But it's a curiosity as to where we are, what we are. That existence, the physical universe, is basically playful.
Welcome to the Curious Humans Podcast. I'm your host, Jonny Miller.
Hello there, curious humans. Today, I'm super excited to share a conversation that I think
explores one of the most important scientific questions of our time. I'm speaking with
the theoretical neuroscientist, Michael Edward Johnson, who after spending seven years researching
consciousness and writing the book Principia Qualia, has developed a revolutionary theory
that could change how we understand trauma, meditation, and human flourishing.
Mike's theory of latches, which we'll be doing a deep dive into,
may provide a testable and concrete biological mechanism for how trauma gets stored in the body.
This might sound nerdy and abstract, but I really believe that if his claims can be tested and
validated, it could revolutionize the medical system and allow the somatic modalities or things
like MDMA-assisted psychotherapy to be compared and tested side by side for their efficacy.
Without any further ado from me, I give you this pretty nerdy, in-depth, and utterly fascinating
conversation with the modern-day polymath, Michael Edward Johnson.
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That's nsmastery.com.
Welcome to the Curious Humans podcast, Mike. It is a real pleasure to have you here.
Thanks, Johnny. I'm glad to be here, and it was really great to meet you this summer too.
How are you feeling?
I'm feeling in this precise moment in three words.
A little nervous, centered, and warm.
Well, the question that I like to start these conversations with is, do you consider yourself
to have been an exceptionally curious child? And if so, can you recall a story about something that
you were curious about?
Ah, interesting. So, the answer is definitely yes. I think that I had this interesting feature
or drive that I felt that I always had to figure things out by myself to figure out my own way,
which sometimes was a challenge and sometimes did virtually well.
Yeah.
And in terms of just curiosity, I guess I was omnivorous, but I would read literally anything.
Dictionary is...
Dictionaries, travel brochures, yeah, just anything.
That fully tracks with my experience of you today.
I don't know the backstory here, but how did you find your way into theoretical neuroscience and
co-founding QualiaResa?
know the work that you're doing today with open theory what's the what's
arc of the journey there?
Yeah, that's an interesting question.
So I helped my dad out with his algorithmic market trading interest.
So he's a farmer, he trades the colonies markets.
I helped a little bit on that.
So that was right after graduation.
And then I guess I was just looking around for something that was personally meaningful,
something that would sort of, I don't know, make everything make sense in a way.
Or we could also phrase it, I was looking for the biggest dragon to slay.
So I was looking around.
And then I found this.
I got really interested in sort of this question of pain and pleasure, of what makes some things
feel better than others.
What is depression?
What is happiness?
Etc.
And I was expecting I could find the right things to read.
It would take me a few months, and I would sort of understand that.
And maybe I could contribute a little bit.
But I really dug into it.
And the more I read about the topic, the more clear it was to me that everything out there
was just confused.
That this was potentially the most important question in the world.
And people had no clue about even what a proper answer would look like.
So I was like, okay, I'm going to do this.
I'm going to figure out how to figure out how to figure out how to figure out how to
figure out how to figure out how to figure out how to figure out how to figure out how
to figure out how to figure out how to figure out how to figure out how to figure out how
to figure out how to figure out how to figure out how to figure out how to figure out
that if you're really digging into these deep philosophical questions,
at first, you really need to sort of be a particularly careful philosopher.
You need to get the metaphysics right.
You need to sort of understand the role of each kind of word that you're trying to use
and to understand kind of what kind of question this is or that is and so on
and what kind of answer you're looking for.
But I found that the more I dug into it, the less it became philosophy
and the more it became sort of theoretical neuroscience,
that if you want to understand these deep questions about the mind,
eventually you are going to run into questions
about the mind and the mind is going to run into questions about the mind.
And of the brain as well.
So that kind of got into different, I would say, different theories of self-organization
and sort of the free energy principle and harmonics and whatnot as it applies to the brain.
Yeah, so I guess that's the super short version.
But I think when it gets down to it, this has been,
I think, a very broad and personally exciting quest to understand.
And if I can help myself, then I can understand, you know,
what kinds of things humans are in general.
That's beautiful.
And that really resonates with, I think, where my curiosity comes from as well.
And to give some context for this, my desire for this podcast episode
is to both try and convey just how important I think,
your research is, and also selfishly better to understand these theories for myself,
because there's a lot of blind spots in my understanding of your work as well.
So as a starting point, potentially, when we were in California a few months ago,
you mentioned fairly offhand that the human nervous system,
which is something I'm really curious about, is almost like a set of wind chimes.
Could you share what do you mean by that?
Right.
So.
I think that's a very important thing in, I guess you could say,
in the system of vessel computation, is that we can sort of
distinguish stuff that's going on in the nervous system, sort of narrowly defined nerves and neurons, and then things that are happening in the muscular system, and especially the vasomuscular system.
And both of these sort of have a particular computational role.
But in terms of the wind chime analogy, I think that essentially, you know, there's just so much data coming in, information coming in, and sort of hitting our nervous system.
And I think that like a very simple story about the nervous system's role in this is it has a bunch of harmonics.
It has a bunch of potential ways that it can
vibrate or resonate or whatnot, and sort of distribute all over the body, but also mostly managed in a way that they're independent.
Like one pattern won't interfere with another pattern, or if it does, like there's some interesting, useful functional logic to how patterns propagate.
But so basically, I think of the nervous system itself as this
very sensitive sort of chimes.
That as you sort of feel your environment, as information, as data kind of hits, hits
this system sort of homes in different ways.
And then based on which residences are present in the system.
And so I'm sort of imagining sort of a sort of a
which resonances are absent in the system, you can get a feel for your environment.
And, you know, I think that we can tell a certain story like this in terms of how the brains,
like how the visual systems feature detectors work, that light comes in and you have various
circuits checking for edges and checking for high contrast or checking for like,
is this a hand and so on. But then also you have kind of, I guess I would say the lower frequency
harmonics of like, is this a safe situation? Or like, how do I feel right now? And I think that
this is kind of the same thing, just maybe shifted a few octaves.
Super interesting. Well, one of the reasons that I'm really excited by your research is that I think,
at least from my read, it provides a plausible mechanistic theory for how trauma, or I call it
emotional debt, is stored in the body. Which, as far as I'm aware, is a pretty open question
in mainstream neuroscience. Like, they haven't really figured this out yet.
And one of the more famous kind of phrases is the idea of the body keeping the score from
bandicoot. But no one really understands the mechanism. As a consequence, practitioners like
myself, it's been very difficult to objectively track progress when it comes to somatic modalities.
Because they aren't really before and after things besides subjective. Oh, I feel differently,
or I'm noticing less triggers, et cetera. With that as context, perhaps as a jumping off point,
could you share the...
As an overview of the focus of the focus focus focus focus focus focus focus focus focus focus
of your principles of VASO computation and how you came to even discover it? Where did
this emerge from in the first place?
Sure. For any interesting theory, there are so many on-ramps that are possible.
We can take one on-ramp today and another one tomorrow and so on. But I think that today
I would tell the story about how we think of the body's intelligence as encoded into our nervous
system. But actually, I think there are two systems that do global processing like this.
And the first is the neural system, and the second is the VASO muscular system. So all
your blood vessels are sort of connected to the nervous system. And so, you can see that
the nervous system is sort of wrapped in a thin layer of smooth muscle. These are VSMCs,
vascular smooth muscle cells. And basically, they can contract or relax, or they have a
smooth muscle has a special third setting that it can latch. And basically, that's glue
itself into a contracted state. And then you don't have to hold it. It's just that's the default then. And I would say that the role of the vascular system in this sort of computational story is it actively manages the neural system in a way where it steps in and
micromanages if the neural system is messing up. If the neural default flow dynamics are producing, we can say, prediction errors. And this is a nod to the free energy principle,
for processing systems
which is that the neural system is a very complex system. And basically, if your nervous system shows that it cannot be trusted with its full range of freedom, the vasomuscular system will contract, cut off blood flow to different areas of the nervous system, and then basically freeze the pattern in those areas.
So blood flow varies by a factor of three.
20 or more in healthy tissue.
That's wild. I heard you say that before. I had no idea. That's incredible.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And this touches on the, it's called the vaso, or it's the
hemoneural hypothesis by Moore and Kao. That's from 2007 or 2008. And they basically put forth
this idea that blood flow regulates neural dynamics.
And basically, the gain of networks, that if some network of neurons, if it has a lot of blood flow, then if it's 20x, it can listen very carefully to what's going on. It can update, it can change. It's very dynamic.
But then if we dial blood flow down,
so from 20x to 1x, basically just enough, the trickle that is sufficient to survive, but not sufficient to pay for updating, being very sensitive, etc. Basically, if we starve neurons of blood, they go into safe mode.
And then they don't update.
Just whatever pattern that they were using.
They were holding. They keep holding. Basically, there's sort of a local freeze of pattern there.
And yeah, basically, whenever the vasomuscular system detects that, okay, there's a problem, the nervous system can't be trusted to have full freedom in this.
And so, the way that we do it is we'll take the blood flow away.
We'll freeze the pattern into kind of a known good configuration, a known safe configuration.
And this engages this special smooth muscle capacity.
It's called the latch bridge mechanism.
The myosin and the actin basically get glued together, I think, with phosphate groups.
And the way that we do it is we'll take the blood flow away.
But these smooth muscle latches, basically they lock local blood vessels shut.
And they're also in play in the digestive system and pelvis and bladder and all over.
But I would be very...
I think the particularly interesting story here is about latches in the vascular system.
And so, these latches they can...
You know, they they may be taken.
you know a few seconds to minute to to set and a few seconds to minute to dissolve but they can
last for days weeks months years a whole lifetime so I mean this this idea of or this question of
how does body keep the score what actually happens I would tell a pretty simple story
that when when it's seen as needed when you can't or
have time to address a challenge with high-level strategies when it's sort of life or death or primal or early on in development where we don't have the high-level strategies or so on.
The nervous system sort of congeals these patches and they can stick with us for a long time.
Basically, for as long as we have them, then if we want to call them trauma, and I think that's probably fair, the trauma will stay with us.
One question that's come to mind is, and you've touched on this a little bit, but what do you think is the adaptive reason for these latches locking down?
Can you just kind of double-click on it?
Why is it sensible for the body to develop this?
Is it an evolutionary mechanism?
Sure, sure.
So, I think it's an unreasonably effective way to manage the nervous system.
And we may think very bad thoughts about trauma, that, oh, you know, it's a very bad way of living and being and feeling, and, oh, I wish, you know, you could just open up.
But from the perspective of evolution, I think it's a very good way to manage the nervous system.
From the perspective of the body.
I mean, we're sort of born into sensory chaos, what William James calls looming, buzzing confusion, which is a beautiful phrase.
And then we have a very strong imperative to make sense of our chaos, to predict our chaos.
And that's what we're doing.
And there are so many degrees of freedom in terms of, you know, if you think of all the information that a baby's nervous system is kind of absorbing, you know, there's data from the eyes and data from the ears and data from all the skin sensors and internal data, interoceptive data about what's happening in the stomach and what's happening in the heart and so on.
It's just a flood of data.
And, you know, I think it's a very good way to manage that.
I think that, you know, evolution has needed to sort of take shortcuts and latch the most predictive or safe things that, okay, well, if we sort of remove the ability for this network to dynamically change and we sort of hold it into a pattern, then all the rest of the system gets more predictable.
And, you know, I think that's a very good way to manage that.
I think that the more we hold, the more predictable the system gets.
Now, obviously, we don't want to hold everything and we can't, but it's just a very useful systems intervention to sort of take the variability out of a component.
Yeah, yeah.
So that makes complete sense to me.
And I've recently finished reading Andy Clark's book, The Prediction Machine, which kind of talks about a lot of this as well.
Yeah, yeah.
Something that I'm wondering, so now kind of based on what you just shared, I'm wondering
how do practices such as say breathwork or MGMA assisted psychotherapy, what is the mechanism
by which they are able to create the conditions for the release of these latches?
Is it to do with they're almost introducing more chaos into the system such that the current
way of latching on no longer really makes sense.
So the body's like, okay, we need any strategy.
Like we need to do something else.
Is that roughly what's happening?
What's your read of how is it that these modalities, particularly let's just use kind of MGMA
assisted psychotherapy and breathwork for now, how are they able to create the conditions
for the releasing of these latches?
Yeah, that's a great question.
So in terms of the sort of chaos.
Thesis, we could say.
I wrote a piece in 2019, Neural Kneeling, where it's sort of a temperature model or
a thermodynamic model for the brain, for the nervous system, where if you get the sort
of, we can think of the brain as having a temperature parameter, not a literal temperature
parameter, but kind of the amount of energy in the system.
And if that gets above some...
Certain threshold, we can call that the melting point of brain
networks. And maybe different networks have different melting points, etc. Then you get sort of entropic disintegration. This is a term used by Robin Carter Harris in his Entropic Brain paper. And then you get reorganization, and then a cooling process, and annealing, which is what happens when you sort of
cool metal down. You get kind of recrystallization of microstructure.
This would be one approach to say, okay, well, breathwork increases the temperature parameter. MDMA
increases the temperature parameter. I'm always interested in exploring new angles. And I would
get a little bit more specific for psychedelics, such as LSD, maybe MDMA. I'm not sure. I have a
working-out-of-a-pet hypothesis about MDMA. But basically, I expect them to have
huge effects on the vascular system. And so for psychedelics specifically,
basically, these latches, these smooth muscle latches, these glued clenches that sort of are
restricting blood flow, and then sort of limiting the ability of the network to change. It's
basically just this hard muscular clench. And it's this question of, well, what releases hard muscular clenches?
And it's this question of, well, what releases hard muscular clenches?
And there can be, I think, some dynamics where the most effective
approach is to cycle. It's like, okay, we have vessel dilators.
They are chemicals that we know kind of open up blood vessels.
But I actually think a much more effective way to open these latches is not just slide the system with a
vessel dilators but also to sort of cycle clench release clench release
and i think that something like lst may be doing that uh that lst is sort of known as a strong
vessel constrictor but i think that this is actually just a a slight misnomer because i think
what to be happening is uh it will produce constriction and then a wave of real action
and then a wave of constriction wave of real action and you can basically
randomly pop ledges with this uh with uh very very results we can say
so a couple of things come to i mean a bunch of things come to mind one is that um
i noticed in myself like when i
when i'm in a process i will sometimes start humming and that almost creates more ease and
i'm aware that humming releases nitric oxide which is also a vasodilator so that kind of
track like maps into that theory i think one thing that i'm really curious about is
um it's also very possible without the use of either breath work or any kind of psychedelic
substance um if there are conditions of sufficient internal and external safety
and permissioning then these processes and these these like incomplete reflexes that i've studied
somewhat seem to be able to complete themselves do you have a sense of what might be is there a kind
of biological correlate to that felt sense of safety which the system is is like the wind
trine that you mentioned earlier is picking up on and then is allowing this latch to unfold
what's your sense there yeah that's a that's a good question yeah and
I understand too I'm sort of
getting ahead of myself on questions
you had asked about breath as well
that's great
just to touch back briefly
on breath work
I think that yeah like humming produces
NO
but also breath work
leads to
CO2
build up
and everyone
like it's sort of
health thesis or a common medical thesis that CO2 is bad and that you need a CO2 meter. I actually have a CO2 meter right here, but too much is bad. But I don't know if you're familiar with the work of Ray Peet, a very interesting sort of metabolism-focused biologist.
He does bioenergetics, I guess I would say, or he recently passed. His thesis is that CO2
is actually incredibly important for cellular respiration, cellular metabolism, and that
it can be a problem if we lose too much CO2.
It increases oxygen uptake via the Bohr effect, if I'm not mistaken. So it actually
helps the cells to be more oxygenated, counter-intuitively.
Right. And I would say that NO is… I mean, this is a complicated topic, of course,
but the simple story that I would tell is NO is sort of the emergency release for the
vascular system, whereas CO2 is the more sustainable release type.
And so they both have their benefits. But I think that if you suffuse tissue CO2,
you'll probably just sort of push everything toward relaxation and release. And then if
you do that, you might sort of pop some arches.
Which explains… I'm remembering in Jamie Weal's recap to the rapture, he has the kind of history of the rapture.
Yeah. So it's like a hedonic engineering protocol where there's breathwork and then
there's inhaling nitrous oxide or nitric oxide, and it creates this incredible ecstatic,
deep psychedelic experience. And that's maybe just multiple latches popping.
So then that brings me to another, I think, really important question, which is that in
these, let's say, peak states, we can experience what it's like momentarily for these latches
to be open and for all of this energy to be flowing more naturally. And then when the
psychedelic or the breathwork wears off, we kind of come back to our normal state. What
do you think is required for the latch to create a new prediction, I guess, such that
it is safe to be open permanently? And I guess this connects to the integration phase of
somatic work and things like this.
Sure, sure. So I would say that there can be at least two flavors of
sort of temporary release, we can say. And the first is where the latch doesn't actually
open, but a little bit more circulation trickles in. And so, you know, the sort of physical
latch is still there. The sort of muscle is still gluteshod, but a little bit more blood
gets kind of pushed in.
Yeah.
that will sort of give a little bit more activity range back to the network,
but it will wear off.
This is a very sort of contextual thing.
And then there's the second scenario where you actually pop a latch.
And this is a pretty big deal to pop a latch.
And then maybe everything is more sort of chaotic and vivid and pleasant, but also dangerous.
And then you sort of reflexively clench.
You get scared of that sort of freedom slash chaos.
And you sort of clench back to the pattern that you know.
And maybe that turns into a sustained clench, not a latch.
Or maybe it just relatches.
So I do think that sort of, you know, you mentioned this integration processes and so on.
And I think that, yeah, like, it's absolutely essential to sort of be able to ideally give yourself a sense of safety.
Yeah.
Even or especially when things kind of feel good but out of control,
to sort of not sort of
So this is what I'm really keen to explore and talk about with you. What might be some of the implications for these theories? And specifically, if everything that you've said is true and is the case, then you'd think we'd be able to look at, let's say, PTSD trauma survivors, and they would very likely damage their lives.
So, you know, highly restricted blood flow in certain areas compared with control populations or like super advanced meditators. Like, is that something that it seems very testable, right? Can we do that?
Yeah. So it should be extremely testable. And like, I've had discussions about using
something like Doppler ultrasound or fMRI with contrast to sort of track fluid flow around the
find the dark spots, find the black holes, find the places where basically there's only a trickle
of fluid flow. And you can kind of assume, okay, these are the places which sort of are latched.
Blood can't really flow there very easily. So I think that, I mean, making a map like this,
or sort of validating this with neuroimaging, say, okay, you know, this person has PTSD.
We can actually find the places of low circulation. I've heard of sort of body
workers using thermal imaging, higher-res thermal, and basically the places on the outside,
which are cooler and probably getting less circulation. And so I think that would be one
example. So yeah, I think that there are...
There are deep scientific and clinical implications. And there are also implications for sort of...
I'm going to give two threads here. One is mapping personality or mapping agency, rather.
And in terms of like, if your latches are the set of constants in your nervous system,
things that just absolutely...
Yeah.
Will not change until you... And like, I think that probably blood flow and attention
are very coupled. And it would be a lossy summary, but an interesting one to say that
blood flow and attention are kind of the same thing, where there's blood flow, there's tension,
where there's tension, there's blood flow.
That's a big claim. That's...
Yeah.
Yeah. Wow.
Yeah.
Okay. Okay. Yeah, yeah.
If there's not blood flow to an area, you can't put your attention there.
And you just don't have freedom in those networks also. And so if you can sort of
build a full map of someone's body of, okay, here's their nervous system, and here's what
parts of their nervous system are latched.
Yeah.
And you kind of have a map of agency. Here are the things that they can't think about,
they can't feel, they can't change. Here are the places in their body which correspond with
various things in the cognitive and emotional realm where they can't put their attention.
And I think that that would be very valuable to sort of map out a body like that.
And the second topic is kind of poking at this idea of what is classical Buddhist enlightenment.
So I can say a few words there or if you have any questions.
Yeah, well, I mean, I absolutely want to get on both threads. Let's start on the agency
one, because that's something which... Agency was interestingly the common thread that I
came to in my work with Nervous System Mastery. And I have a framework of rise out of reactivity.
we were able to cultivate interoceptive awareness which is certainly correlated with blood flow
um a sense of embodied safety or self-regulation and then emotional fluidity which is another way
of saying how able are you to not clamp down in the midst of some kind of emotional intensity or
wave um and when those pieces are in place like you say there is more there's more freedom between
stimulus and response without the kind of knee-jerk reactive kind of classical reactions
reactions whether it's like emotional reactivity or the classic hyper or hypo arousal which are like the body's protection strategies i guess
So, that to me is fascinating.
If there were some researchers listening to this, and I know that there will be at least
a few, how might you design or suggest that they design an experiment to test this out
and conclusively show that this is the case?
Maybe there's before-after sessions.
You mentioned, I think, before that there might be a distinguishable density signature
associated with these latches.
What would you recommend to some researchers who might want to explore this for themselves?
Yeah, that's a good question.
So just playing up some notes here.
I would say that the four things that one could try to use to sort of map someone's
nervous system, one is Doppler ultrasound, another is fMRI plus contrast.
These are sort of researcher-grade stuff.
Then there's the thermal imaging, which I think is more, you know, hobbyist.
I think it's a good thing.
You can just buy a thermal imager on Amazon or whatever until you're up with it.
And I think if I was a massage therapist, I would sort of try and see if this can predict
the places which are sort of least functional in a person, where they had the least feeling
to or whatever.
And sort of are worth...
I would also say that like a big part of this to...
Okay.
And also if you can sort of do density imaging, probably with ultrasound, of the vasculature,
most probably these smooth muscle latches will have a distinct density signature.
Yeah.
That you should be able to pick up.
I would also say that a lot of this also revolves around not just the latches, sort of crystallized
points of constant pattern in your nervous system, but also your reflexes.
As you were saying, emotional flexes.
Yeah.
And just sort of what is your response reaction?
Can you sort of do this in a better way?
And this actually, I was kind of thinking about, oh, what topics would be fun to discuss
on this podcast?
And there are so many, but one that I've been thinking about a lot recently is...
And I think every tradition is going to have their different terminology here.
I would put it in terms of different forms of virtue.
And I would say that there's a nervous system virtue.
And this is sort of, if you are just in a natural flow state.
Yeah.
and just let the energy go if you just kind of are in the moment.
How trustworthy is that?
Can you trust your nervous system to do that and produce good results?
And your vasomuscular system has a strong opinion on that.
It has a very strong opinion on how virtuous your nervous system is.
And if it has a good opinion, then it'll just kind of hang out.
It'll let you flow.
It'll let you just kind of, you know, energy just kind of naturally manifests
whatever your nervous system wants.
But if it has a bad opinion of this virtue, if it thinks, oh man, like,
I trusted it last year and it caused so much trouble.
Yeah.
And like, or like, you know, I trusted it and then my
fell down and broke his arm and like, no, like we're not gonna sort of trust your natural flow reflexes. We can say we're gonna micromanage. We're gonna make sure we're gonna be a little bit neurotic, but we're gonna make sure that you're safe. And so what I would expect, like I see behavior as kind of this handshake or trade-off between these two systems.
Your nervous system just left to its own devices. It's, it feels very pleasant. It feels very easy. Maybe, maybe it's a little schizo. Maybe it's a little, a little lazy. And maybe sometimes just when, when activity flows through your nervous system, maybe sometimes
bad things happen. Like you get impulsive about this or you, you know, eat a kilo of ice cream or, you know, who knows. And so then when the nerve, when the vessel muscular system kind of has to micromanage this, when it thinks that your nervous system doesn't have, or like lacks some virtue, then you get sort of more controlled feeling, emotion, and so on.
movement, cognition, more neurotic, more anxious, et cetera, but more careful, basically. And so I would expect that the vessel muscular system, like, would be a lot more active in this second scenario, that you're sort of engaging a lot of muscular reflexes that are meant to sort of micromanage neural patterns.
Yeah, I think, to, to a large degree, I think sort of, uh, deep wellbeing comes from turning that system down and also leveling up your nervous system so that you can afford to turn that system down.
Yeah, there's a piece around building capacity, as well as openness. And what, what's come to mind for me is the, the framework of,
um, to me, by me, through me, and as me that are almost like increasing levels of openness or nervous system openness. And I love the idea of like a nervous system virtue as being reflective of to what degree is the vessel muscular system kind of clamping down.
And maybe there's also a kind of a top down, it's like bottom up and top down virtues. And the top down one is more of like, to what degree can you remain in a kind of curious, open,
loving, loving, even courageous awareness of the clamping that may or may not be happening. And it seems like there's, there's this interplay of these two systems happening at the same time.
Yeah, absolutely.
And I also think, I'm sort of very interested in sort of,
If you're aware of the, the clamping,
the lump,
like,
feel latches can you feel them when can you sort of create a menu option of okay some trauma
happened or like some some sort of very painful thing happened and now i feel like oh there's like
there's a pain in my heart and like this sensation that i i sort of connect with
maybe this could be a latch forming and then if i let it form i'll be more closed
uh maybe i can choose to just feel the pain sit with the pain accept the pain not create the latch
so what one two things come to mind one is um i have a very visceral kind of memory of that exact
experience i was kind of
like a year into a grieving process and i remember approaching this memorial bench
and this like these like waves of intensity kind of came through and at a certain point it felt
like something just like imploded internally and this huge amount of energy was released through me
and it didn't even it didn't even feel bad or it was almost more akin to ecstasy and rapture and
joy what do you think is happening there when this
you know
this torrent of energy is being released in the system and and and perhaps an even more challenging
question is like because i still don't have a good answer for this but like what what the heck
that energy? What is that experience that we have when these things happen, to the best of your understanding?
I suspect that if it's a discontinuous experience, that something happened and then this energy came and it was very intense, I would suspect that that would be a latch opening.
Another way to frame that is you gave enough evidence to your vasomuscular system that you could handle it. You could handle freedom in that matter.
That's interesting. It's almost like you have to show to your vasomuscular system that you are trustworthy of being able to have ownership or stewardship of this much capacity or this much energy.
Yes.
Interesting.
One question that Oshan Jaro shared, which I think is relevant to bring up here, is he had this sense that there's probably lots of priors and latches in our system, many of which are likely very useful.
What are the markers that differentiate between unhelpful or maladaptive latches versus those which are actually still serving us? Is there a distinction that you have there?
I would have to say that the…
The logic of the body is sometimes strange. That maybe there'll be some sense of, oh, I have to keep this muscle clenched or else something bad will happen. And then if you investigate, okay, well, what do I feel? What bad thing would happen if I released this? And then if you can successfully ask your body that and get a feeling and response.
Yes.
The answer might be kind of bonkers, might be nuts. And it's like, no, I don't have to worry about that body. But we do have to respect the body's logic too. I think to answer this question, I'm going to transition to this second thread.
Great. I was about to kind of bring us there as well. Let's get that.
Nice.
Yeah, yeah.
Perfect.
So a very simple story about…
um these these latches and we can say radical well-being is once again we're sort of born into
sensory chaos um everything is happening all at once and it's very confusing and we have
tons of predictioners and uh sort of to become functional in this uh the body sometimes kind of
gets a little greedy we can say or like uses the this very simple ancestral approach of uh finding
places to pinch uh it sort of
make
the rest of the system more stable and you know i i would expect
uh you know especially around the age of one and a half and had two years old and i think uh romeo
has talked about this as well but basically you know a lot of latches get get set up and
mostly they're very useful uh and i i think especially like we talk about the self horizon
in this
time frame and uh you know the the thing that the buddhists say so many bad things
about um but it's it's sometimes useful so very very useful generally yeah it's a
it's predictive it's defensible uh if you're sort of in some sort of adversarial social uh
interaction then like yeah you you have to have a certain sort of
you better have a self to be able to sort of maintain as invariant the things that are good for you to have.
But I mean, evolution is like this sort of reflexive clenching, sort of cringing into certainty, we can say.
And a clench and a cringe and a flinch, all kind of the same basic reflex, kind of, you can say, the
The first muscle reflex. It's the base. And it's sort of the reflex that the system is built from. That we find a safe pattern and we grab and we clench it and keep it. Or like we find something useful and we keep it that way.
And then, you know, okay, and we're two and we have a lot of these. We sort of have learned to grab this and we keep it and maybe we hold it tight enough that it latches on. And we grab this and we keep it and it latches on.
And then we grow up. And we use these in many, many circumstances.
And maybe often they're helpful and sometimes they prevent us from, you know, our sort of full freedom. But they help us survive.
Then we can say, and we can phrase this in terms of personal development or just, you know, you hit, you know, 2025 and you get a new toolset.
You get a toolset of high-level moves to the next level.
And then you can start to manage uncertainty.
And these moves are much more nuanced and careful and rich and multidimensional than the sort of plunge or like, you know, flinch into certainty.
And you can start sort of managing ambivalence and uncertainty with these sort of higher-level tools.
And we can talk about, you know, Keegan levels.
And we can Keegan 3, Keegan 4, Keegan 5, whatever.
Yeah. Just like one question there.
Do you think, and I imagine the answer is yes, what is the connection between like these latches and certain beliefs or, you know, people who have a tendency to go into binary thinking or to have a very low tolerance to be with uncertainty?
Do you think that that is almost like a correlatory latch in their system that is related to their inability to be with the uncertainty?
Sure.
It definitely could be.
I mean, it's going to be a little bit different in each circumstance.
But I could see that, yeah, I mean, if you have a latch on some felt sense, on some feeling, on some sort of small network, and then someone is talking about a concept that maybe touches on this pattern.
But it's like it would need.
Yeah.
That network to be holding a different pattern.
It's like you're holding a certain pattern and that maybe is has latched and it's basically a permanent part of your identity.
And you do very physically, physiologically.
You can't change that thought for as long as the latch is there.
It's like maybe you can like to instruct some complex.
A re-inclin of your nervous system.
where you can like uh act as
Yeah.
As if you can.
But it always sorts of collapses and like says, okay, like there's just no freedom there.
There's no it's not negotiable.
It's a physical thing.
And when someone's attention is pointed at something that is latched, that's actually a really unpleasant thing.
Because it's like, no, they like literally can't put their attention there.
It's latched.
The blood won't physically go there.
And so then you get sort of deflection, projection, many of these sort of psychological defense mechanisms.
And, you know, I think it's part of the challenge.
Being a human and living with other humans.
Like some things are just not easily negotiated.
They're more sort of held at a physical level rather than a useful psychological level.
Yeah.
I'm really curious to unpack a little bit more of the idea of attention basically being highly connected with blood flow in the system.
And I'm thinking of my friend Michael who has, he's an Alexander technique kind of practitioner.
And the idea of when we expand our awareness and we become aware of the space behind us, the sides of us, in front of us, there is this sense
of ease and effortlessness and relaxation. Is it really as simple, like is a lot of meditative practice, for example, in the beginning especially, just learning to direct blood flow around the body? Is it that simple?
I would expect that. Actually, this June, I had a conversation with someone who had done a lot of meditation, and he literally had to stop because there was this maybe too much blood flow.
Blood flow is kind of a lens of attention, and the more blood flow there is somewhere, then
the more differentially amplified that region of the brain is. He said he would just get this
sensation of this ball of blood in his head, and he just had to stop because he didn't know what was
going on, and he had to sort of lean into that. I think it's a rare occurrence. I don't think
people would question it. Yeah, yeah.
That brings me to, and maybe this will kind of bring us back towards the
enlightenment track that I'd love to speak to you about, but something that I was thinking
about yesterday as I was anticipating this conversation is, and I've had many people
ask me the question of like, what is qi or prana or energy in the system? From my kind
of lived experience, it almost seems as if there's two vectors. One is arousal energy,
which kind of is the energy that's going to be in the system, and the other is the energy that's going
chi prana which also has corresponding connections to nerve clusters in the central channel generally
for me higher arousal is more kind of head neck chest and heart and then lower arousal more belly
pelvic floor um that that kind of area and that also correlates to some degree with the jhanas
as well which which we haven't touched on yet um so yeah what is energy and and would you say
is the experience of because it seems like there is literal energy like volts of energy going
through the nervous system but then there's also our experience of that which it sounds like you're
saying is increased um blood flow into these areas sure it's a it's a great question uh
i think that uh i mean i'm sort of answering from a position of curiosity here uh
but i would say
that uh first of all i would expect that to understand energy in the body
we should have kind of a short list of the most electrically active cells
and in terms of you know what cells have the biggest polarity from
from inside to outside a negative charge inside and charge outside so and and also sort of
communication um and just kind of have
big of a splash they make in the
EM field when they fire, when they discharge.
And, I mean,
neurons have a very strong EM
signature, but
actually, heart muscle
has a stronger signature.
A much...
37 feet or something, I think the heart
sends out?
It's crazy. Somewhere between
4x to
10x, the magnetic
field of the brain.
Very, very strong.
And I would also say that
fascia and
collagen are
sort of very
electrically relevant
cells, or like
tissue types.
And so,
I'm not going to give
a full answer at this point.
Some things are still in the oven
and cooking, but
I would expect that
sort of
EM
if we understand this as
sort of
the shape of electrical charge
in the body
and the amount,
we might say,
roughly speaking,
if we could measure the voltage
potential, the differential
in charge between
the inside
and the outside of
I'm going to
punt and say the energy body.
Or like,
you know,
measure key parts in the brain,
like the inside of the brain,
the outside.
This came up in discussion with
Max Odeck,
but also, you know,
in the heart as well.
Basically,
the amount of voltage potential
may correspond with the
intensity of the experience.
And so, if you're having a very intense experience, there's probably a higher voltage of potential
between sort of your core and your outside.
And I mean, this would be very testable.
I would anticipate that this would sort of go down over age, with age, go up with some
sort of tense experiences, go up with psychedelics, go up when, I guess, this gets into the enlightenment.
So, yeah, let's go there.
And perhaps, like, where my curiosity, I have many curiosities, but the question's coming
up at the moment is, like, is there a difference between someone who has experienced, like,
an experience, let's say, abiding, kind of classical awakening, like, kind of their
default state is more or less in a non-dual state, versus being relatively free of latches?
Because I've met people who have, you know, have had that experience of being in non-abiding
awakening, but they still have nervous system challenges, let's say, and, like, things,
traumas will arise at the same time, but they're more able to kind of have a much greater
distance from it.
So what's your sense of the connection between the process and the journey of awakening versus
latches?
Sure.
Yeah, that's a good question.
And this should get back to this idea that there are multiple kinds of virtue, that we
can say it's, I don't know if it's a virtue, but it's a good thing, ultimately, all else
being equal.
Yes.
You know.
So, you are latches.
You have a near system.
It lets you feel more alive.
It lets you sort of access more cognitive, emotional freedom, behavioral freedom.
You can be anything.
You feel free.
Everything's on the menu.
Things are more vivid.
Probably time passes slower.
I mean, the benefits go on and on.
But.
You can have, you know, few latches in your system, relatively speaking, but yet be very
reactive.
You can, you can sort of have a nervous system, your vascular system doesn't trust, and you
get these sort of strong reactions and uncontrollable reactions.
And these are not exactly apples and oranges, because, you know, that they're like strong,
like, strong.
And, you know, reflexive, like, reflexive reactions often will lead to latches.
But if you sort of.
Focused your self development on opening latches, but not sort of toning down your reflexes
or not nervous system virtue, then you could kind of take this track of, well, yeah, few
latches.
But.
A lot of sort of.
Strong.
Reflexive.
InScripts.
sort of the, I want to say
InScripts.
idea that when you're
InScripts.
more tools, you can sort of use these high level approaches to
manage situations in ways that can sort of not require these
touches. However, if you've made it to 2025 30, whatever, you
basically just have this sort of foundation of latch networks.
And then sort of the the healing journey, we can say, or the sort of
more classical Buddhist approach as well involves Okay, let's let's open
these up and get my freedom back, basically. And I see this as a, like, I
think the Buddhist way is, is long, but it's not as long as the Buddhist
safe and good.
It's sort of
you trust the body
of
when to open. You're not sort of doing crazy drugs to try these open. I see the process of meditation as, I mean, first of all, okay, you have all these slashes, kind of hard constants in your nervous system, which we can call the self. And then, okay, you go to a very safe environment,
so a nice meditation hall. You have a teacher that you trust, and you kind of do the process. And maybe it takes some years, many retreats. You go on a two-month retreat, and you get symmetry. And basically, I think to dig into the technical process,
I can speak very narrowly and from a place of humility about an inspiration, we can say, in terms of the posthumous insight meditation. So, my teacher is Anthony Markwell. He describes it as you're present, you're not in the future, you're not the past, but you're in the present moment. You're inside.
You're in general. You're not trying to put your attention out there. You're in here. And then you're centered. And by centered, he means not trying to chase good feelings, not trying to run away from bad feelings.
And then, with this foundation, you try to develop a noting practice, where you sort of try to notice each sensation.
Often, you'll have to draw them out.
focusing on the breath and you inhale the rising and falling as well. And so you note
the sensation and then you try to know the sensation, you try to kind of fully feel the
sensation and you let it go and do with the next one. And to put this in a Bayesian frame
here, you're sort of, I mean, first of all, the safe environment says, okay, it's safe to
experiment a little bit here. And then with the noting practice, I mean, you're sort of dialing
down, all this practice dials down your vascular reflexes. You're not trying to
control your sensations. You're just trying to feel them. But then I think if you actually
follow through on this practice, you get really weird sensations, really sort of, you get to a
pretty strange place. And in a Bayesian frame, I think you're basically showing your nervous
system.
wildly out of distribution data. data, that it is absolutely failing to predict.
And then you're saying, okay, nervous system, you didn't see this coming. Like this, this is,
you're totally failing at predicting this, but maybe if you opened a few latches,
you could predict it. It wouldn't be out of distribution.
It would be, uh, sort of predictable and it's not trying to force these latches open, but it is
trying to tease, teasing. Yeah. It's like the, the Huxley's doors of perception, like the aperture
opens a few degrees more to let in even more of the, the, the chaos outside.
Right. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
And I think that, uh, I mean, in, in result,
you don't suddenly become a perfect person, but
by, by all accounts, it's a significant step change.
Yes. If you can kind of, and I, I think that there's like,
there's a lot of, it's, it's like that. Uh, I think it's toast. I quote, um,
all happy families are alive.
Like all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way.
can kind of adapt it to nervous systems and say, all unhappy nervous systems are unhappy
in their own ways.
And it can take many, many, many years until people can even begin a recognizable meditative
path.
And maybe that's their particular set of latches that they have to work through and their reflexes
and so on.
But then it's this funnel where things become more and more similar as you're sort of digging
into these sort of nigh-universal latches that almost everyone has.
One curiosity I have, internal family systems is becoming increasingly popular,
certainly in the circles that I'm in.
And I'm wondering if what Dick Schwartz labels as the protector parts, like the firefighters,
et cetera.
Is he just describing different types of latches that we're then able to kind of have a dialogue
with and we experience as being like two parts in tension?
I might suggest that he's not necessarily describing different kinds of latches,
but different kinds of reflexes.
Different kinds of vasomuscular reflexes.
There's going to be a pretty wide spectrum of reflexes.
There's going to be a set of strategies to sort of reduce uncertainty.
Respiratory chair.
Yeah.
And those could be things like the developmental reflexes that like the Landau reflex.
We kind of learned these in our breathwork training that sometimes can become, what's
the word?
Basically just like stuck and incomplete.
And then again, through this process, they can be completed.
So it seems like there's both incomplete reflexes and latches.
And those are two separate but related things.
Yeah.
I mean, it's interesting to dig into that and to what degree are they fully separate
or could be overlapping.
So one example is like if I turn a burner on and start cooking something, I'll hold
something in my nervous system until I turn the burner off.
Yeah.
I'll be like, okay, I got to remember this.
Like I have to burn it off.
And it's like very useful to do that.
I've forgotten that many times.
It's in my wife's frustration.
Yeah.
I think that like step one in exploring this is like respecting the body of like, okay,
there's some logic of what it does.
And so, yeah, like I sort of naturally reflexively hold this.
And then I turn the burner off.
I can let go of that thing, whatever that I'm holding, some tension.
And then I can go about the next steps.
But some things I would expect that you never get that release.
And you just kind of hold.
And there's no catharsis.
There's no closure.
There's no
Now just kind of some sort of a held thing.
You're in process.
You're in the middle of something.
You're holding some state.
You're holding some context.
And sometimes that may just be a muscular thing.
And that sort of regenerates when you wake up and so on.
But sometimes that might get physically latched, like with a bad breakup or something.
So yeah, I suspect that there's some of that.
If you can never get closure, then maybe your body just latches it and says, okay, let's
move on.
Just treat it constantly.
Got it.
So slight tangent, but I've heard you mention the role of metabolic health in this as well.
And I've recently been listening to some of Dr. Jack Cruz, who is a very controversial
figure.
But he has some interesting ideas around.
He's a very controversial figure.
He thinks that mitochondrial cells emit low levels of UV light and that sunlight also
plays a crucial role.
In your model, what is the role of metabolic health in the encouragement of latches to
release?
Sure.
Yeah, that's a great question.
Metabolic health I've really been getting
into, and I think it's at the core of so much in health. And if you don't have energy, then you start to fall apart. And if you do have energy, like this is the right beat stuff that he has a very nice quote, as energy flows through tissue, order accumulates. And it's just that this flow of energy allows us to maintain ourselves.
And to accumulate more order. Now, I think that metabolic health and vasocomputation are
intimately linked. Because like the sort of latch solution, then okay, muscle can sort of
be issued sort of freely cycling. And it takes a lot of energy,
to freely cycle takes a lot of fuel. And, and actually, the contracted state is the
metabolically insufficient state. If you like rigor mortis comes from, okay, you ran out of ATP.
So yeah, really kind of a little counterintuitive. But so it actually,
you know, in in one formulation, this and the details are a little complex, but it takes more
energy to relax than that. And so, you know, it's, it's a little bit of a, it's a little bit of a,
you know, it's a little bit of a, you know, it's a little bit of a, you know, it's a little bit of a,
that's interesting. That's really interesting. I mean,
that that applies to a lot of like stressed out type A people who struggle with relaxing.
Totally. And I would also say, yeah, yeah. This, this idea of metabolic health too. Like,
when the body is sort of bumping into metabolic insufficiency. When it's saying, okay, basically,
we have rolling gratis.
here uh in the body that one of the one of the core moves that it can do is it can sort of
go from like this this muscle freely cycling state and it can just latch that muscle it then
it doesn't have to spend energy to to hold things open or hold things shut it can just say okay
let's set this lock now maybe it's not perfect maybe it's not ideal but we'll we'll deal with
that later um it's cheaper because we can just sort of not have to pay the muscle
and so i expect that you know if if you're and then if it's sort of latched pretty tight
it's hard to get blood into the muscle
the tissue and the blood would sort of you'd need the blood to pay for the metabolic cost
of releasing the lat so it's right right right yeah that's such a fascinating insight that it
takes more energy to be tense than it does to relax right that's that's incredible so i mean
if someone is is really into sort of
healing trauma release meditation all these things i think metabolic health is just going
to be very centrally important that i mean you can you can sort of uh to to create the conditions
for release uh it really helps if you're sort of above the waterline in terms of okay you you have
more energy than than you absolutely need you can afford it and you can afford it and you can afford
to uh that the body can kind of feel oh yeah like maybe i need to keep that slouch for this reason
but at least metabolically speaking i can afford to relax and so then then at least you have
the possibility of release whereas i think if if you're metabolically insufficient um
i think basically you know you get a lot of random micro spasms in your vasomuscular system
and you know this is a probably very important yeah it um it speaks to or reminds me of like
the dieta kind of before ceremonies that is traditionally practiced um are there any specific
um supplements or things that you think are supportive for people listening who might be
engaged in in this type of work and might be curious like how do i increase my metabolic
health and how can that also be measured is there some there's some objective way of doing that
or is there some way of measuring that sure yeah the the best measurement um so i mean my my thought
tends to go to the thyroid and markers of thyroid health.
And the sort of mainstream way to do this is measuring TSH and T3, T4, etc.
But the repeat crowd, which I would include myself in that, says that actually measuring
your body temperature when you wake up is actually an even...
It's practiced in Ayurvedic lineages as well.
Nice. Yeah. Nice. And so just kind of tracking that over time would be great.
In terms of metabolic health, I would say that most of the low-paying fruit, so as in everything in life,
most of the low-paying fruit is in the form of stop eating yourself.
And so I think it's mostly about removing things from your diet, from your environment,
things that are... I think that I sort of buy the repeat view that
people used to have much more active metabolisms, and now we've sort of become
like body heat is I think
I think a full degree Fahrenheit lower now than I was in 1870 or something.
And I think that it's sort of the iceberg meme where you have the surface and then the
next level, and you can keep going pretty far down metabolic metabolic health rabbit hole.
Yeah.
oils so it's sort of this idea that um oils that are generally made from seeds um are not
particularly healthy uh they have forms of fat that are very reactive easy to oxidize
and like humans are like for for cows you know whatever they eat uh they have four stomachs
their remnants with with these four stomachs and then the bacteria in the stomach um like turns
whatever fat that they eat into sort of cow fat uh iron such as fat and so on
humans don't have four stomachs
whatever forms of oil we eat we put into ourselves pretty much as is so it's not like
proteins where we we eat something we break it down into amino acid building blocks and then
we build proteins we need it's that we just grab a fat molecule and we use it
and so if these fat molecules are um
um
particularly uh
not ideal we could say uh if they're reactive if they break down in light if they uh
are easily oxidized um if they aren't a good fit for for what we need then slowly
we rebuild ourselves out of these sub substandard fat molecules so fat quality is important in ways
that protein
i mean for protein it's just you know get enough amino acids and uh you know there's
are you that glycine is especially important and so on but for fat it's really
you know you you become what you eat and the seed oil hypothesis is that um unsaturated fat and
and especially polyunsaturated polyunsaturated fat or the the acronym is poof polyunsaturated fatty
acid uh is particularly unhealthy and uh there's a lot of voices like very loud voices on on both
sides that uh you know if you ask the the american heart association they'll say oh
yeah
you know uh unsaturated fat is better than saturated fat and i think that's deeply wrong
and i think that um like if you want to focus on metabolic health
uh a simple thing like replacing canola
oil or corn oil or soybean oil or these sort of mainstream vegetable oils with coconut oil.
That's a great book.
Coconut oil is almost entirely saturated rather than proof.
It's interesting that, almost maybe ironic, that a lot of meditation retreats,
they will serve their food with seed oils.
I've been to many where that's the case.
It seems maybe very counterproductive.
Yeah.
And I think that's going to be surprisingly important.
I think there's a real space to open up for a retreat center that is sort of like pro-med
bald health, like explicitly this is the priority.
If step one is not eating seed oils, there's many, many, many steps.
But you can just go down the list.
Yeah.
Fascinating.
Well, another kind of switching gears slightly topic that we briefly spoke about in California
was polyvagal theory.
And you shared that polyvagal theory is likely useful, practically useful, but kind of wrong
in interesting ways.
But I don't think we have time to kind of unpack what you meant by that.
So I'm curious, in what ways do you think polyvagal...
What does polyvagal theory get right?
And what does it do?
Was it kind of not quite...
Was it Mr. Markham?
Yeah.
So I mean, the vagus nerve, it's kind of the wandering nerve, it's called, and sort of
travels throughout, up through the spine and I think by one ear.
Yep.
And yeah, like vagal tone is, I would expect, centrally important throughout.
I think that really...
And then there's the sort of frame of...
Okay.
There's this very tonal and parasynthetic tone and kind of the side of the body.
The audio has just gone kind of fuzzy and...
Oh okay.
How is this?
That sounds better.
Yeah.
Okay, cool.
That's great.
All right.
think that um you know there's there's a
lot to like in in this framing but it's not exactly a gears level approach i can't like there's
little actionable physical mechanism involved like you know it's this it's like this meme you know
is this polyvagal tone in the room with us right now i know and well
maybe not uh we can't measure it we can't um like uh we can't directly manipulate it we can
hypothesize that there is such a thing as polyvagal tone so i think i'm i'm most excited about um
approaches that eventually will cash out in something physical something measurable something
yeah me too me too and do you have a sense of um so one frame or concept from polyvagal theory that
i find useful is
this idea of the window of tolerance and also that we have they call it um dorsal shutdown
it's kind of like one reactive mode and then like sympathetic overwhelm is kind of the other
reactive mode when we're we're outside of the window of tolerance do you have a sense of
what might be happening there and and is it connected to latches in in any in any way
short answer is i'm not sure i i need to do my research there yeah okay um it it seems like
the system almost get there's there's almost like too much energy in the system and it could be you
know connected to an emotion um and when when this when the energy reaches what you mentioned earlier
was like a temperature threshold then it tends to have like a protective reactive reaction which
can either be to kind of like withdraw and go numb and collapse and shut down or it's like
be aggressive and and attack but it seems to be connected with the temperature idea that you that
you mentioned earlier yeah and
i mean just in general like there's there's kind of a very odd trade-off in the nervous system where
we will almost like somewhat reliably for pain and failure over uncertainty and ambivalence
and like sometimes this manifests as like oh you sort of act to collapse the uncertainty
and destroy the situation yeah um and
like, why did you do that? That's not optimal, but we,
honestly really hard to tolerate uncertainty.
And is that because we are wired to minimize prediction errors in our system?
I would say so.
Beautiful. Well, I had one other question from, I think this was from Steven from
the Jhanas or Jhana Tech. How has your work and theories been received in kind of the
broader community? Have you had any interesting pushback from smart people also in theoretical
neuroscience?
Yeah. So I think that people seem cautious and very curious. So I was talking with
Michael Levin last year and had a good chat about how maybe this kind of distributed stress
optimization could extend to his work. And I think people kind of want this to be true. And
like, are kind of looking and saying, okay, well, this is a nice, clean story. What's the next step?
And what's the next step after that? And I'm kind of in the position of, well, there's a lot to do.
One of me and I kind of want to to tell them more, like, the more full story first before I sort of
get into anything.
Very, very empirical.
But I'm I guess trying to see if some outside groups will test this sort of density differential
or double orienteering.
ultrasound to find latches and so on.
So I guess the feedback that I've got has actually all been positive, which tells me
that maybe I need to be a little bit more aggressive at finding the feet of star.
And I guess just to give the larger context, so vessel computation parallels the work
of Moore and Cowell.
They have this 2007, 2008 paper, The Hemodural Hypothesis.
They don't talk at all about latches, though.
They just talked about, okay, like blood flows.
It seems to adjust the gain of neurons.
And the latch bridge mechanism specifically seems to be the physiological feature that
neuroscience forgot, that there's really no sort of sense in the neuroscience literature
that this could be a deeply regulatory mechanism.
In a computational sense, like this could regulate computation.
And it's sort of building this no man's land that, okay, look, there's this sort of sense
that blood flow is sort of important.
And like Moore and Cowell show that, or I think they have Moore and Cowell, and then
there's some follow-up papers that say that changes in blood flow actually precede changes
in neural activity.
And it's not that.
That's fascinating.
Yes.
It's not that neurons do stuff and then the blood comes to pay for it.
Yeah.
It's the blood arrives first and then neurons change.
And I mean, I would have imagined that neurons travel faster than blood flow, but I guess
that it's still possible that the blood flow arises and then the neuronal changes happen.
Right.
I mean, that just seems like such a huge.
Yeah.
Insight that you'd think that would be more widely shared or known in like, that was the
first time I'd heard that.
Right.
Yeah.
That's wild.
Yeah.
And the second thing that I'd say about this is like, I'm pretty optimistic and it's sort
of, so I am learning how deeply political academic science is.
And I kind of, you know, it's.
Oh.
Yeah.
And I've said about that, but I would say that I'm very optimistic that like this sort
of free energy principle, active inference, sort of sense
that, well, we have predictions and minimizing prediction error.
It's like the nervous system is a prediction machine and minimizing prediction error can
be done through making better predictions.
And it can also be done through making predictions and then acting in the world to make them
true.
And I'm incredibly optimistic about vasocomputation offering the physical substrate for the predictions.
The clench and like a clench in some network is a prediction that you're sort of holding
something constant.
You will naturally act in the world.
To make that true, to sort of relieve stress on this.
And sometimes you latch a prediction and then you might call that something like a strongly
held prior about the world.
And I think the free energy principle active inference framework is this absolutely beautiful
mathematical structure.
It's, you know, I won't say perfect, but it's magnificent.
But it doesn't talk about anatomy.
It's, you know, you can take a look at this and well, can we see the prediction errors
on EEG on fMRI and like there are some like loose approaches to do that.
But I'm very optimistic that well actually it's vascular tension.
Every piece of vascular tension.
He's implicitly prediction and every prediction we can find in vascular tension.
And I think that this could potentially take the framework from sort of something that
really smart neuroscientists talk about to wow, like let's scan someone and find their
latches and like we can figure out exactly what their nervous system is predicting.
Totally.
And one of the thought experiments that I had the other day was like, so I studied innovation
prizes and economics like a long time ago.
And I was wondering like, you know, if someone were to put up a half a million dollar prize,
what do you think the specific, the most useful innovation would be that would enable the
blood flow tracking in smooth muscle reflex to exist?
And, you know, it could be called like the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the,
the body scorecard prize.
Like, but I do, I mean, I feel like this would be insanely, insanely useful if yes.
So, so let's say like reset, like a team of innovators, people came to you, 20 people
that like, okay, Mike, we're gonna, we're gonna do this thing.
What, what, what direction would you point them in?
Like what would be the most useful thing that they could design that would be able to scan
people?
Sure.
Nice.
Yeah.
Great question.
So I would, I would frame this in terms of distinct steps and step one would be create
a blood flow of a body and and then like step 1.5 would be okay.
And then like do PTSD sufferers have you know, dropouts on this map and do you know, highly
accomplished
Yeah.
Meditators have light spots on this map that where everyone else has a dark spot, they
have normal flow.
And then I think step two would be, well, can you, can you induce like, you know, can
you take something like ultrasound, which, uh, I'm told, um, like the effects of ultrasound
on neurons.
Um, there are.
There are various stories about how that works and the stories are kind of loose and perfect.
Um, that yeah, ultrasound has, uh, effects on populations of neurons, but it's not a
precision thing of changing, uh, neurons in exactly this way or that, but that said ultrasound
seems even better.
Uh, or like using muscle cells as, as targets, like the there of how it
affects muscle cells is more clear. It can be more precise when used to target muscles. And so, you know, there's all this interest in focused ultrasound and its magnificent technology. But I just think that basically everyone is targeting the wrong kind of cell.
And, you know, I think once we collectively realize that or, you know, certain groups realize that, I think we could be off to the races in terms of okay, well, if we can make a map, can we start popping these latches and then entity the safety protocol for okay, well, sometimes these latches exist for a reason. And like, you know,
maybe like the buddhist process grows different kinds of virtue where you need to have in place
before you uplatch so like there's not just the buddhist process but like um yeah just like
the emotional fluidity stuff and and just kind of nervous system yeah i i mean that that would be
that would be my dream in that in the same way that you can go to hospital today and
they'll tell you if you have a broken leg or you can do a scan and you see if you have the early
signs of a cancer tumor like you could also you know have a scan of your blood flow and see where
are these like go latch hunting like you said and find out where the latches are and then your
kind of somatic work could be so much more focused and targeted to that particular area
obviously with all the caveats of creating safety and ideally having someone to hold space with you
while you do this exploration but i mean i think that's the thing that i'm trying to do is i'm
would really put somatic work kind of on the map and have mainstream scientists and people take it
seriously because right now people seem to say well this thing seems to work but because we
don't really understand it we're not really going to integrate it into our paradigm so we're just
going to leave it over here uh yeah it feels incredibly exciting to me nice yeah and then
yeah it's then it's also like 11 leveling up as researcher as practitioner dealers whatever
and like it's it's not the case that just kind of popping a latch is always a good thing and
only good things will happen if we do that um i think you know for example cyclic shows that well
sometimes good things happen and sometimes people have a have a rough time um but i think it's like
this is i find a promising way for the field to grow yeah i i feel like the the people that don't
have a good time so to speak it's more because the latch is like forced open as opposed to a more
gentle kind of invitational approach yeah yeah yeah beautiful um is there anything else that
is alive for you that you'd like to share or talk about before we begin to begin to close
uh i think we covered a lot
there's
uh yeah i guess uh nothing that can't wait until part two okay beautiful well i have a few quick
rapid fire questions and then we'll uh we'll wrap this up the first question is if you were to
define an emotion in relatively simple terms what might you say i would define an emotion as
a low frequency resonance in the earth which
essentially functionally acts as a bayesian prior for all the the higher frequency uh resonances
in the body what is one idea in neuroscience that you disagree with or you think is given
too much weight basically every single way we're using neuroimaging
i could go down the list but but it's all like good good technology but oh well
sometimes uh but i think that um we need better sort of foundational stories
what is one book or paper that you've read that disproportionately impacted your thinking
the free and free principle by firston it was a very brilliant paper what is one question or
direction that is very alive in your research currently um how to
how to
how to heal people and i i think that's kind of uh kind of obvious but um i just think it's
it's not too obvious to repeat what is your heart's greatest aspiration or
vision that you have for your research and your work in the world for the years and decades to come?
So I'm going to give a slightly longer answer to that.
Please.
Research tends to be... It's sort of in three families right now. There's the first
branch, which is my philosophical research. And so I wrote this book, Reciproqualia.
Probably the big result from the book was the symmetry theory of valence.
And I think that that's going to be very important for sort of,
quote unquote, solving consciousness. And I talked about that in a recent paper in the summer.
It was kind of entitled, A Paradigm for AI Consciousness. So the first branch is very
metaphysical. What is consciousness? What is pleasure?
The second branch was more thermodynamic. It's narrow kneeling. It's sort of taking a look at
music, meditation, psychedelics, has increasing energy parameter, the temp parameter of the
brain of the nervous system. And then sort of implications thereof.
And the third big branch now is vasocomputation.
It's, okay, maybe there's a very simple systems decomposition
where we take this complex thing
and it's actually made of two much, much simpler things.
There's the nervous system
and then there's the vasomuscular regulation of this.
And so setting aside the second branch for now,
I would say that I really want to make sure
we're sort of headed into a future
with lots of good consciousness,
lots of good quality, we could say.
So for the first branch,
these are the foundational question of
what is the domain of value?
And if consciousness is the domain of value,
then like,
okay,
what is good?
What is a good feeling?
What is bad feeling?
What makes things pleasant?
What makes things unpleasant?
I think it's going to be important for the future
in ways that I haven't really expressed yet,
but maybe kind of obvious.
And then for this branch, vasocomputation,
I think systematizing the healing of trauma
and sort of not just getting people up to normal,
but how far can we get them past normal?
And I think classical Buddhist enlightenment
is an absolutely beautiful existence proof and a recipe for,
yeah, like really good states exist.
And then the question is, well,
how do we very respectfully,
and carefully get people there?
Beautiful, beautiful.
Mike, this has been such a pleasure.
I'm so, so grateful that you took the time
for this conversation.
And I'm deeply excited for the impact
and the ripple effects for your curiosity
and for this work.
And I hope that there are researchers
and people with means who listen to this
and they're like, okay,
these ideas need to be shared more broadly.
And I think that we need to apply more resources
into these directions because to my sense,
this feels like one of the most important questions
or problems that we could be tackling.
So I'm really grateful to you
for just following your curiosity down so many rabbit holes
and coming back with some just truly beautiful theories
and ideas.
So thank you.
Thank you so much for your time.
Yeah, my pleasure.
Thank you.
Where can listeners, where can they find you?
Read, where would be the best place for listeners
to kind of learn more about your work
and to kind of read your papers in more depth?
Everything is available on my website,
opentheory.net.
And you can click best of if you want some highlights.
Perfect.
So I love to close with a line from Rilke.
He said, try to love the questions themselves
and live them now.
Perhaps you will then gradually without noticing it,
live your way into the answer.
And with that in mind,
what is the question that is most alive
in your consciousness
consciousness right now and what question might you leave our listeners with?
I think the question I have is, and I'm sorry to bring this up and not answer it,
but I think we build our reality, we build our inner world out of what we learn how to stabilize.
And how exactly does that stabilization happen in the nervous system? That's my question that I'm
answering right now. Well, I've opened enough latches to be able to sit with that uncertainty,
I think. Mike, thank you. Thank you so, so much. Really appreciate you and just
super grateful for this conversation. Thanks, Sean. It's my honor.
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Thanks for listening.