News Archive

NEWS FROM THE DIRECTOR

Events at the Centre for Integrated Human Studies are moving fast. With the beginning of second semester we welcomed our first enrolled postgraduate student, San Wong, and a new staff member, Steve Johnson. San will be researching the interface between relaxation methods and physical and mental wellbeing; Steve is working on curriculum development. I am also pleased to be working with the new Director of University Extension, Susan Marie. Together we’ll be looking for ways to bring Integrated Human Studies to a wider audience in 2009.

Our second semester seminar series began on August 6 with an entertaining and theatrically adversarial joust with my colleagues Dennis Haskell and Colin MacLeod. I confess I was pleased that they successfully refuted my claim that the body is the dominant mode of the human being! Notes from the talks are on our website now. We thank our presenters for making their notes available so you, readers, can access them – but of course it is much more enjoyable to come along to the seminars and hear the talks! Then you can participate in the discussion too.

We find ourselves talking about the seminars through the following days and are planning on starting an online discussion board. We’ll let you know as soon as it’s available.

Associate Professor Neville Bruce
Director, Centre for Integrated Human Studies

NEXT SEMINAR 20 August

The next seminar in our Human Wellbeing series examines some aspects of health. In keeping with our integrated approach, we’ll start with an academic background, take a look at practica policy issues, and then consider how human behaviour might affect us into the future. It will be held at 5.30 pm in Seminar room 1.81 in the School of Anatomy and Human Biology at the University of Western Australia (two buildings south of Shenton House on the Matilda Bay side of the campus).

Seminar 2, 20 August 08 : Health
Is there an evolutionary or physiological basis for the psalm’s “three score years and ten” summation of human lifespan? Historically, what have been the threats to human health? Human beings now have vast medical knowledge and skills, and many diseases that would have killed us last century are treatable and even curable this century. But there are new threats to human health; and policy has so far failed to address the disgraceful state of Indigenous health.
Chair : A/Prof Neville Bruce
Presenters : Dr Debra Judge – Evolution of human lifespan and factors affecting it
A/Prof Ted Wilkes – Indigenous health – policy issues
Prof Philip Weinstein – “Are we shitting in our own nest?”

NOTES FROM THE LAST SEMINAR, HUMAN WELLBEING

The Centre for Integrated Human Studies director Associate Professor Neville Bruce began by explaining what Integrated Human Studies is all about, and reiterated that the fundamental focus is to examine what it is to be human, and how we can promote human wellbeing in a sustainable environment. The Human Wellbeing series examines some aspects of these questions, with the first seminar looking at body, mind and psyche.

Neville invited the audience to consider what the body is; what it has meant to us in the past; what it means to us now, and what it might mean to us in the future.
He suggested that the body – by dictionary definition the physical material frame of man – is most purely a body when it is a corpse. The body has many forms: from the embryo through various stages to senescence and death. When does it become a human being, and when does it cease to be one? He proposed that the body is the dominant meaning of what it is to be a human being, and gave a number of compelling examples, from Narcissus who became obsessed with his image, to the sanctification of the dead body by a variety of religions, and the current popular value ascribed to bodies, with Heidi Klum insuring her legs for millions, and Dolly Parton doing the same with her “assets”. In affluent societies, we have modified the body over time by increasing its longevity and functionality; changing its appearance with surgery and by becoming taller and fatter; enhancing it with drugs; and adding to it with prostheses and bionics. Neville wondered what we might do to the body in the next fifty years, and challenged the audience to consider all the possibilities for genetic enhancement, targeted drugs, and bionic add-ons that might improve physical, sensory and mental capabilities. While many in the audience rejected the idea of surgical intervention to improve on physical abilities, Neville pointed out that it is a small step from joint and lens replacements, cochlear devices, and cosmetic surgery to enhancement technologies.

In the future, with the rise of computer consciousness, will we need a body at all? Neville concluded by returning to myth and imagination to ask the question, if the apple in the Garden of Eden was the font of all knowledge, would implanting extra computer power in the brain lead to the downfall of humankind?
You can see Neville’s PowerPoint notes here .

Professor Colin MacLeod of Psychology gave an overview of the theories and research into happiness. He asserted that the heart of human wellbeing is mental wellbeing, or happiness. Many philosophers believe that the primary motivator of all human behaviour is the quest for happiness – and the US Declaration of Independence states explicitly that “all men … are endowed … with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”.

Many researchers have attempted to answer the question “where does happiness come from?”, and there were two broad theses, the “bestowed” view and the “crafted’ view. The “bestowed” view proposes that happiness is either genetically determined, or situationally determined. The “crafted” view is that it is self determined: in other words, we are responsible for creating our own happiness. Colin led us through a variety of types of research methodologies that have been used to test hypotheses related to these views, including studies on families and on identical and non-identical twins; comparisons between nations; longitudinal studies within nations and on individuals; and cross sectional studies in nations. There is a significant but not huge correlation between twins, suggesting that happiness is genetically determined, but only to a small extent, and many other factors must have an effect. One’s situation is important – wealth does bring happiness, but only to a certain level, after which increases in wealth are not matched by commensurate increases in happiness. In poor nations, rich people are happier than poor people, but the same is not necessarily true of rich people in rich nations. There are no long-lasting positive effects on happiness after a lottery win. (Aren’t you glad to know that!) The conclusions here are that happiness is somewhat situationally determined. However the most telling research is into the behaviours of happy people, who make choices that are conducive to happiness. Among other things, they choose what to invest in – experiential purchases elevate happiness more than do material purchases; they choose how to interpret events; they forgive transgressions; and they choose to savour the good things in their lives.
Colin’s PowerPoint notes are available here .

Professor Dennis Haskell opened with a quote from Shakespeare’s Hamlet: “What is a man / If his chief good and market of his time / Be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more.” (Hamlet Act IV, sc. 4) to support his assertion that human beings are nothing without our spiritual and artistic dimensions. Before science, there was only the exercise of myth and religion to explain fundamental questions about the world and human existence; after some 400 years of scientific advances, the great questions – does God exist? What is the purpose of our lives? – remain unanswered. Characters of myth and legend like Zeus and Venus have been replaced in the popular imagination by celebrities like Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. In this material age, religion of various kinds must satisfy a dimension in our lives that science apparently cannot. The arts
provide an imaginative response to the rational material world in ways that can feed the soul.

Dennis showed a painting by Rembrandt, “Landscape with a stone bridge” that appears to be a realistic landscape but is actually a metaphor for man’s journey through the physical world (with all its distractions and temptations) towards a heavenly reward. Then he read his own poem in response to this painting, which linked it with events in Indonesia 400 years later. This poem was an example of the claim made by Jay Parini when he said “the still, small voice of poetry … stands in ferocious contrast to the clamour in the culture at large and, often, to the sound of society's explosions”.
( https://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24024076-16947,00.html )
Dennis also quoted the Australian writer David Malouf, who said that the “real work of culture” is “enriching our consciousness” so that we can ultimately “possess the world we inhabit imaginatively as well as in fact… (n)ot legally, and not just physically, but as Aboriginal people, for example, have always possessed the world we live in here: in the imagination”. ( https://www.abc.net.au/rn/boyers/98boyer2.htm )

Questions and comments included :
· Is forgiveness necessary for happiness, or is indifference enough?
· Human beings are social animals – the value of human interaction in happiness should not be ignored.
· Will enhancement of the body become a commercial proposition?
· The perspective of the talks was dictated by the frames of reference particular to our
culture.

CORRECTION
Giz Watson has kindly let me know that the decline in rainfall of 20% that I quoted from her talk on Greening Australia at the last seminar in our first semester series applies to Western Australia, not Australia as the notes in the last newsletter said. Apologies for this error, and thanks, Giz, for pointing it out.

HAVE YOU JUST JOINED OUR MAIL LIST?
If you have missed previous newsletters containing summaries of the seminar presentations, you can see them on our web site on the News and Events page.

ABOUT THE CENTRE FOR INTEGRATED HUMAN STUDIES
You can find out more about the Centre and about IHS at our web site . If you are interested in enrolling in postgraduate courses in IHS, please contact the Director, A/Prof Neville Bruce on +61 08 6488 3292 or email [email protected] .

TELL US WHAT YOU THINK
Please feel free to give us your comments, thoughts or suggestions for future seminar topics by emailing Karen on [email protected] .

Media references

Karen Connolly
Integrated Human Studies
School of Anatomy and Human Biology
The University of Western Australia
35 Stirling Highway Crawley WA 6009
+61 08 6488 3647 email: [email protected]
In the office on Mondays and Thursdays - for urgent enquiries please phone Neville Bruce on +61 08 6488 3292