The vasomuscular origin story for humanity

My origin story for humanity: the particular cognitive capacities of modern humans came from being able to flex (and latch) our vasomuscular system in more areas, with greater precision & integration, and with greater strength & duration than other animals

The vasomuscular system is a spiderweb of smooth muscle finely threaded throughout the body. This spiderweb can clench, and “Vasocomputation” is the thesis that these clenches stabilize local neural patterns. For as long as the clench lasts, neurons can’t update. This is the anatomical correlate for “the hand of the mind” — we can very literally “grab ideas” and we do it by clenching this muscle

We’re not born knowing how to finely clench this muscle; learning to do so and in more dexterous ways is a big part of development (idiosyncratic gaps in this capacity are invisible but universal). As we develop this capacity to selectively stabilize patterns we essentially learn how to program our nervous system: being able to save+load sensations and treat our nervous system as a canvas upon which we can paint counterfactual sensations enables imagination, planning, and language

Smooth muscle has a special capacity called the “latch-bridge mechanism” where the sliding filaments essentially get glued together, locking the muscle in place. I believe these ‘latches’ can last for minutes to decades*, basically constituting a semi-permanent muscle clench; “latched” neural patterns cannot change. This is an incredibly useful capacity, as it allows us to set durable priors as to what areas of our dynamic range are safe and/or desirable. I.e. the ability to set latches allows us to treat the nervous system as an FPGA (field programmable gate array — essentially a programmable computer chip). Something that can be shipped as a very general, adaptable system and can be customized as needed

The differential resolution on our ability to finely clench our vasculature looks to be around 100-400um (red blood cells are 5-8um); translated into voxels with simple napkin math, this would suggest the brain would have between 21m to 1.3b ‘vascular addressable units’, or areas that could be differentially stabilized. This is a very high-resolution system. (Plausibly the dexterity of our vasomuscular system and the dexterity of our hands bootstrapped off each other; they have a very similar grammar of stabilization)

But having shards of frozen sensation (“trapped priors”, aka latches) in our nervous systems also creates a particular flavor of suffering. Evolution has given us a Faustian bargain; we don’t live in reality, we live in a hybrid of (1) raw sensation and (2) our saved context and expectations about what our sensations should be (implemented via vascular tension), which we hold until they become true. This merging of what is, what could be, and what should be, into *what will be* is an incredibly efficient strategy for navigating the world (Friston’s active inference**). But we also suffer to the degree our frozen sensations/expectations are not true and we’re constantly creating more

I expect variance in smooth muscle health & dynamics to underpin the majority of human hedonic variation, and if I had to suggest numbers I’d expect roughly as much variance as there is in human intelligence (not a coincidence imo). Likewise, I think “disorders of vasomuscular reflexes & latching” is going to be a very generative lens for a future subbranch of psychiatry (see my recent HPPD hypothesis***). This system is fairly new and evolution hasn’t had the time to smooth its rough edges

Buddhism is a really hopeful existence proof that this system can be shifted to be way more pleasant. I think a good path for humanity has us figuring out how to improve this system & get the good stuff with gentler tradeoffs (I hesitate to call this “universal basic enlightenment” but it’s in the general neighborhood of what I think is possible)****.

Cont.

Notes:

*this has not been scientifically established at this point, and would be a big finding. Many ways to check, but the simplest would be a longitudinal study

**my formulation is a little different from FEP-AI; hope to do a side-by-size comparison at some point

***HPPD as a disorder of latching: https://x.com/johnsonmxe/status/1867338092631490719

****I think of this in somewhat biblical terms: if learning to freeze+control sensations was the Fall, and ‘enlightenment’ is the journey back to Eden, maybe it’s possible to design tech (or even ways of bringing up children) that makes getting back there easier

Resources:

- Principles of Vasocomputation: https://opentheory.net/2023/07/principles-of-vasocomputation-a-unification-of-buddhist-phenomenology-active-inference-and-physical-reflex-part-i/

- My Edge City Lanna talk on vasocomputation: https://x.com/johnsonmxe/status/1863595299056517410

- “In the beginning there was sensation” thread: https://x.com/johnsonmxe/status/1751994506478587977

- The hemo-neural hypothesis: on the role of blood flow in information processing (Moore & Cao 2007)

- Cognition is entangled with metabolism: relevance for resting-state EEG-fMRI (Jacob, et al. 2023)

Larger research context:

@johnhawks has a nice overview of some recent work on what distinguishes the human vascular system from other primates. His thesis is that we're optimized for physical endurance. Probably true; I also suspect we're optimized for cognitive endurance.

"Cognitive endurance" has two categories:
(1) longer periods of thinking,
(2) holding (vascular) priors for a longer time.

The former would seem to require allowing sustained bloodflow to the brain -- brains are expensive & using them for longer periods requires more investment in plumbing. Simple.

The latter category is more conceptually interesting. A "latch" is a vascular clench that gets locked & restricts local neural dynamic range. A latch is functionally a Bayesian prior. If you get bitten by a dog, your body latches shards of that experience into your nervous system; you have less cognitive-emotional-perceptual freedom next time you see a dog. Latches are memory, enforced stasis on local circuits. A latch is also a prediction: we can hold a counterfactual until it becomes true (active inference), sometimes for years.

(That our nervous system doesn't distinguish between these uses is the source of much interest in human affairs.)

Part of my argument for human origins is that we use latches much more than other animals, and we almost certainly have specific vascular adaptations for this.

What would these adaptations be? I mentioned some broad considerations in my Hand of the Mind article; essentially I proposed we have mental hands that are capable of finer grips. But we may also expect humans to be optimized for *longer* grips; capacity to hold priors that can help get us through cold seasons. If I were studying human origins I'd specifically dig into the latch-bridge mechanism & comparative vascular muscle anatomy across hominids.