majority of their lives in conditions that mimic ‘summer-like’ environments. These so-called eternal summers are characterized by light and temperature conditions that lack seasonal rhythmicity. Presently, many of us no longer live in accordance with the naturally occurring variation in geophysical rhythms.

The consequences of this seasonal desynchronization include the retinal damage and increased risk of breast cancer caused by ‘ill-timed exposure to artificial light’ (SCENIHR, 2012); cardiovascular disorders (Scheer et al, 2009); respiratory disease, asthma, and allergies caused by particulate pollution (Beggs, 2004); stress, depression, sadness and psychiatric disorders caused by population density and disconnection from biodiversity (Dean et al, 2011); sleep disorders (SCENIHR, 2012), obesity and gastrointestinal dysfunction (Fonken et al, 2010); neurodegenerative disorders caused by the disruption of circadian and seasonal rhythms, light, noise pollution and over-stimulation (Wulff et al, 2010; Kaplan, 1995); and even genetically disrupted immunity (Dopico et al, 2015), increased morbidity and mortality (Stevenson et al, 2015).

‘Privileged’-world, post-millennial generations may be ‘born with a sense of relatedness to their environments’, but ‘through the processes of socialization they acquire a sense of separateness from environments, including the natural environment’ (Phenice and Griffore, 2003). A 2014 survey of 350 American children (Kabali et al, 2015) found:

Most households had television (97%), tablets (83%), and smartphones (77%). At age 4, half the children had their own television and three-fourths their own mobile device. Almost all children (96.6%) used mobile devices, and most started using before age 1. ... At age 2, most children used a device daily...

Amongst this demographic, the effects of desynchronization from the natural world appear intensified (Kasser, 2002), fuelling a host of physical and psychological dis-eases (Lewis et al, 2012; Xie et al, 2015) and promoting unhealthy physical, sexual and psychological aspirations (Saguy & Riley, 2005; Braun- Courville, 2009). Worse, as the natural world is disregarded, it grows endangered by the many insensitive ways in which humans exploit it. The resulting climate emergency is reported by scientists and our daily media as an existential species threat (Mecklin, 2020), and this sense of existential doom is itself increasingly understood to promote an emotional disconnection from the natural world (Buttlar et al, 2017). It’s a vicious cycle.

Faster pharma: time and treatment

Of course, our society’s ‘future-mindedness’ (Sontag, 1998) can also bring benefits. Comparisons of outcomes of cancer care in Western countries have consistently illustrated the advantages of early diagnosis and rapid access to treatment (Berrino et al, 1995; Abdel-Rahman et al, 2009; Brown & Rubin, 2014). It is the medical profession’s belief that:

When a diagnosis is accurate and made in a timely manner, a patient has the best opportunity for a positive health outcome because clinical decision making will be tailored to a correct understanding of the patient's health problem. (Holmboe and Durning, 2014)

Yet, even pre-pandemic, National Health Service practitioners had, on average, ‘about six minutes’ (Honoré, 2004:148) to relate a patient’s presentation to a ‘pre-existing set of categories agreed upon by the medical profession to designate a specific condition’ (Jutel, 2009). Meanwhile, the application of market forces has given rise to such ‘ever-increasing options for diagnostic testing and treatment’ and ‘rapidly rising levels of biomedical and clinical evidence’, that:

The rising complexity of health care and the sheer volume of advances, coupled with clinician time constraints and cognitive limitations, have outstripped human capacity to apply this new knowledge. (Balogh et al, 2015)

Additionally, the ever-increasing variety of ‘profitable medicines for a range of daily activities’ (Fox & Ward, 2008:856) skews patients’ perception of dis-ease by medicalizing solutions to common social experiences, such as the ‘disruptive behaviour’ of children (Fishman, 2004), average sexual performance (Marshall, 2002), or shyness (Lexchin, 2001). Patients now behave as consumers, demanding speedy ‘magic bullet’ solutions (Marshall 2002:133). As medical services increasingly rely on the big data marketplace to hone diagnostic templates and tools (Balogh et al, 2015), dis-ease is re-framed as a fractured series of isolated symptoms requiring speedy, discrete solutions.

For the past three decades, the pharmaceutical industry has consistently been the most profitable business sector in the United States (Angell, 2000). An estimated 20% of its profits is spent annually on research and development; meanwhile, 40% is devoted to marketing (ibid.). This marketing relies heavily on the harvesting of digital data, which becomes the commercial property of the digital platform developers (Lupton, 2014), whilst ‘consumers’ are encouraged to believe that the ‘big data’ to which they contribute

are more powerful and accurate sources of knowledge than other means of collecting information about people’s behaviour, experiences and opinions. (ibid.)

This is significant, critics suggest, because it causes pharmaceutical industries to over-concentrate production on profitable drugs that meet the perceived needs of a particular demographic of digital consumers, diverting global capacity from wider actual and anticipated health needs (Angell, 2000; Kelly- Cirino et al, 2018). There are also consequences for the hapless, digitally engaged consumer. In the United States, an estimated $25 billion is spent annually on the pharmaceutical treatment of wounds, yet these are often symptoms of underlying circulatory disorders, or diseases such as diabetes (Sen et al, 2007). It can be more profitable to treat a range of symptoms than to spend time addressing more profound, underlying conditions. The digital health phenomenon operates to ensure that there is not only ‘a pill for every ill, but perhaps more significantly, an ill for every pill’ (Mintzes, 2002: 909).

On curing and healing: time and tradition

So where does all that leave slower, traditional, herbal medicinal practices? Does herbal medicine have anything to offer? Traditional herbal practices are drawn from ‘indigenous ways of knowing’ (Kimmerer, 2003:100). Rather than standing in opposition to science, these sensibilities and bodies of knowledge themselves emerge ‘from careful systematic observation of nature, from the results of innumerable lived experiments’ (ibid:101). Yet these traditional practices do stand against the pharmaceuticalization of health and medicine, and the rapacious consumption that disrupts our chronesthesia. Fortunately, there is

an increasing recognition that quality healthcare and the delivery of that care need to take a more holistic, patient-centric approach, an approach that emphasizes healing as important as curing. (Firth et al, 2015:44)

Healing is differentiated from cure by engagement with the ‘repair and recovery of mind, body, and spirit’ (Smith et al, 2013) in addition to the eradication of physical symptoms. This focus on wholeness derives from the Hippocratic view of health as a state of harmonious balance between body and soul (McElligot, 2010). Indeed, the origin of the English word ‘healing’ lies in ‘haelen’, Old English for ‘wholeness’ (Quinn, 1997).

Firth et al (2015) determine four ‘defining attributes of healing’: it is a process which evolves over time; it is a ‘dynamic, emergent, and experiential’ movement from ‘an undesired state’ towards ‘renewal’; it ‘occurs’ in ‘mind, body, and spirit’ in ‘expected and unexpected ways, creating a new entity’; and it ‘engages the individual’s innate ability to repair damage and recover function’.

Whilst some consensus emerges about what healing is, there is less clarity on how it might be delivered. To determine relevant qualitative information, physicians must take the time to elicit any ‘changes in sensations and feelings’, ‘changes in self-concepts and values’, or ‘changes in medical symptoms and complaints’ (Firth et al, 2015). Both time and dialogue are central to the ‘construction of meaning’ and ‘cognitive reframing’ recommended by German theorists (Teut et al, 2014). The ambitions of healing, then, neatly reflect the conceptualization of time as a fundamental, integrated, physiological system.

Zahourek (2005:106-7) argues that ‘transformative change (healing) is dependent on intentionality’, which is ‘essential’ to ‘perceiving mind-body-spirit unity’. Within the transformative healing encounter, intentionality is variously understood as ‘focused attention’, ‘mental projection of awareness, with purpose and efficacy’ (Braud & Schlitz, 1991:31), or ‘the influence of one person on another’ (Pilkington, 2000) through attitudes, behaviours, interpersonal relationships, motives, motivation, and actions. To date, literature on the practical effects of intentionality in healing is slight, and embraces concepts unfamiliar to the Western medical cannon, such as acts of ‘quieting’ and affirmation, and a ‘unity of universal life energy’ (Heidt, 1990). Yet these concepts are readily found in Traditional Chinese Medicine (Rosenberg, 2018), in the ‘gunas’, yogic ‘prana’ and ‘chi’ of the Indic traditions (Clark, 2002; Lad, 2002), in the energetics of homeopathy (Kent & Loos, 2009), in Bach Flower Remedies (Barnard, 1987), and beyond. Indeed, throughout traditional herbalism, there is widespread acknowledgement of time physiology manifest as ‘energy’, or ‘spirit’, and this is even considered transferable between plants, humans, and other living beings (Pendell, 2005; Wood, 2016). It’s a perspective that is increasingly validated both philosophically (Ingold, 2011; Lovelock, 2016), and through empirical studies in botany and phytochemistry (Teixeira et al, 2010; Ncube et al, 2011; Jayanthy et al, 2013; Ahl et al, 2014; Li et al, 2015; Gololo et al, 2016; Satyavarapu et al, 2020).

Diagnosis and prescription

So, scientific research is beginning to reveal time as a product of complex, multi-layered interactions between internal chemical-biological processes which have evolved to be responsive to external phenomena (earth processes). These human time systems are delicate, malleable and

are therefore highly vulnerable to changes in the constellation of environmental factors under which they have evolved. (Stevenson et al, 2015)

In the 21st century, our interactions with environmental factors have become so distorted that our internal time systems are malfunctioning. It is now beyond doubt that:

temporal mismatches between the environment and circadian biology…have detrimental effects on health and well-being. (ibid.)

Moreover, the disparity between nature and popular Western conceptions of time creates a ‘frame conflict’ (Wodak, 1996) in which our highly sensitive time physiology can only exacerbate our dyschronesthesia. The resulting dis-ease is increasingly serviced by big pharma:

[P]eople have lost the ability to read the role of a plant from the landscape and read instead the ‘directions for use’ on a tamper-proof bottle of Echinacea. (Kimmerer, 2003:101)

So many interrelated physiological systems are recruited to serve the human time system, that the symptoms of dysfunction may be correspondingly broad. This may have obscured science’s ability to appropriately identify the role of dyschronesthesia in many common disorders. Nonetheless, it follows that the diagnosis, management, and treatment of many contemporary dis-eases could benefit from prioritizing attendance to ‘chronotherapy’ (Li et al, 2013). Repair and restoration are less likely to be achieved by a pharmaceutical ‘magic bullet’ (Marshall 2002: 133), or surgical intervention, than by the raising of noetic and autonoetic consciousness and the reduction of exposure to mechanisms that disrupt or inhibit our vital time system. The failure of contemporary Western medicine to comprehend a diversity of symptoms as evidence of dyschronesthesia simultaneously strengthens traditional herbalism’s claims to the existence of a fundamental, vital, integrated physiology of time that is variously described as the ‘energetic system’, ‘subtle body’, ‘subtle energy’, and the ‘energetic body’.

Thus, in the treatment of dyschronesthesia, traditional herbal practices have more to offer than modern, pharmaceutically-driven medicine. Traditional herbal medicine provides opportunities to reintegrate the chronesthetic and the autonoetic: by holistically framing dis-ease in both diagnosis and healing; by calming expectations and raising auto-noetic consciousness through duration of treatment; and by respecting bio-diverse and seasonal medicinal ingredients that can serve to re-unite the patient with noetic influences.

From the preparation of materials to the diagnostic encounter, traditional herbalism is infused with acts of intentionality, quieting, and affirmation that serve as temporal correctives to chronesthetic disorders. To realize this advantage, however, herbal medicine must maintain the integrity of its tradition and resist the ‘pharmaceuticalization’ (Fox & Ward, 2008) of both herbal products and practices:

it still remains possible, even now, to turn things around: to spin straw into gold, time into eternity, anxiety into ease and inspiration. (McEwen, 2011:14)

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