At this point in history, it feels almost impossible to me to write honestly about the nervous system without writing about collapse. The project of modern civilization so-called, which is ultimately an imperial project birthed from alienation, has pushed the biosphere to the brink. All around us, in the multi-faceted infrastructures of modernity– how we have organized ourselves into nation-states– how we have organized political economy– how our lives are governed by inflationary pressures in the context of needing to make a living in systems designed to extract labor in service to capital– our nervous systems are sense-making in a context of increasing ambient threat.
The human nervous system mediates between interiors and exteriors. Autonomic physiology, which is the particular purview of my research and clinical work for nearly thirty years, is the neural scaffolding that governs the energy-processing templates through which we relate to our experience. Building on the foundation of Polyvagal Theory, developed by my primary mentor in neurophysiology, Dr. Stephen Porges, I have organized a model of Autonomics that regards this system through a tripartite intersection of three variables, which I sometimes call 3 x 3 x 3, because each of the lenses that comprise it has three possible states. These variables are neuroception, neurology, and neurochemistry. My purpose in this cartographic modeling is to show how the intersection of neuroception: our moment-to-moment assessment of safety, danger, and lifethreat, with specific autonomic neurological systems, in the presence of coordinating neurohormonal chemistry organizes autonomic states: energy-processing templates that govern how we process our experience of the world. An autonomic state is like a pair of neural glasses that you cannot take off. It shapes the depth, velocity, and quality of the river of experience flowing through you. It governs visceral state (how it feels inside your body), how you understand yourself existentially (we identify with the states we spend the most time in), what emotions are available to us, the nature of our thoughts, how we interpret the world around us, and how we behave.
I have, for a number of years, likened primary autonomic states to the three states of water. For someone unfamiliar with this mysterious element, encountering water in the three faces she wears would seem to be encountering three entirely different materials. If you met liquid water, steam, and ice, and were unaware that they were the same element, I propose you would not believe they were related unless you could watch them change state. If you did watch them change state, a function of kinetic energy that translates through their temperature, you would be astonished, because her properties change entirely across these three faces. Autonomic state is like this. The version of ourselves in safety–the liquid water version–bears little resemblance to the steam version of ourselves in danger, and no resemblance to the ice version of ourselves in lifethreat. A human nervous system centered in each of these three primary states might as well be three different people.
In my most recent book, The Neurobiology of Connection, I have marshaled a huge amount of clinical data to show that creating wellness is a function of moving more and more of our present moment states into a neuroception of safety. It is, I propose, within our power to do this by understanding our own autonomic cartography, learning the sequence required to activate our neuroception of safety and connection, and learning how to consciously augment the necessary neural inputs for this process. Doing this requires mindful awareness, an experiential sense of our autonomic selves, and the discernment and discipline to learn to feed ourselves health-creating inputs. It requires that we become agentic in our own healing process.
When we neurocept safety, and are able to engage the neurological and neuro-hormonal systems attendant thereto, we activate salugenesis: e.g., wellness creation. We are able to grasp the deepest levers of our wellbeing, and tilt them in the direction of flourishing. This is crucial work, because approximately 80% of what is wrong (e.g., in the sense of mental and physical health) with modern humans in stress-related, and you can learn to directly activate the root drivers of this system yourself, i.e., with no therapeutic intermediary required.
This shift in orientation, from a trauma-focused worldview to a health creation-focused worldview accords with a more indigenous and ancestral orientation toward becoming fully human, and re-situates the dialog about engaging our neurology in the province of wellbeing rather than disease.
Our objective, organizationally in the networks I lead, is to help a broader and broader selection of humanity return to and live in and from this ‘liquid water’ state. This is our ancestral birthright, which has been denatured by millenia of alienation, and the context in which our deepest humanness resides, as well as the context from which morality arises endogenously. If we want to create the world our hearts know is possible, we have to get more people functioning from this baseline.
Yet since activating these liquid water systems requires the proper inputs to the nervous system (inputs of the Evolved Nest that foster the proper intuitions of relatedness) and since much of the mechanism of the modern world is designed to feed on our detection of danger, and since the collusion of digital technology (think faux social networks, adrenalized video games, the dissociation of screentime), capitalism (think of the triumph of capital over labor), and the necro-politics of this era (nativist, racist, misogynist, anti-ecological etc.) harness defensive responses as a foundation layer of their operating systems, and since most modern people are traumatized far more deeply and multi-generationally than we realize, modernity has created a biological feedback loop that is acceleratingly deviating people from this possibility.
In utero and early life stress sensitizes nervous systems to adrenaline, cortisol, and endogenous opioids. It trains children to become more aggressive and more dissociated. Children raised in necro-political systems replete with toxic and dehumanizing discourse, by stressed-out, distracted, and traumatized parents who do not understand ancestral childrearing practices, in contexts where stress hormones flow like milk, functionally alter their brains and nervous systems in the direction of steam and ice. Our digital technology, capitalism, and politics are colluding to produce humans void of the ability to deeply contact their own interiority. Our civilization is engineering young people whose nervous systems are being optimized for aggression, dissociation, and indifference. Bluntly, we are building zombies.
The most recent election in the United States, which has returned to power a person who could not stop lying if his life depended on it, seems at one level a referendum on a world where people feel out of control, where the quality of life seems to be getting worse, and where many people spend more of their waking moments in distress than feeling well. To be able to identify with Donald J. Trump’s grievance-filled agenda requires that we are in touch with our own sense of being grievance-filled. And in the United States, where he achieved a clear electoral margin, people clearly feel aggrieved. Tragically, this necro-politics will never lead to liberation. It is much more likely to hasten a techno-fascist state.
In this book I wish to re-architect the entire field of neuroscience as a liberatory praxis. I want to redraw the lines of the discipline from its foundations, in order to put it to work in the service of liberation. I am going to ecstatically dance on the desiccated bones of orthodox neuroscience until I pulverize them into powder, and then reformulate them through the addition of water and other alchemical elements into a new creature entire.
The neuroscience modernity has evolved is a tepid lukewarm affair, constrained since birth by implicit biases of which it was unaware. It has not yet emerged fully from a colonial scaffold, not yet differentiated itself from the Cartesian error of locating identity in cognition. And it is, therefore, and has been since its infancy, blind to its own impotence. The field accelerates into a dead end, having completely boxed itself into the cranial brain. Yet it doesn’t have to be this way.
The nervous system is the site where our context collides with our interiority. It is the interface between what is around us and what is inside us. Your Autonomic Nervous System is, in particular, the neural-architecture of your mind-body connection. The altar of your spirit.
It is therefore a uniquely potent location for transformation. With the birth of Autonomics we have, I believe, accurately mapped autonomic physiology for the first time in this civilizational epoch. What I propose to do here is rewrite the history of neuroscience to provide an adequate lineage history for this emergent field.
Over the next several hundred pages, we are going to re-animate neuroscience, and relocate the focus of its inquiry to include the body entire. This re-assimiliation of the discipline updates the paradigm in which Autonomics can function to optimize transformational possibilities of which we are sorely in need. It continues to situate the discipline within a set of nested contexts, which include both its scientific history, and the ensphering contexts in which our nervous systems make meaning from our experience, namely beyond the sphere of the physiological individual to the familial, sociological, civilizational, ecological, and more-than-human worlds.
As it gets darker and darker out there, we must turn up stronger and stronger the inward lights. Think of this book as a form of night vision that will allow you to continue to evolve your own nervous system from inside out. A set of maps and lenses that will allow you to reorganize your understanding of the field of neuroscience inwardly, increasing your ability to see discerningly in the dark, and brightening the light of your inward fire.
The serialized publication of Visionary Neuroscience begins here, at The Neurobiology of Connection, in January 2025. It will be available only to paid subscribers. Join us for the ride.