Our first white paper

Towards an Accurate In Vivo Reconceptualizing of Autonomic State

Greetings Friends-

I’m pleased to let you know that our first white paper, Towards an Accurate In Vivo Reconceptualizing of Autonomic State, is available on ResearchGate.

DESCRIPTION:

For the past decade, Hearth Science has been developing a novel in vivo neurophysiological cartography of the Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) and its affiliated neurochemistries that redraws the functional architecture and inter-relationships between the three primary autonomic systems, significantly updating their embodied neural cartography beyond what is commonly understood in both traditional neurology and Polyvagal Theory (Porges, 1994). This novel neurological mapping, and its de-coupling from affiliated neurochemistries metabolized by the ANS (classical autonomic neurological namings conjoin neurological systems and their affiliated threat chemistries) combine with the Porgesian concept of neuroception, the moment-to-moment autonomic neural detection of safety, danger, or lifethreat to define a three-variable system whose integral is autonomic state. This novel conceptualization provides a more nuanced and descriptive quantifiable description of eustress and allostatic loads, of the neurobiological sequelae of salutogenic and stressful events, alterations to, or retained deflections of autonomic baselines, and explains clinical observations about the transitions between various modes of stress response, dramatically increasing the precision and delineation of autonomic state, in its particular embodied neurology, as well as demarcating more precise intervention pathways for stress metabolism and release mechanisms. Since much of what is making modern people unwell is stress-related, and since the Autonomic Nervous System, as the neural architecture of the mindbody connection, is the primary neurological and neurochemical conduit of both ill and well-being, developing more precisely descriptive mappings of the functional in vivo embodied (e.g., extra-cranial) dynamics of these systems, and their relationships with both salutogenesis and disease etiology has profound implications for medicine, mental health, performance, and human flourishing broadly construed.