The intelligent body and its discontents.

The traditional view is that mind is intelligent and the body is stupid. Recent research suggests that the whole body, and not just the brain, acts as a complex parallel processing system. If the whole body is intelligent, then intelligent processes normally attributed to psychology may occur in the non-brain body. This article shows how self-organizing learning error in a brain-body system creates the potential for a new type of pathology, network pathology, that is distributed across over the whole body. The intelligent body concept is illustrated with four examples: chemical sensitivity, asthma, chronic fatigue syndrome and obesity. Network pathology develops when normally adaptive self-organizational processes malfunction so that control system parameters are altered in a way that creates suboptimal self-regulation. Subtle therapies are needed, in addition to the conventional robust therapies to correct network pathology.