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Imagine we’re all born with three arms, but one is small & invisible, and it’s easy to roll over in our sleep and cut off its circulation. And every time this happens there's a chance the circulation stays pinched; this permanent loss of feeling happens to most people by the time they’re ~2-3 years old. Almost all adults forget they ever had a working third arm — it’s been numb so long our body-model no longer remembers it as a functional affordance and we think of it as merely metaphorical.

At some point in antiquity, someone figured out a way to restore circulation to their third arm as an adult, and taught others how to do this. Their teachings have been preserved, but these claims seem deeply strange — a working third arm? Preposterous. Except some people try these ancient instructions and they say it works. Are they deluded or did we miss something basic about human anatomy?

Humans do not literally have invisible third arms. But I do believe that certain crucial regions of our nervous system become chronically pinched & numb ("latched") when we're very young, and we forget they exist. And it's possible to open these pinches up: circulation & feeling will rush back and we'll regain a sense of possibility & freedom that we lost very early in life, similar to realizing we can move a joint we thought was fused.

Vasocomputation is a research program for understanding this system, how, why, & where these pinches (vascular latches) happen, and how they might be opened.