Cellular Wisdom: Decoding the Body's Secret Language - Hardcover

King, Joan C.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1587611880 ISBN 13: 9781587611889

Publisher: Celestial Arts, 2004

Synopsis

After more than 20 years of working in a research lab, neuroscientist Joan C. King began to see her surroundings as much more than a temple of science she discovered that they are a temple of the human spirit as well. She realized that the physiological processes of the body the interactions within and between individual cells, organs, and systems had significance beyond human physiology. Fundamental human truths are written in our cells, outlined in the interactions between our body s organs and organ systems. Just as a single human cell is orchestrated from a nucleus at its center, each of us has a blueprint at the heart of our being; when we make decisions that are in line with this purpose, we feel vital and fulfilled. Or take the fact that only when cells connect with other cells do they fulfill their potential; we humans achieve our grandest purposes in relationship with others. CELLULAR WISDOM shows us how to interpret the truths that our bodies teach and how to use them as lessons to live a more exuberant and harmonious life.

About this title

About the Author

JOAN C. KING, Ph.D., was a professor at Tufts University School of Medicine for 20 years and served as chair of the Department of Anatomy and Cellular Biology. She then established Beyond Success, a coaching service based in Loveland, Colorado, where she helps others apply the dynamic principles of biology and physiology to their lives. Teaches how to decode the body s secret language by showing parallels between a healthy functioning body and a healthy functioning person.

Reviews

A former Tufts neurosciences professor, King now makes a living as a life coach, helping people apply "principles of biology and physiology" in order to learn how to "live exuberantly." Readers who failed biology can relax, as King's sketchy but digestible mini-lectures on such topics as the spinal cord and the blood-brain barrier are easy going. Harder to wade through are the vague life lessons she derives from them, which rehash familiar self-help chestnuts about the importance of growth and change, following one's dream, finding balance and rhythm and connecting with others. She illustrates these platitudes with anecdotal case studies and reminiscences about her own quest to find herself (as an ex-academic and ex-nun with three marriages under her belt, she knows from life changes), and drills readers with exercises in hypno-meditative introspection. King's grounding of motivational pop-psychology in hard science is a cumbersome failure. Her "cellular wisdom" consists mainly of inappropriate biological metaphors applied schematically to incommensurable psychological and social phenomena: parents transfer values to children just as neurotransmitters convey information across synapses, for example, while homophobia is like an "auto-immune disease" that "causes aggression by one group against another within the body of society." In proffering these facile and unenlightening analogies, her prose varies between peer-reviewed stolidity ("in our discussion of the sleep-wake cycle, we saw that the suprachiasmatic nuclei...function as the leaders, signaling or triggering the day-night alteration in many systems") and New Age mysticism ("our individual energies pulse in and out of the sea of all energy, all love"). The result is not likely to satisfy either the scientifically curious or the seeker of wisdom.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Celestial Arts
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1587611880
• ISBN 13: 9781587611889
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240