There is enormous interest in power, and especially personal power, which holds the key to every kind of success and achievement. Yet there’s a problem with how we approach personal power. Despite the poet William Wordsworth’s warning that “we murder to dissect,” we analyze power by cutting it up in bits and pieces, trying to tease out the relevant factors from the immensely complex issues open to question. You can examine power as a product of the mind (some people come up with impressive new ideas that have an enormous impact), the product of the brain (some people seem to be hard-wired for great decision-making), or the product of genes (some people have won the DNA lottery, it seems).
But what if the whole is much bigger than the sum of the parts? This certainly must be true when it comes to personal power, because it’s the totality of the person who matters. We call this a “top down” approach, which considers wholeness first, rather than the reductionism of dissecting the whole into the tiniest parts, which is a “bottom up” approach.
You are the product of mind, brain, and genes acting in concert – that much is undeniable – so the big question is “How do they cooperate? What organizes them into a unity rather than as separate parts?”
An emerging field known as systems biology has begun to ask top-down questions like these, because the way we experience life is not reductionist. Instead, we experience the following:
Read More Here
Like Comment Share Google+ LinkedIn YouTube Instagram Disqus Delicious Tumblr Stumble
Career Curveballs: How I Learned to Tame the Ego
The worst setback in my career took place after I had graduated from medical school in India in the 1970s, came to America, and set my heart on doing research in endocrinology. I destroyed my dream overnight, with very long-term consequences
The most prestigious research fellowships were those in Boston medicine, and I was fortunate. I was offered one in an endocrinology program at a hospital affiliated with Tufts University that took only two or three new fellows a year. It was headed by a world-famous researcher in the field. My time would be divided between laboratory work, which would lead to publishing research papers, and seeing patients in the clinic.
I was fascinated by being in the lab, and there was no way to foresee the blowup that would end my fellowship and almost my whole career. What mattered was the subtle interplay of hormones in the body, which is what endocrine research is all about. The field had miles to go before a complete understanding would be reached. The next turn in the road would lead me to studying the hormones secreted by the brain, not just the thyroid or adrenal glands. The brain, of course, is only a step away from the mind.
Continue Reading Here
Like Comment Share Google+ LinkedIn YouTube Instagram Disqus Delicious Tumblr Stumble
