These two mechanisms are activated in parallel fashion. They mutually influence each other, but follow a different causal pathway. The feelings of yoga poses for male reproductive organs and depression that follow the exhaustion phase are thus accompanied by depressive affects like anger at oneself and one’s powerlessness. The organism has fewer and fewer resources. The waste products in the muscles are not eliminated, breathlessness sets in, the arteries and the heart function poorly.
An excess of Cortisol lowers the immune defenses, but it also attacks tissues of the central nervous system, which it saturates via the bloodstream At the beginning, this effect is stimulating because it allows the ions of the nerve membranes to circulate more rapidly (it consists especially of the circulation of calcium in the membranes). Once this chemical reaction has been exploited, the neurons are in turn exhausted, and sometimes die, due especially to depolarization. Several studies describe a reduction in the volume of the hippocampus in persons who have lived through this form of sudden accommodation.
The hippocampus, situated in the limbic system, is especially implied in the management of memory and spatial relations. The attack on this neurological structure causes uncontrollable psychological reactions of disorientation. The glucocorticoids also excite other regions of the brain. They modify the functioning of the frontal lobe, which can explain why persons under stress often make poor decisions. They also excite the amygdala, which increases the feeling of fear. The amygdala reinforces the activity of the pituitary while the hippocampus can inhibit it.
Certain attacks to the hippocampus can be repaired by taking antidepressants, which is one of the reasons they are prescribed. This implies taking these medications during a prescribed time (at least a year) to restructure zones of the hippocampus that were destroyed by stress.
Laborit: From the Cell to Politics, from Spinoza to Reich
Henri-Marie Laborit76 (1914-1995) was also influenced by the study of the shock that unsettles soldiers at war. He was a surgeon in the French navy during World War II and during the last French colonial wars (Indochina and Algeria). In the latter part of his life, he became a kind of Spinoza of biology who shows how each system actively influences the system that contains it. Laborit77 arrives at similar conclusions as Spinoza with regard to human beings when he shows that the mental system cannot be conscious of the nonconscious mechanisms by which it is regulated. One of his principal preoccupations seems to have been to find a way to understand how an individual, entangled in systems of regulations that go through many levels (atoms, cells, organisms, institutions, ecology), can actively and lucidly participate in what animates him This theme gradually became a form of individual and social engagement.
Laborit’s research observes mechanisms that enrich the models of Bernard, Cannon, and Selye. He describes in greater detail how the regulatory mechanisms of the organism are like a bridge that links the cellular and social dynamics. Like a bridge, the homeostatic mechanisms are rooted in two shores. Thus, the food industry makes it possible for human yoga poses for male reproductive organs to feed themselves, but it uses this support to render individuals dependent on a system that exploits them He describes in a detailed way the chain of mechanisms that connect cellular, organismic and social dynamics. This allows him to provide an enlarged panoramic view of the heterogeneity of the mechanisms involved in the homeostatic regulation of the human species.
