Sensing in Therapy and Beyond!

Let’s go back to the basic sciences – and think about where energy, as physics, fits into our understanding of health?

When we learned physics at school, one of the first things we learned was velocity, or speed, but I never thought about the crossover of physics with biology until I started working with energy. The speed at which our body works, optimises its efficiency, and an efficient body, like an efficient machine requires less fuel, doesn’t it? In fact an efficient body will manage its own functions really well, and it will heal itself whenever it can.

And let’s consider communication. As therapists whenever we meet a new client, we immediately start assessing them, and they start sussing us out too.

Can I? May I? Should I? Do I trust this person? Do I feel safe?

As we look, we perceive and interpret light waves, and so we see. We interpret information in the visible spectrum of light through the complex history and experience which forms the basis of our perception. At the same time we listen, and mechanical waves hit our eardrums. But we don’t only interpret the words, we also notice tone of voice, tightness or charge, a good therapist can hear and sense changes in emotional state. We sense heat or radiation – although we can’t see it we can perceive it if we are close enough and, more recently we have started to understand that we even interpret smell as a vibration.

"This work shows that altering molecular vibrations of molecules changes their smell. Receptors in our noses are acting like tiny spectrometers to identify molecules by their vibrations." Dr Luca Turin, Alexander Fleming Biomedical Sciences Research Centre, Athens, Greece.

According to University College London (2013) - Receptors in our noses are acting like tiny spectrometers to identify molecules by their vibrations, not the shape of the molecules as previously believed. Some people can even smell disease. Joy Milne, a Scottish nurse noticed that her husband developed a particular smell 10 years before his Parkinson’s diagnosis. Her ability to detect this specific smell led to ongoing research by The University of Manchester together with Parkinson’s UK.

Dogs can be trained to alert their owners of an impending epileptic fit before it is visible to humans. The dogs can sense the change in charge long before it is perceptible to our senses.

Senses form the basis of communication,

a transference of information, an exchange of energy.

And in the man-made world of gadgets, mobile phones or wireless communications are simply the result of machines being developed, with the appropriate application of physics, to allow effective transference of information across distance. Pioneering the new paradigm of radiocommunication, the Lecher loop predated our modern technology by over a hundred years but is no less effective in its task.

Thank you for joining me on this adventure through time - where physics meets anatomy

Look out for part FOUR soon,

Carol