Subtitle: Modal excellence and modal pathology: the same circuitry, facing opposite directions
The most complex machine in the known universe is not a particle collider or a supercomputer.
It is you: a living system that turns chemistry into perception, perception into meaning, and meaning into action.
This lecture is not a medical diagnosis, and it is not a replacement for care.
It is a map of plausibility.
It explains why medicine has long struggled to describe certain phenomena in plain language, even when the phenomena are real.
Modern clinical medicine excels at structure.
It detects tumors, infections, fractures, and genetic errors.
But some human suffering sits in a harder category:
These are not imaginary.
They are system-level events.
They happen when the body’s signalling networks change state.