Dr. Alex Hankey Distinguished Professor, S-VYASA, Bangalore, India
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PHYCHIATRIC AND PSYCHOLOGICAL HEALTH 27th – 28th April 2020, London UK Dr. Alex Hankey Distinguished Professor, S-VYASA, Bangalore, India Dr. Alex Hankey attended Trinity College, Cambridge, gaining a First in Natural Sciences; he studied theoretical physics at M.I.T, under Professors Robert Gilmore, H. Eugene Stanley, and Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg. In 1969, he learned Transcendental Meditation, becoming a teacher of the technique in 1973. After a year at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, he joined Maharishi International University, working in Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's organization for 30 years. Since his return to research in 2002, he has worked extensively developing detailed theories of complementary systems of medicine based on modern complexity biology. This has led to deep understanding of Naturopathy, Yoga and Yoga Medicine, Ayurveda and other areas of Traditional Complementary and Alternative Medicine. More importantly, extensions of the molecular biology theory of biology, on which modern biomedicine is based have resulted. The expanded theory of biology utilizing complexity together with its main results leads to a picture where an autopsies in the form of self-organized criticality optimizes system functions. This has led to a new definition of health, and new understanding of how physical and psychological healths are maintained. Also emerging are reasons for the psychophysiology's capacity for self-healing; and why organism function is organized according to Ayurveda’s Tridosha structure. His knowledge of critical phenomena have also enabled Dr Hankey to show how critical instabilities in complexity biology provide the foundation for consciousness and organism intelligence, in which freedom of choice is a possibility, in contradiction to Descartes and western views of the past 500 years. Criticality also leads to insights into the need for sleep, the self-healing power of deep meditation, and other psychiatric / psychological phenomena with no previous theory, like OOBEs and the transfer of ideas directly from mind to mind without use of the senses. In 2016 Dr Hankey joined a team from NIMHANS to write an authoritative article on the value of India's ancient traditions for modern mental health practice, published in Lancet Psychiatry. He was founding Managing Editor of the Journal of Ayurveda and Integrative Medicine, and is on editorial boards of many other journals in the field of CAM. Since 2002, when he returned to full time research, he has published over 100 papers in the peer reviewed scientific literature. He is a well - known speaker at internal conferences and has been invited to chair conference sessions and/or give keynote talks in the UK, the US, Italy, Portugal, France, Germany, Sweden, India, Australia, Malaysia, Thailand and Cambodia. .