"The Mind-Body Connection and the Vagus Nerve"

I have recently been asked to give a lecture at the University of New Mexico’s integrative medicine class. I put together a lecture base on the topic of our healthcare system, mind-body dualism, positivism, and reductionism.

As have already surmised, our healthcare system in this country is in a crisis. From this lecture, I hope the students and my clients that read this information with will have a better understanding as the cause to this crisis in our healthcare system. In addition, I will discuss the “vagus nerve” in repudiation of the philosophical theory of mind-body dualism. I know it is long, but I need to talk for a hour. Below is the talk I will give to students:

“The Mind-Body Connection and The Vagus Nerve”

Greetings. My name is Terry Kern, a physical therapist of Albuquerque for over forty years by way of Minnesota. My purpose in talking to you today is bringing attention to the philosophical theory of mind-body dualism that is the foundation of our healthcare system as well as our Federal Government and insurance payment, and legal systems.

Most of you and for sure the American public are totally unaware how the philosophical theories of mind-body dualism along with positivism and reductionism from the 17th century define and impact their health and our healthcare system in this country.

As early as 1948, The World Health Organization (WHO), an organization that the present administration of our Federal Government does not identify and support, defined health as a state of complete, social well-being and not merely the absence of disease and debilitation.

Instead with this definition of WHO, health was now seen as a resource to support an individual’s function in a wider society than and end in itself. Simply, a healthy lifestyle provides the means for a person to lead a full life with meaning and purpose.

Yet in this country we have continued to define health from a biomedical, disease model. This was substantiated in 2009 when medical researchers published in the Lancet, a medical journal, a definition of health as the ability to adapt to new threats and infirmities.

They based their deﬁnition on the idea that science has taken great strides in the awareness of diseases, understanding how they work, and discovering new ways to slow, stop, or eliminate them altogether. A definition of health that solely focuses on the absence of disease and debilitation.

These contrasting views of health continue to exist in this country today so that our healthcare, insurance payment, and legal systems lack a clear and definitive definition of heath. Instead, they yield to the biomedical definition of health as the absence of disease and debilitation. A definition that contrasts with how many people and their families in this country would deﬁne health.

For the majority of people, health for themselves and for their families means much more than this. Thus, it is my opinion that these contrasting views of health that exist in this country today creates a serious conflict. In fact, this lack of clarity regarding the definition of health is slowly creating a health crisis.

The mere absence of an integrated deﬁnition for health defaults to the ﬂawed biomedical, disease-based model for our healthcare, insurance, and legal systems. No one can deny that this biomedical model has had undeniable beneﬁts from the biomedical investments to awe-inspiring treatments discovered for selected diseases. But despite of this success in these selected areas, this biomedical, disease based model to define health has its short falls.

That is because it focuses primarily on the mechanisms to develop interventions for selected diseases and totally ignores the human nature of people that we know today impacts the disease process. This narrow focus leaves little to address the hidden human potential for health and human development in a holistic sense by not treating the whole person.

The biomedical, diseased based definition of health doesn’t take into account the mental and social factors of humans, but rather focuses on just the symptoms of an illness. In short, this biomedical, disease based model of health traps this country and its citizens in a vicious cycle of spiraling chronic disease and spending.

The main reason our healthcare, insurance payment, and legal systems continue to use this biomedical, disease based definition of health is that its foundational philosophy and ideology is the view of seeing physical and mental health as two separate entities or as Descartes in the 17th century called it “mind-body dualism.”

At one time in human history, mind-body dualism was viewed as being self-evident in the world of science thus becoming the foundation on which our present knowledge of the human mind and body was built. However, this antiquated philosophical theory and ideology has become a concern since it rarely gets questioned despite its inherent limitations and self-defeating consequences regarding your health today. More importantly, I feel it is setting up our present healthcare model for even more problems in the future. That is because the philosophy and ideology of mind and body dualism identifies and deﬁnes humans as having two distinct substances, each with a different inherent nature.

As I have already mentioned, this theoretical philosophy and ideology originated in the 17th century with a well-known version credited to Rene Descartes, a French philosopher and mathematician. He is considered even today to be the most inﬂuential ﬁgure in the emergence of modern philosophy and science. According to Descartes, human beings consisted of two very different substances consisting of their mind and body, which cannot exist in unity, in union because they are entirely different entities.

He reached this conclusion by arguing that the nature, the essence of the human mind is completely different from the essence of the human body and therefore it is possible for one to exist without the other. Simply in Descartes’ view, the human mind and body do not coexist.

Therefore, the human mind and body were defined and understood by Descartes as two separate and independent entities. His argument gave rise to a debate that is ongoing to this day of how can the human mind cause our bodily limbs to move while our body’s sense organs cause sensations in our minds when their natures are completely different, separate, and independent entities?

Because the mind and body were viewed in such a fractured manner, the body was subjected to the mechanical laws of nature at that time while the mind was not. Case and point is when Gilbert Ryle, a philosopher back in 1949 explained that people live two different collateral histories:

“One comprising of what happens in and to the body, the other consisting of what happens in and to the mind. The events in the first history are events in the physical world, those in the second are events in the mental world.”

However, we for sure know this is not the reality of our world. In fact the human mind and body coexist in a relationship. However at the time, the emergence of Descartes’ mind-body dualism was seen as a critical, theoretical leap, a paradigm shift, that was deeply needed in the world of science in the 17th century.

Prior to this transformation led by Descartes, the orthodox, Christian views prevailed believing that human beings were of a spiritual nature having a body and a soul and diseases were caused by metaphysical forces such as personal or collective wrongdoing or human’s sinful nature.

In addition, another orthodox, Christian belief of the 17th century was that for a person’s soul to ascend to heaven, their human body had to remain unsevered, totally intact. Therefore, there was a religious prohibition on the study of human anatomy and physiology through the dissection of the body.

Descartes with his mind-body dualism separated the body from the mind and handed the body over to science and medicine to study. Dissection of the body now allowed, paved the way for the progress we have witnessed in medical science. However at the same time, it nulliﬁed the relationship and signiﬁcance of the mind and body in the human experience of life and one’s health. Along with advent of Descartes’ mind-dualism, the philosophical theory, of “positivism” came along.

The theory of positivism emphasizes that empirical evidence and objective observation are the foundation for acquiring knowledge no matter the subject matter being studied. The philosophical theory of positivism then gave rise to the theory of “reductionism.”

Reductionism is the speciﬁc methodology within positivism that involves breaking down a complex subject matter being studied into simpler, more basic components in order to understand how it works. Simply, the focus is on the parts of the subject being studied rather than the whole.

In addition, by making the objective realm of the subject matter being studied the only legitimate domain of enquiry, Descartes advocated a complete and exact natural science through the so-called analytical method of reductionism.

His analytical method involved breaking up a scientific problem into bits and pieces and rearranging them in a logical and systematic order. It was under this momentum, this spell of positivism and reductionism that started the so-called “scientiﬁc revolution” in the 17th century. Simply, a paradigm shift in how science tried to answer the questions about life, nature, and the environment.

With positivism and reductionism as its foundation, it allowed the sciences of physics, chemistry, mechanics, optics, anatomy, physiology, and astronomy to ﬂourish. It was also during this scientiﬁc revolution of the 17th century that created, encouraged, and even reinforced the human belief you can still find today that we as humans could control the natural world. The successes achieved with this new scientiﬁc theory and methodology reinforced Descartes’ philosophy even further and contributed to the dogma of scientism, the belief that scientiﬁc method through positivism and reductionism was the only legitimate path to knowledge and understanding.

However, this did not come without debate because the disciplines that come under the social sciences, human society, and social relationships, did not lend themselves to this scientiﬁc methodology without running the risk of being incomplete and at times distorted in the understanding of their subject matter which was the human mind.

It was this 17th century dualistic stance of human’s distinct and different mind-body nature and the analytical scientiﬁc methodology of positivism and reductionism that perpetuates the biomedical, disease based model of our healthcare system today along with most of Western world.

Therefore, people in this country are still seen through the lens of mind-body dualism and are being studied as mere biological organisms to create their health. They are studied and understood by examining their constituent parts within the principles of human anatomy, physiology, and biochemistry.

No one can deny that this way of looking at health has enabled groundbreaking treatments and expertise. However at the same time, it has has also led to the specialization of healthcare professionals within our system creating challenges such as fragmented care, increased costs, and a declining focus on primary care. These issues raise questions about whether this emphasis on specialization is undermining the accessibility, affordability, and effectiveness of our healthcare system.

In our healthcare system, disease and illness are solely viewed as a deviation from biological norms and caused by some identifiable physical or chemical event. The end result being that someone’s health is simply defined as the absence of disease and debilitation.

In today’s world, we now know more than ever that someone’s health is inﬂuenced and dependent upon a combination of biological, psychological, and social factors. It is dependent upon not only the health of the body with the absence of disease, but also the health of the mind. Therefore, we must view the mind and body not as two separate entities or substances, but in a relationship. You are definitely now starting to hear more and more of this over radio, television, and social media in this country.

Overtime, the understanding of the nature of human beings as both a mind and body in a relationship and union is slowly changing as demonstrated by the recent theory being put forth of the so-called “lived body.” The “lived body” theory maintains that the human body is not just a material thing of creation, but rather a “multiphasic, experiential being of ﬁnite freedom” and this experiential being is the nucleus of one’s consciousness and reality in life.

Humans are finally being theorized as a complex system in which the mind and body coexist in a relationship as a unit and are an integral part of the the body’s other systems all of which are in a permanent relationship, interaction with their environment and capable of constructing their own subjective and personal realities of life. The “lived body theory” definitely challenges both the mind-body dualistic nature of human beings and the inability of positivism and reductionism to successfully pursue knowledge that is not “objective.”

The definition of health in this country and for that matter in the rest of the world is finally being seen as something positive and not negative as seen with the biomedical, disease based model. The more positive and missing dimensions of health were finally identified with the World Health Organization (WHO) deﬁning it as a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being. It also made further declarations regarding health as a resource for everyday life, not the objective of living. Health was now seen as a positive concept emphasizing social and personal resources, as well as physical capacities.

More speciﬁcally, health is now seen as “the capacity, relative to one’s potential and aspirations, for living fully in a social environment.” A far contrast from the deﬁnition of health as being the absence of disease and debilitation.

In this context of a new understanding for the foundational nature of human beings and their health, the question then still remains, “How can medicine in its present form with its narrow focus on biological factors and control of diseases, help human beings achieve health?”

Emergence of new diseases that have known psychological, social, and environmental components as part of their etiology challenges the existing dominance of biomedical, disease based model still being used in this country and around the world.

The consequence of this apparent paradigmatic error is the lack of agreement today between what contemporary healthcare professionals have got to offer and what their patients expect from them. With the primary focus still being on the human body and the absence of the influence by the human mind, it makes the healthcare professionals within our healthcare system disregard personal, interpersonal, and cultural reactions to disease.

Finally, we are beginning to see that health is freedom from mental illness as well as freedom from disease. However, this paradigm shift within our healthcare system is not always identified and consistent within our ancillary insurance payment and legal systems. The result is the rampant dissatisfaction and sometimes violent behavior toward healthcare practitioners as well as the CEO’s and workers within our insurance payment system.

Part of this dissatisfaction is due to disempowerment of patients and dehumanization of medical care with a cold, impersonal, technical style of clinical practice shaped by the notion the body is just a machine devoid of the mind and self. Ever increasing litigation rates, patient noncompliance, increasing recourse to alternative practices, mounting consumer criticism in this country reﬂect the failure of our biomedical, disease based model dealing with today’s health issues.

This dissatisfaction came to a head late last year with the killing of a UnitedHealth Group CEO in New York City. In fact, the killer is now seen as more of folk hero since people justify his actions because of their own dissatisfaction with out insurance payment system. Another executive of the UnitedHealth Group commented after the killing of his colleague, “We know the healthcare system doesn’t work as well as it should, and we understand people’s frustration with it. No one would design a system like the one we have. And no one did. It’s a patchwork built over decades.” I would add to his comments that it’s a patchwork built on philosophical theories of the 17th century.

Today, roughly 6 in 10 insured adults in this country experience problems when they use their insurance. Actions which usually include their insurers refusing to pay for care. There continues to be huge lack of clarity for patients and for their health practitioners about what’s covered by insurance plans involving what medicine can be started, what care will be approved, and what will be denied. I feel this is a reflection of our healthcare system still adhering to the philosophy and ideology of mind-body dualism. But even today with patient’s and their families’ obvious frustration in this country, the U.S. healthcare, insurance, and legal systems continue to conceptualize disease by using these antiquated 17th century philosophical theories.

The cause of this frustration has many different facets than just adhering to mind-body dualism to be sure, but one that is foremost is the resultant creation of artiﬁcially set boundaries of professional responsibility inﬂuencing healthcare professionals’ attitudes toward and behavior with their patients because of this antiquated philosophical theory. The result is now our healthcare system is at a critical moment, a ﬂash point in its history.

This was substantiated in a recent article by the Guardian. In this article, it stated that the United States’ healthcare system ranked dead last in an international comparison of 10 peer nations according to a report by Commonwealth Fund. This report was the 20th in a “Mirror, Mirror” series, an international comparison of the US health system to 9 wealthy democracies including Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Netherlands, New Zealand, the U.K, Sweden and Switzerland.

In spite of Americans paying nearly double that of these other countries, our healthcare system performed poorly on health equity, access to care, and outcomes. The foundation calls this years report card a “portrait of a failing US healthcare system.” In my opinion, the Commonwealth Fund’s ﬁndings not only found a failing grade, but substantiated our healthcare crisis.

Again there are many factors you could actually point to as an explanation for this patient dissatisfaction and negative report, but it appears the major ﬂaw with our healthcare system stems from the logical inference that “disease” continues to be deﬁned solely in terms of the somatic parameters based on the 17th century philosophical theories of mind-body dualism, positivism, and reductionism.

The result is that most healthcare professionals and practitioners in our healthcare system are not concerned with psychosocial issues which lie outside physical medicine’s responsibility and authority as it is perceived today by our healthcare, insurance payment, and legal systems. As a result, the biomedical, disease model is utilized to define health and they focus only on the molecular biology at its basic and foundational scientiﬁc ﬁeld of study while ignoring the psychological and social factors contributing to the health of their patients.

Our healthcare system and its practitioners infer that disease can only be fully accounted for and explained by deviations from the norms of measurable biological and somatic variables and leaves absolutely no room within its current framework and study for the social, psychological, and behavioral dimensions of illness and disease. The variables that truly make us human. Our healthcare and ancillary insurance payment and legal systems continue to focus on this biomedical template requiring disease be dealt with as an entity independent of any social or psychological behavior.

On top of that, it even demands that the behavioral abnormalities that can be identiﬁed in a patient can only be explained on the basis of disordered somatic, biochemical, or neurophysiological processes. Because that template is still utilized, you can identify deﬁnite lines of demarcation between separate departments of physical medicine and psychiatry within our healthcare system. The result has been the spawning of a profession known as “liaison psychiatry” attempting to bridge that gap between these two specialities. Bridge that gap between the mind and body.

Even the existence of liaison psychiatry in our healthcare system underscores the existence and persistence of mind-body dualism and the existence of this stop-gap response just perpetuates this antiquated way of thinking about the relationship between the human mind and body.

If one looks at the history of the medical advancements within our healthcare system as it exists today, no one can deny the fact that this template of health based on the 17th century philosophical theories had “its place in the sun.” But it is also quite obvious too, that the time is upon us for our healthcare, insurance payment, and legal systems to break away from these very isolated and linear cause and effect views traced all the way back to the scientiﬁc and philosophical ideas of Aristotle, Plato, and Descartes.

These antiquated theories are way too restrictive, too linear for what has been discovered today in the world of science and especially after the advent of the quantum theory and quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics just like Newtonian mechanics of the 17th century before it, brings mathematical clarity and order to the chaos of the most recent observations of our physical universe and life itself. Therefore in today’s world, the human mind and body needs not be viewed as two separate entities or substances, but as in a relationship, an open and complex system.

Because of the new found complexity in the quantum world, the governing rules of the human body that still dominate our healthcare system are beyond the scope of contemporary scientiﬁc research and Newtonian mechanics causing the existing knowledge about the human body to appear very fragmented, unsystematic, and out of date. Take for example, Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) as well as other Eastern ways of thinking about the human mind and body.

They have very different philosophies and profound understandings about the nature of the human mind and body. The biggest difference between TCM and western medicine is that it contains far more knowledge and wisdom beyond human anatomy and physiology.

TCM explains the mind-body relationship on a model based on the forces of Yin-Yang and the ﬁve elements. It uses essence, vigor, and spirit to describe a person’s health status, an approach that has been found to be effective throughout its history of 5000 years. The relationship of mind and body in TCM also emphasizes the unitary integrity of human life, including the unity in form and spirit, in the ﬁve internal subsystems, and the unity of man and society, man and nature.

Therefore, TCM’s concept of human beings goes far beyond the scope of its anatomical and physiological knowledge put forth in Descarte’s, scientiﬁc theories of the 17th century. Now more than ever, it is clear to me a paradigm shift is necessary in how science and our healthcare, insurance payment, and legal systems view the human mind and body. We need a view that is more integrated and uniﬁed, revealing everything in the human body is connected in a relationship of communication through the body’s various systems. Some more than others, but simply “quantitative holism” versus the “isolationism” which still exists in our healthcare system today.

To validate this view of “quantitative holism,” let’s verify and at the same time disprove Decsartes’ mind-body dualism by asking that centuries old question, “how can your human brain cause your limbs to move and how can your body’s sense organs cause sensations in your mind,” when according to his theory, there natures are completely different where the human mind and body are viewed as two entirely separate entities.

First as I continue with my argument, keep in mind that everything you have ever felt or done in your life can be related back to your brain. At its most basic level, your brain’s intricate ﬁring rates and neuronal patterns determine who you are, who you have been, and more importantly, who you will become. All that you are is derived from your brain and its neurons and neuronal patterns. Simply, your life and all your experiences in that life are your brain. Your entire existence, everything you experience such as sights, sounds, touch, smells, and even down to your posture and movement, my specialty, is caused by the electrical ﬁring of neurons and their associated neuronal patterns of your brain.

In fact, your entire human experience comes down to which neurons in your brain are ﬁring! It is not only which neurons are ﬁring, but when and how often. That sums up your life, the electrical activity of neurons ﬁring within your brain.

It was back in 1906, when the Nobel Prize in Medicine was awarded to a Spaniard named Santiago Ramon y Canal, the father of the so-called “Neuron Doctrine.” His findings based on the reductionist theory of the time was that the human nervous system was not one, physically continuous system. But instead, a network of billions of individual, unconnected cells that communicated through electrical synapses to accomplish different functions.The Neuron Doctrine became universally accepted as the foundational theory of the human nervous system. That is, billions of neurons communicating across neuronal synapses, laying down the electrical groundwork for any task, any memory in the human body.

However for this complex and elaborate communication system to work in total synchronization, we now know these individual neurons must communicate in a relationship or through neuronal patterns. For you to simply lift your arm or take a step when walking, individual neurons must work together through these synergy patterns to accomplish the movement goal at hand. With such an elaborate system, your human brain contains upward to 86 billion neurons, so scientists can spend their entire lives researching these neurons and their synaptic connections, their neuronal patterns and still come no closer to uncovering all the mysteries of the human brain.

It is also a known fact that we as humans come into this world with certain inherent, neuronal patterns, reflexes which create involuntary and nearly instantaneous movements in response to a stimulus. These neuronal patterns occur without your neocortex or conscious thought process. Instead, these reﬂexes, these neuronal patterns occur through what is called a reﬂex arc and become a vital part of your nervous system’s ability to protect you from harm and maintain homeostasis inside and outside your body which is the goal of your central nervous system function.

A process by which your peripheral and central nervous systems maintain a stable environment even when your internal or external environment changes. With your posture and movement it involves so-called foundational primitive and righting reﬂexes that everyone is equipped with when coming into this environment of gravity.

The mere existence of these very early reﬂexes are to insure your survivability in this environment. Outside of these inherent primitive and righting reﬂexes though, your brain has the potential, the ability to change and transform no matter your age. That is because change is a natural part of your life and existence.

When coming into this environment of gravity with birth, you came equipped with foundational reﬂexes or neuronal patterns in response to gravity allowing your nervous system to change and mature and acquire equilibrium reﬂexes (ER). In this so called neurodevelopment, your nervous system allowed you to progress beyond these foundational, righting reflexes in response to gravity acquiring the functional tasks of sitting, standing, and eventually walking.

In short, transforming your neuronal patterning. With your neurodevelopment starting with head and neck control in ﬂexion and extension at 6 weeks of age when first coming into this environment of gravity, your neurodevlopment progresses to lying prone at 8 weeks followed by your ability to roll in the transverse, rotational plane at 3-18 weeks. and grasping at 2-7 months. Sitting, quadruped positioning, and crawling began later at 7 months while tall kneeling, half kneeling occurred at 8 months. Standing and the cross-patterned gait of walking, the pinnacle of human position and motion, began at 9-16 months. Of course, all these time frames are only estimates of time with your neurodevelopment, but your brain never stops developing even at 9-16 months. Beyond popular belief, “you can teach old dogs new tricks” because your neuronal patterning constantly changes as you learn, adapt, and grow throughout your entire life.

You always have the potential to develop new neurons and their patterning as long as you are breathing and alive. This continuous potential and ability to change your neuronal patterns is referred to as “neuroplasticity.” It doesn’t matter how old you are or what’s happened in your past, simply, you are not done growing, changing, and adapting to your environment until your last breath of life is taken. Your nervous system always has the potential and ability to transform your neuronal patterning no matter your age due to its plasticity.

Transforming someones neuronal patterns literally describes what I do in my clinic in order to help my clients with their acute and chronic symptoms of their musculoskeletal system. I transform their posture and movement by changing the neuronal patterns of their brain through altering their vestibular, visual, and proprioceptive sensory input. Whether I am helping elite athletes improve their performance, assisting geriatrics with their stability and mobility issues, or helping people suffering from pain and other musculoskeletal symptoms, it all starts with transforming the neuronal patterns of their brain. Simply, changing their brain.

Neuronal patterning is also the foundation of your posture, movement, and for that matter your health involving both your mind and body that are in a relationship working together in unity, in synergy and not as two separate entities as put forth by Descartes.

Despite its apparent complexity, your brain which is part of your central nervous system (CNS), is organized in a very orderly and systematic manner. Your central nervous system not only consists of your brain, but also the spinal cord, but it is the brain that ultimately receives, processes, integrates, and acts on sensory information. Sensory input is fed to the brain as the spinal cord conducts and relays sensory and motor signals from itself or to and from the brain.

Therefore, the peripheral nervous system (PNS) consists of both sensory and motor neurons, often clustered together in ganglia sending and transmitting information to and from the brain and spinal cord.

During the process of evolution, however, humans developed three very distinct brains residing in form similar to the three different layers of the body found within its muscular and fascial systems. These include your brain stem, limbic system, and neocortex. However for simplicity sake during this narrative, I will describe the organization of your central nervous system and brain into two parts: The First Brain (Old Brain) and the Second Brain (New Brain).

The First Brain or Old Brain is considered your non-reasoning brain. It’s primary concern is keeping you safe from threats outside and inside your body. Simply, your survival. It is actually the gatekeeper for all the information that eventually channels upward to the Second Brain or New Brain and is comprised of anatomical structures found deep inside and toward the posterior section of the brain including the:

•Brainstem

•Superior and Inferior Colliculi

•Amygdala

•Hippocampus

•Thalamus

•Limbic Structures

The Second Brain or New Brain is home to the majority of the qualities that make us human and distinguish us from other, non-higher thinking animals. The Second Brain controls diverse functions like our:

•Conscious Thought

•Memory

•Language

•Creativity

•Decision Making

•Movement

•Consciousness

While you may think that your Second or New Brain is always in control as the scientiﬁc revolution of the 17th century reinforced, how you function day to day is a partnership, a relationship between your two brains.

It can be better described as an ongoing and dynamic dance between your First and Second Brains inﬂuenced by your environment, high-priority brain drives, or survival-based actions. Remember, your survival and safety is the First Brain’s job and it is far less concerned with your conscious, higher thinking, the job of your Second Brain. In fact, it is the primary job of your Second Brain to inhibit your First Brain. This ability of your Second Brain to override the First Brain allows you to function in your normal societal contexts and work constructively and creatively.

Now that you have a better understanding of the basic building blocks and functions of your nervous system and brain in place, let’s look at how they function together in a relationship with your body as a closed-loop system to establish your reality, who you are, who you were, and who you will become in life. Your central nervous system and more specifically the functions of your brain can be broken down into four simple stages including sensory input, interpretation, decision, and motor output.

First, your brain receives sensory input or afferent information from a wide network of receptors from your peripheral nervous system positioned all over your body, from your visual and vestibular systems to the proprioceptive system involving your ligaments, joints, muscles, and fascia when discussing your posture and movement.

The afferent, sensory information of your posture and movement includes sensations like your muscle tone, muscle length, and more importantly your spatial orientation in regards to gravity. This sensory information is sent from these various receptors located throughout your body into the central nervous system including the spinal cord and finally the brain for interpretation, decision, and output.

With your posture and movement, these receptors as mentioned will involve your vestibular, visual, and proprioceptive sensory systems in the creation of your skeletal equilibrium and balance no matter the activity you are doing. Once this afferent, sensory information reaches your brain, the information is interpreted in such a way that your brain can understand. Your brain then uses this information to make decisions and create an action or motor output about what you do next in order to establish your skeletal equilibrium and balance. Not only what you do now with the sensory input at that time, but in the future during a similar event because this information is stored within your brain as a neuronal pattern or memory.

Literally, your brain collects all the sensory input regarding the vertical forces of gravity and ground reaction force, interprets it, makes a decision regarding it, then acts upon it with a motor output which is integrated as part of your memory in a neuronal pattern. So you can see why a paradigm shift is necessary in how both science and our healthcare system view the human mind and body.

A view that needs to be become more integrated, revealing everything is connected in a relationship of communication through the body’s various systems. Simply “`quantitative holism” versus “isolationism.”

If we now had the opportunity to debate Descartes’ face to face about the reality of his mind-body dualism, we would deﬁnitely be able to win with the information you just heard. However, another great point you could use in my argument debating Descartes’ mind-body dualism and fuel the paradigm shift to “quantitative holism” is the integration of your body’s other systems.

Let’s begin with a thought experiment fueled by this question: Which physiologic system of your body, if you could somehow physically extract it intact, in its entirety would show you the precise physical shape and contour of your body, inside and out? In other words, which of your body’s other systems are truly, physically, holistic systems? If you could make everything else invisible and leave just your nervous system just intact, you would see the exact shape of your nervous system in the outline of your physical, structural body. You would of course see the brain and the spinal cord along with all the main trunks of its spinal and cranial nerves.

You would notice the main trunks of these nerves branching out into smaller and smaller twigs until reaching the tiny tendrils maneuvering themselves into every part of your skin, locomotor system, and organs. You would also see each organ of your ventral, thoracic and abdominopelvic cavity within your ﬁlmy autonomic system reaching out from your sympathetic and parasympathetic trunks.

Your digestive system would be surrounded by the submucosal plexus, which has as many neurons spreading along the nine yards of the digestive system as are in your brain. Your heart too would particularly be more vivid and dense with the bundles of nerves that keep it tuned and running. In addition, you would observe that your peripheral nervous system is not equally distributed throughout your body. In fact, your tongue and lips are more densely innervated than the back of your leg by a factor of 10 or more. However, the more sensitive areas of your hands, face, genitals, eye, and neck muscles would have a greater density of nerves, while the dense tissues of your bones and cartilage would be more sparsely represented.

You would surely notice that no part of your body except for the open lumens of your circulatory, respiratory, and digestive tubes, would be left out of the control and modulation of your central and peripheral nervous systems. When they are working together properly in their relationship, there is no part of you that you cannot feel consciously or unconsciously, so the whole body is represented in this neural network, this neural web of information and response.

In order for your body to coordinate the actions of these trillions of quasi-independent entities called neurons, you need this integrated, informational system organized in patterns that “listens” to what is taking place all over your body inside and out. It then weighs the totality of these many different impressions and produces speedy, coordinated chemical and mechanical responses to both your external and internal environments.Therefore, every part of your body is in close contact with the rapid-ﬁre tentacles of your peripheral and central nervous systems deeming it truly a “holistic” system.

Similarly, if you did this with your vascular system you would once again have a physical manifestation in the exact shape of your structural body. However this time, it would instead be centered around your heart’s constant pumping action. Major arteries and veins would be going to and from the lungs, and out through the aorta and arteries to your organs and every part of your body via the wide network of your capillaries. The closed nature of your circulatory system with its capillaries involves tens of thousand of miles of capillary nets giving you a vascular body that is complete down to the ﬁnest detail.

If you included your lymphatic and cerebrospinal ﬂuid (CSF) of your craniosacral system in your vascular system, the ﬂuid body would be more complete down to the ﬁnest nuances of everything except your hair and some gaps created by avascular parts of your cartilage and dense bones. Also, you would understand how the inner cells of your body especially the cells of your soft tissues, which are not in direct communication with the outside world, get their nourishing chemistry from the edge of your body to its middle dependent upon this so-called vascular net. This vascular net not only brings the nourishing chemistry, but also takes otherwise toxic chemistry from the middle to the edge where it can be dispersed.

It is with the organs of your ventral cavity, the lungs, the heart, the digestive system, and the kidneys that provide your vascular system the means for dispersal while the so called vascular net would also provide an “inner sea” complete with nourishing and cleansing currents. Your vascular system network of capillaries within this holistic system penetrates not only the immediate neighborhood of most individual cells no matter its type, but also delivers the goods needed for these cells to function via diffusion from the capillary walls.

This systemic, vascular diffusion, especially nourishes your body’s soft tissues involved in your posture and movement. That is why soft tissue injuries to the cartilage and ligaments take longer to heal. Many of the cells of your soft tissue are so far from the shores of this inner sea of vascularization that they must rely on seepage from farther away.

The third and what I feel is the most forgotten and unappreciated holistic system of communication within your body is your fascial or connective tissue system. It runs uninterrupted from the top of your head to the bottom of your feet. It is a component of your anatomy and physiology that is essentially a web made up of proteins surrounding virtually every part of your body from the muscles, bones, central nervous system, and organs. In fact, down to every cell of your body with their extracellular matrix.

Again, if you were to render all tissues invisible in your body except for the ﬁbrillar elements of your connective tissue including the proteins collagen, reticulin, and elastin, you would again see the physical shape, a manifestation of your entire, physical body inside and out. What’s so remarkable about fascia is that it forms a continuous network with no beginning or end. It’s not just an inert packing material, but a dynamic system that plays vital roles in your health as recent research is finally ﬁnding out.

As I mentioned, western medicine took a reductionist approach to the human body since the 17th century, dissecting it into its various isolated parts and systems and especially the fascia. While this has yielded tremendous discoveries and results in research, it has also led researchers to sometimes “miss the forest for the trees” neglecting the importance of fascia to human health.

The ﬁbrillar elements of fascia would differ in density throughout your body. The bones, cartilage, tendons, and ligaments would be thick with a leathery ﬁber make-up of collagen and elastin. Therefore, the area around each joint would be especially well represented. Each muscle would also be sheathed within connective tissue or fascia and infused with a cotton-candy like net surrounding each isolated muscle cell, ﬁber, and bundles of ﬁbers called “myofascia.”

Your face would look less dense, as would the more spongy organs like your spleen or pancreas, though even those would be surrounded by one or two tough, fascial bags. You would also notice the bursal sacs around the bony prominences of your skeletal structure and the plica around your knee which are also both part of your fascial system.

Although your fascial net arranges itself in multiple folded planes as just described, once again no part of it would be distinct or separated from the entire, inclusive net as a whole; each of these bags, strings, sheets, leathery networks are linked to each other, head to toe, top to bottom. In doing so, it supports the rationale of Thomas Myers, a structural integrator, teacher, and author of ‘Anatomy Trains’ to ask when describing the muscular system of your body, “Are there really 600 muscles or only 1 muscle in 600 fascial pockets?”

The center of your fascial network would be your mechanical center of gravity (COG) located in the middle of the lower belly at sacral segment 2 while standing (S2) and slightly higher in the chest sitting. The fascial network would also create your body’s important cranial-sacral system at its deepest layer containing the cerebrospinal ﬂuid (CSF) and encapsulating your cranium and spine with attachments to your sacrum and ﬁnally your tailbone.

In Thomas Myers following description of fascia, he describes it as “The biological fabric that holds you together. You are about 70 trillion cells, neurons, muscle cells, epithelia all humming in relative harmony. Fascia is the 3D spider web of ﬁbrous, gluey, and wet proteins that binds you together in their proper placement. Your biomechanical regulatory system is highly complex and under studied-though new research is ﬁlling in the gap. Understanding fascia is essential to to the dance between stability and movement.

It is crucial in the performance of functional and high performance skills, central in recovery from injury and disability, and ever present in our daily life from our embryological beginning to the last breath we take. This fascial centric view is providing the momentum for a paradigm shift in how the body is conceptualized. Rather than seeing the body as a collection of separate parts, it is beginning to be appreciated as an interconnected whole, with the facia serving as its unifying matrix. Simply “isolationism versus holism.”

The new research focusing on fascia is also revealing how complex and important it truly is to your health. Some key ﬁndings from this research include:

Fascia contains six times more nerve endings than muscles, making it a key player in pain perception and body awareness.
It is ﬁlled with specialized cells made up of collagen, reticulin, and elastin producing hyaluronic acid, a critical lubricant that allows your tissues to glide smoothly on each other.
Fascia plays a vital role in immune function and ﬂuid dynamics throughout your body.
It’s highly responsive to hormones, particularly estrogen in women that may explain gender-speciﬁc health issues.
Fascia forms continuous lines of tension and connection throughout your body deﬁned as fascial meridians as deﬁned by Thomas Myers.

These discoveries in the recent research of fascia are opening up new avenues for understanding and treating a wide rage of health issues from chronic pain to immune disorders.

Just like the neural and vascular webs just described, your fascial web permeates your body so as to be part of the immediate environment of every cell in your body. Thus, these three holistic systems just described, should convince you how your entire body is linked together in a relationship, how your entire body is integrated in its function and not dismantled into its various, isolated systems as we have done with mind-body dualism, positivism, and reductionism.

With the discoveries in the 20th century by Einstein and Bohr, physics and science has gained even more momentum toward the direction of relationships with the quantum theory making the isolated, linear views of Descartes and Newton obsolete. Instead a more circular view of your body where everything is related in a relationship is needed. Simply, holism versus isolationism.

The world of science and especially our healthcare, insurance payment, and legal system today needs to recognize this circular view of “holism” and treat the whole person rather than focusing on just the isolated, physical manifestations of disease or injury.

One of my favorite people that has taught me so much about the body’s soft tissues over the years, Ida Rolf, describes this circular rather than linear view of your body this way, “the body is not made up of parts, but is composed of relationships, all of which are related. I am dealing with problems in the body where there is never one cause. I’d like you to have more reality on the circular processes that do not act in the body, but that are the body. The body process is not linear, it is circular; always, it is circular. One thing goes awry and its effects go on and on and on and on. A body is a web, connecting everything with everything else.”

As I have already mentioned, our healthcare system has come far in the treatment of disease and injuries and because of that, making any changes will be hard. I also know change is a process that takes time especially with the success our healthcare system has already achieved. But, the healthcare professionals within our system continue to get stuck within these antiquated and obsolete philosophies of mind-body dualism, positivism, and reductionism when treating today’s patients. In fact, the education of our healthcare professionals are still taught about the mind and body according to these philosophical theories of the 17th century.

The bottom line is that because our healthcare system focuses on these three antiquated philosophical theories and ideologies, it prevents the scientiﬁc research into treatments that have a potential to treat and manage the health issues we face in our ever changing, technological world. It’s no wonder that the research today in medical psychology that has demonstrated an interplay between the soft tissue system and the environment as well as how genetics and lifestyles play an integral part in a disease process is usually cast aside as a possible and viable treatment.

By adopting a more holistic, circular definition of the human body rather than an isolated, linear deﬁnition could have an inﬂuence how health research is conducted, and offer the possibility and greater potential for generating practical interventions and treatments. Then and only then can our healthcare system be able to address the behavioral, developmental, environmental, and social natures of our health, adopting a more holistic understanding. It would also help create complementary research pathways that would focus on discovery, adaptation, and implementation of holistically oriented interventions that address this goal rather than just focusing on the biomedical disease model and process.

This unspoken adoption of a holistic philosophy defaults to the dehumanizing, exclusively disease-based deﬁnition of health which is a major obstacle in addressing the national health crisis we are experiencing in this country today. Did you know that even before Descartes of the 17th century, Hippocrates of Greece’s classical period in the 5th century argued that it is more important to know what kind of person has a disease, than what disease a person has? He put the person at the center of his focus with his treatments. As a Greek physician, he was ﬁrst and foremost interested in ﬁnding out what led to the development of his patient’s symptoms.

In his treatments, he distinguished lifestyle patterns and personal characteristics that predisposed his patient to certain conditions. Although our healthcare system is slowly changing and starting to realize the importance of an individual’s lifestyle, behaviors in the development of chronic diseases, it continues to give priority to examining the illness and disease process from strictly a biomedical model.

While Hippocratic therapies of the 5th century involved changes in diet, exercise and other lifestyle patterns, our healthcare system continues to concentrate on pharmacological and surgical interventions. It is time our healthcare system changes so as to put more focus on the complete, whole person including biological, psychological, and social factors.

It is time to realize that our healthcare system’s love affair with these 17th century philosophies has now become counterproductive. It has become an inclusive policy that casts aside the psychological and social factors merely for practical reasons, excluding if not totally forgetting altogether these other important factors of your health.

The greater the success of this narrower, biomedical approach, the more difﬁcult it has become to abandon these linear views of health. No one can deny that this exclusive, biomedical approach to health with its linear tenets at its foundation has been successful beyond all expectations, but it too has come at a cost. For in serving as the only guideline and justiﬁcation for healthcare policy, this exclusive biomedical approach has contributed to a host of problems. The recent murder of a health insurance CEO and recent results of a report from the Commonwealth Foundation is the evidence we need to transform our definition and approach to health in this country.

Our healthcare system is now faced with the necessity and the challenge to broaden our view of health which includes the psychosocial and behavioral aspects without sacriﬁcing the advantages gained by the biomedical approach. So how do we go about this paradigm shift?

The ﬁrst step is to truly understand the foundational integration of the mind and body that was totally disregarded by theories of Descartes’ in the 17th century. Integration that describes the linkage of the different components, parts of your body and their various systems that is identified within the neuronal pattern of the human brain. It means then that the separate areas of your body with their unique functions are linked to each other through synaptic connections in your brain or by specific neuronal patterns.

These neuronal patterns made up of individual neurons are then stored as memory. If these neurons are the transmitters and receivers of information as mentioned, neural patterns are what give the information they receive and send to and from your brain its meaning. It is this integration of your body within the brain that needs to be viewed as a core mechanism in the cultivation of your health.

Keep in mind though that also these neuronal patterns can represent any thought of anything you’ve ever had or done or experienced during your life. It can be as simple as an identifying an apple or taking a step when walking or as complicated as understanding the definition of love and integrity. But for sure, every thought, every action of your brain becomes a neural pattern and stored as a memory. Simply, neuronal patterns are the connections between individual neurons that form a memory in your brain.

Your brain then attaches a meaning to these speciﬁc patterns and the next time you think of that same thing or do a similar activity no matter what it happens to be, the same pattern lights up again within your brain.

It is through these neural patterns that your brain stores your thoughts and actions throughout your experience of life. In regards to your skeletal posture and movement, it is the neural patterns in your brain that create the positions and motions of your skeletal structure in response to the vertical forces of your environment. Every position and motion of your body that produces your physical activities of everyday function occur through this ﬂexible combination of a small number of muscle synergy patterns in the first or old brain without the interference of your conscious thought. That is without your brain’s neocortex or the Second Brain.

Because of evolution, the more recent developed part of your brain, the neocortex, which is home to our conscious thought is that part of your brain that helped humans get to the moon, build submarines, and develop strategic plans. However, it is also the part of your brain that lets you chose what to do and when to do it. The neocortex has many functions, but more importantly it includes what is known as your “visual brain” or the visual cortex at the back of your brain in your occipital region.

It takes up about a quarter to a third of your entire neocortex and over 60% of your neocortex’s neuronal activity. Therefore, your visual sensory input is constantly sending messages to other areas of your brain and to the rest of your body.

When it comes more specifically to your posture and movement, the visual cortex has a direct connection to the body’s neuromuscular system and especially the suboccipital muscles including the rectus capitis posterior major, rectus capitis lateralis, obliquus capitis superior, and obliquus capitis inferior. Try this to feel how the eyes can affect these muscles? Place your ﬁngers on your suboccipital region just below the cranium of your skull. Now, move your eyes up and down, to right and to the left and feel the movement of these tiny muscles react to your eye movements under your fingers. The result is that the neuronal patterns creating your posture and movement in your brain are activated by every visual thought and action you have experienced in your life.

The visual cortex of your neocortex is not only responsible for your vision, but also your visual memory, visual imagination, visual dreaming and any other visual associations. Even when your eyes are closed, your visual cortex may be hard at work.

You can see with this integration why the psychotherapy technique referred to as “eye movement desensitization and reprocessing therapy” or EMDR founded by Frances Shapiro, Phd. is effective in alleviating distress from traumatic memories. EMDR involves movement of your eyes in a speciﬁc way while your mind processes these traumatic memories of your life. The goal of this technique is to help you process and heal from any distress due to physical or mental trauma you have experienced. It works because the motor output to the muscles of your eyes is brain driven not only involving your brain stem, neocortex, and visual cortex, but also your limbic system part of your first brain. The limbic system is involved with your emotions, memory, and motivation affecting your autonomic nervous system (ANS) to create homeostasis between your sympathetic and parasympathetic systems.

Because the neuronal patterns of your posture and movement mentioned above also travel from the brainstem through your limbic system the neuronal patterns of your posture and movement are continuously being interpreted for their risk to your survival. Therefore, the neuronal patterns of your skeletal balance and equilibrium in creating your posture and movement can also have an effect on the homeostasis, the balance of your sympathetic and parasympathetic divisions of your autonomic nervous system.

When your skeletal structure is unstable, a sense of disorder, a disturbance will exist within your central nervous system and the tone of your sympathetic nervous system increases. Conversely when there is an improvement of your stability, the tone of your parasympathetic system is enhanced. Remember during the Summer Olympics of 2021 when Simone Biles experienced what was then referred to as the twisties. It was caused by a lack of homeostasis, an imbalance of her sympathetic and parasympathetic systems reacting to the lack of homeostasis, an imbalance in ﬁnding her skeletal equilibrium, balance, and stability. The result was her central nervous system and more speciﬁcally the imbalance of her autonomic nervous system prevented her from performing her superhuman skills in the sport of gymnastics.

In her specific case, her central nervous system and her autonomic nervous system did its job. It shut her down from doing any of these skills she was trained to do as an elite athlete because of a new found risk, a fear she had never experienced before.

Your autonomic nervous system and its sympathetic or “fight or flight” system, includes a network of neurons extending throughout your head and body with its neuronal ﬁbers extending from the brain stem and spinal cord to various organs and tissues, including the heart, lungs, stomach, intestines, bladder and blood vessels. Essentially it is a network of neurons that span the entire body originating in the central nervous system relaying signals to and from your brain. Sympathetic neural pathways and patterns have cell bodies located in the lateral horns of the spinal cord found in the thoracic, upper lumbar, and sacral regions of your spine.

With the parasympathetic system known for “digestion and relaxation it has its ﬁbers exiting the central nervous system via a cranial nerve. Cranial nerves are a set of 12 nerves on each side of the body originating in the brain that communicate with your head, face, and torso. There are 12 cranial nerves and each play a key part in the functioning of your autonomic nervous system. These cranial nerves are responsible for many functions including sensation, movement, and communication.

The cranial nerves help you see, smell, hear, and balance. In addition, they control the muscular system in the creation of your posture and movement especially with head and neck position and motion. Finally, the cranial nerves allow you to make fascial expressions and to communicate. Each of your 12 cranial nerves has a name that reﬂects its function and a number according to its location in the brain. Scientists used Roman numerals from I to XII to label the cranial nerves.

The main control of your parasympathetic system in setting its tone involves the cranial nerve number 10 called the vagus nerve. It is one of the longest nerves in your body playing a vital role in many of your body’s functions. It starts in the brain stem and travels down through the neck and into the chest and abdomen. The vagus nerve is involved in regulating important bodily functions such as breathing, heart rate, digestion, and immune response. As well as playing a role in controlling your mood, emotions, and social behavior.

The vagus nerve is sometimes called the “wandering nerve” because of the many different parts of the body it interacts with. Today, scientiﬁc interest in the vagus nerve is exploding especially after the COVID pandemic with studies investigating it as a potential treatment for everything from obesity to depression, arthritis, and most recently COVID related fatigue. Autoimmune diseases are very difficult to treat as we all know. But recently, scientists have been trying something new, stimulating the vagus nerve or your body’s “information superhighway” with tiny pulses of electricity via an implanted device. This approach has been used to treat epilepsy, depression, and anxiety and researchers say it could be applied more widely.

In fact, they are finding it could help 1.5 million people diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis in this country as well as those affected by Crohn’s disease and multiple sclerosis. Researchers have found that neural signals from the autonomic nervous system have the ability to reflexively control aspects of your immune system.

Thomas Meyers of “Anatomy Trains” further explains this connection between the vagus nerve and your gut: “Our gut made us, and continues to run us. We think we ‘have’ a stomach, but our stomach, actually the whole gut has us to contend with. Our gut was here ﬁrst. It ‘invented’ our neurofascial body: hundreds of millions of years ago, when the ﬁrst vertebrates strapped a wiggling tail like a polliwog or a sperm onto the back of the their gut to help move it around, away from its competitors. The idea was to use the increased movement of what the neurofascial system gave them to get better food. Seriously though, in our neuro-centric view of the world, we view the vagus nerve as spreading down through our body from the cranium through the neck past the heart to the gut organs.”

As Thomas Meyers’ narrative just explains, the vagus nerve is the primary carrier of parasympathetic signals from the federal brain to the democratic gut. It is a two-way communication channel between the brain, heart, lungs, and abdominal organs. In addition, it innervates structures such as the esophagus and voice box, helping to control involuntary processes, including breath, heart rate, digestion, and immune responses. It actually sets the tone of your parasympathetic nervous system, governing the “rest and digest” processes, and relaxes the body after periods of stress or danger that activate the sympathetic nervous system.

With COVID, a systemic disease affecting multiple organ systems of the body, it had a wide range of acute and chronic symptoms. Research on this disease has now found that the vagus nerve was affected by the virus creating an imbalance of homestasis of the autonomic nervous system which is referred to as dysautonomia.

Dysautonomia has been found to impact acute COVID as well as after the recovery from COVID referred to as long COVID. It has been hypothesized that the vagus nerve affected by COVID virus might contributes to this autonomic nervous system dysfunction. It is now estimated that 65 million people suffer from persisting symptoms after recovery from acute COVID which can last for years or even expected to be lifelong referred to as long COVID. The data now suggests vagus nerve inﬂammation followed by autonomic nervous system dysfunction contributes to the critical and chronic disease course and might contribute to dysautonomia.

In your everyday life, you need to think of your autonomic nervous system and its sympathetic and parasympathetic systems as your inherent, built in surveillance system involving your higher brain structures or neocortex which constantly assesses your risk to survivability. Your autonomic nervous system responds to your environment both inside and outside of your body.

From a matrix of sensory information fed to the brain from the peripheral nervous system, your autonomic nervous system is constantly discerning your risk without involving the thinking parts of the brain, the neocortex. That is, according to Stephen Porgas, Phd. He refers to this matrix of sensory information as your “neuroception” with his polyvagal theory (PVT). It is through your neuroception constantly scanning other people, your environment within your body, and the environment outside your body for cues of safety and danger and the risk to your survivability.

Remember, the number one job of your central nervous system is to keep you alive, your survivability and your autonomic nervous system is your central nervous system’s major tool in doing just that. As these cues of neuroception come in through your peripheral and central nervous systems, your autonomic nervous system will reﬂexively and instantaneously shift the state of your autonomic nervous system to manage the situation you are in to optimize your survival.

Because of the integration of your mind and body, which is the opposite of Descartes’ mind-body dualism, your neuroception and your autonomic state are intertwined because they are linked and constantly being assessed for your survivability. Although neuroception is interpreted as a very powerful mechanism capable of shifting your autonomic state, it does have the resilience to move back and forth among the various states of your autonomic system in a so called dynamic dance.

Again, it was through the process of evolution that the human autonomic nervous system has been found to have three principle neuroceptive states including relaxed, immobilized, and mobilized. These states functionally and adaptively shift according to how safe you feel at any given moment in time regarding your external and internal environments. Think of these various states of your autonomic nervous system as a dynamic continuum. It is by no means a static process because your central and autonomic nervous systems are always at work assessing your risk of survival.

In fact, these states, these conditions of your autonomic nervous system are in a constant, dynamic dance that occurs between your sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems to assess your risk of survivability. These three neuroceptive states of your autonomic nervous system functionally and adaptively shift according to how safe you feel at any given moment in time regarding your external and internal environments.

Whereas your central and autonomic nervous systems are constantly scanning your external and internal environments to determine the risk to your survivability, neuroception is what is responsible for deﬁning the risk with the shifting of these neuroceptive states occurring at your subconscious level. Therefore, it is neuroception that deﬁnes you at any given moment of time as being relaxed, immobilized, and mobilized in any situation you may face in your life at any time in your life. Also because of the integration of your mind and body, these states of your neuroception can also form an underlying neurophysiological response for your feelings and emotions that ultimately affects your your posture and movement.

In reality though, these three states are not independent, but in a relationship that may interact to form hybrid states which support this continuum providing a dynamic range of your behavioral reactions. This continuum ranges from inactive to mobilized actions within both safe and threatening contexts.

Keep in mind that your neuroception will at times have the potential to give faulty readings. It may send a signal of danger when you’re actually safe, or it can send a signal of safety when you’re actually in danger. This faulty neuroception is usually inﬂuenced by your past history, memory of adversity and/or trauma. For example, if you have a history of severe adversity such as being a soldier returning from a recent deployment, you may ﬁnd yourself habitually hypervigilant in anticipation of a threat. In addition, to optimize detection and risk and the preparation of defense, you might habitually seek out risky behavior to insure your autonomic state remains in a chronic state of heightened sympathetic arousal preparing you for ﬁght/ﬂight behaviors.

Because everything is integrated in the mind and body as just described, you can see how someone’s posture and movement and athletic performance is affected by your autonomic state. I personally experienced this connection in my training and competing in the winter sport of nordic ski jumping. Therefore, I can assure you I have a much different perspective on the body’s posture and movement, athletic performance, and its connection to the autonomic nervous system with its sympathetic and parasympathetic systems. That perspective comes from my experience of traveling at times as fast as 70 mph down an in-run of a ski jump on a pair of 245 cm jumping skis while in an aerodynamic, crouched position with my arms at my side.

Then in a split second from my visual input, launch my body into the air at take off. If my timing was right, I would use the newly acquired air pressure under my skis and begin my ﬂight in deﬁance of gravity. If everything went as planned, I would land again on my feet with my total body reacting to ground reaction force and momentum.

My experiences taught me that the performance of my skeletal, neuromuscular, and fascial systems were deﬁnitely integrated with my autonomic nervous system. My mind and body were one. This experience also taught me the importance of vision and the relationship of mind and body during human posture and movement. Just like a bird, vision and my mind’s visual cortex played a major role in creating my human skeletal equilibrium, balance, stability, and mobility in the performance of my athletic skill that ultimately affected my autonomic nervous system. How else could a ski jumper ﬁnd himself/herself on a pair of skis defying gravity while ﬂying through the air and then land reacting to ground reaction force and momentum safely?

In addition, I learned a lot about the human musculoskeletal system, trauma, injuries, pain, and the autonomic nervous system. More speciﬁcally musculoskeletal pain caused by the dysfunction/derangement of the body’s skeletal, fascial, and neuromuscular systems from falls I had while training and competing. However, there is one particular fall I experienced in 1975 at Ironwood, Michigan on a hill called “Copper Peak” that changed how I trained and competed years after. For that matter, it changed my life. This hill was a monster and was considered at that time as ski ﬂying or nordic ski jumping to the extreme.

It was considered a monster of hill because Copper Peak’s scaffolding stands 241 feet above the ground and has a 469 foot long in-run cantilevered with a 35 degree slope. It was built this way to withstand even the strongest winds coming off Lake Superior. During windy weather as was usually the case, there was always a gentle 18 inch sway at the top as part of its design. In 1975, I was having my best competitive year as a member of the United States Ski Team. I was rated #1 in the country going into that competition after just returning from competitions throughout Europe.

While on top with the scaffolding swaying slightly, I got the green light and came down the inrun with takeoff speed at and around 70 mph. At take off, I vaulted my body into the air and at the peak of my ﬂight, approximately about twenty feet above the ground, the wind got a hold of me and ﬂipped me over landing on the back of my shoulders. To this day, I don’t remember anything about the fall until opening my eyes for a moment in the ambulance and then again in the emergency room.

Understand that before this fall, I was able to train my mind and body to be in a relaxed and mobilized neuroceptive state. A neuroceptive state where my parasympathetic system was in control with each ride. I felt safe, energetic, and looking forward to ﬂying through the air like a bird to go as far as I could when competing and training. However, that all changed after this fall. Due to the fall, I had to have right shoulder surgery. After my recovery and rehabilitation from surgery, my neuroceptive state when jumping I would describe as being mobilized and feeling unsafe. My sympathetic nervous system was in now in control of my body because of fear, the fear of falling and sustaining an injury again.

It was not too long after this fall and surgery, I came to the realization that I was very close to snapping my neck landing on the back of my shoulders. Now when I was on top of any hill I skied, I felt increased anxiety and stress rather than a relaxed and safe state as before the fall. Believe me when I say the greatest accomplishment I achieved in the nordic sport of ski jumping was not making an Olympic team in 1976, but overcoming my fear and the increased facilitation of my sympathetic nervous system due to the fall.

Somehow without really understanding what was happening at the time, I was able to engage and increase my parasympathetic tone enough when training and competing to make the 1976 Olympic Team held in Innsbruck, Austria placing 30th on the large hill.

More recently, Mikaela Shiffrin, the greatest skier of all time in my opinion had to overcome what she personally described as a mind-body disconnect before winning her 100th World Cup race. Once again reenforcing this mind and body relationship.

To begin to understand the months-long ordeal she endured in the build up to her history-making victory earlier this year, you would have to go back to November 30th of last year when she crashed out of a giant slalom, World Cup race in Vermont. Physically, the impact of that crash caused her severe muscle trauma and over a two and half inch puncture wound to her abdomen.

After finally getting back into competition in February of this year, she described how she had a what she phrased as a mind-body disconnect. She recalls how she would tell her body to do certain technical moves, technical moves she has done her entire competitive career and it just would not happen. She stated, “My body is screaming at me, it’s like a fight or flight: No don’t do it, it’s risky, it’s dangerous.” Healing both mentally and physically, has been a key part of Shiffrin’s comeback and success as it was for me confirming the relationship between the mind and body. Confirming mind and body are not two different substances.

From our discussion today, you can see how the foundational philosophies of our healthcare system involving mind-body dualism, positivism, and reductionism are out of touch with science’s quantum theory and mechanics of today’s world.

These philosophical theories from the 17th century are just too linear although they have been given pretty much the cultural authority to “name the world.” Quantitative holistic medicine, not isolationism is our healthcare system’s future that will require a paradigm shift in the practice of medicine that emphasizes the use of quantitative data and mathematical models to understand and treat disease and illness of our modern world.

This approach is based on the idea that the human body can be studied as a complex system, with interconnected parts that can be modeled and simulated using mathematical and computational tools instead of mind-body dualism, positivism, and reductionism.

At its core, quantitative holistic medicine is based on precision, personalization, prediction, and prevention. The concept of returning to a more holistic approach to healthcare through quantitative medicine could be considered an example of the circular pattern that has always existed in science, where ideas and approaches evolve over time, only to return to a starting point, but at a new level of understanding.

This circular pattern of science could be considered the “spiral of science” or the “circle of knowledge.” It is philosopher and historian of science Thomas Kuhn who proposed the concept of scientiﬁc paradigms, which are frameworks of understanding and knowledge that guide scientiﬁc research and discovery. According to Kuhn, science undergoes periodic revolutions, in which existing paradigms are replaced by new ones, leading to a signiﬁcant shift in scientiﬁc thinking and practice. However, Kuhn also noted that scientiﬁc progress is not always linear, and that there are often periods of stagnation or even regression before a new paradigm emerges. I think we are at this stage when looking at our healthcare system that exists today.

This circular pattern of progress and regression is referred to as the “Kuhnian circle.” In the case of quantitative holistic medicine, the use of mathematical and statistical methods together with the potentiality of artiﬁcial intelligence represents a new paradigm shift within our healthcare system. It has the potential to revolutionize the way we understand and treat disease and debilitation rather than using the biomedical, disease model that still exists today.

The rise of quantitative holistic medicine has marked a signiﬁcant transition in the history of medicine, from the mind-body dualistic, reductionist, or mechanistic approach to a more holistic approach. While these philosophical theories of the past have brought many beneﬁts, including more personalized and targeted treatments, improved understanding of the underlying biological mechanisms of disease, it has also presented some challenges and criticisms with our healthcare system.

In particular, losing sight of the patient as a whole, unique individual, and the inability and need to ensure that the healthcare model is grounded in a holistic understanding of the complex systems that underlie human health. Furthermore, the rise of quantitative holistic medicine has not occurred in isolation, but rather reﬂects broader philosophical and scientiﬁc trends. The development of new technologies and the inﬂuence of reductionist philosophies have been key drivers of this shift. While it is important to recognize that reductionism had its limitations, a truly comprehensive understanding of human health will require a new synthesis of reductionist and holistic approaches.

As you, the healthcare professionals in this country move forward, it will be important to continue to critically evaluate the beneﬁts and limitations of quantitative holistic medicine so as to ensure we maintain a balanced approach that recognizes the unique complexity of each individual patient. 35By integrating insights from philosophy, physics, and other ﬁelds, we may be able to develop new and innovative approaches that bridge the gap between isolationism, positivism, reductionism, and holism in a model that we could truly deﬁne as “quantitative holism,” and ultimately improve the patient outcomes within our healthcare system.

Thank you.

“The Mind-Body Connection and the Vagus Nerve”

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“The Mind-Body Connection and the Vagus Nerve”

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