The Myth of Normal 49

facets (physical, psychological, biographical, etc.) is part and parcel of being human. Our difficulties begin when we lose sight of the other side of the equation, which is just as real, if less apparent. The interrelatedness of seemingly isolated organisms has now been discovered even in the lives of trees that form living networks, communicating through electrical impulses akin to animal and human nervous systems, hormones, chemical signals, and scents. As an article in Smithsonian magazine reports, “Trees of the same species are communal, and will often form alliances with trees of other species.” Peter Wohlleben, the German forester who has become well known for popularizing such information, wittily calls it “the wood-wide web.”[4] That our own individual minds and bodies are intimately linked is fairly simple to grasp. Less obvious but no less true is the fact that those same bodyminds are in many ways shaped, in the first place and throughout our lives, by factors external to us. Although modern medicine’s focus on the individual organism and its internal processes isn’t wrong as such, it misses something vital: the pivotal influence of the mental, emotional, social, and natural environments in which we live. Our biology itself is interpersonal. The concept of interpersonal neurobiology was introduced some years ago by Dr. Daniel Siegel, [*] a psychiatrist, researcher, and prolific author. Like myself and many of our colleagues, Dr. Siegel had become uncomfortable with the limitations of his education. “When I was in medical school,” he writes, “many of the fine teachers we had approached their patients, and their students, as if they had no center of inner experience—no subjective internal core we might call our mental life. It was as if we were just bags of chemicals and bodily organs without a self, without a mind.”[5] He sensed that both research and practice lacked a consensus definition of “health” and, startlingly, in the mental health field lacked even a shared agreement of what “mind” is, let alone a shared view of the relationship of mind and brain. Recruiting co-workers in medicine, neurology, psychiatry, psychology, anthropology, sociology, history, physiology, biology, physics, and related disciplines that study the human experience, he set out to explore what such a consensus might look like. The team’s findings confirmed that our brains and