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”.
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: kconnolly@anhb.uwa.edu.au
In the office on Mondays and Thursdays - for urgent enquiries please phone Neville Bruce on +61 08 6488 3292
