Mike Johnson on Vasocomputation

SummaryDr. Jessica Vellela is the first American-born woman to become an Ayurvedic Physician and practice independently in India. Prior to her nearly eight years of Ayurveda study she had an early career as a self-taught Data Architect. She founded Āyu Academy and now runs myĀyu, a one-on-one personalized Ayurvedic health program. In this conversation we cover the cosmology and metaphysics underlying Ayurveda, the tridosha system, pain as the cardinal symptom of vata, worked examples of the Ayurvedic diagnostic process, difficulties in assessment and communication, and why you shouldn’t eat fruit and milk together.Timestamps0:00:00 – Intro0:01:05 – What is Ayurveda?0:04:20 – Atma, rebirth, karma0:07:00 – The 60/30/10 model: body/mind/soul0:10:30 – A case study: digestive problems0:14:30 – Mind and body in Ayurveda0:17:55 – The ontology of pain in Ayurveda0:20:10 – Endogenous and exogenous disease0:24:40 – Dosha combinations and classifying pain0:28:10 – Diagnosing chronic pain example0:32:20 – How are some physical ailments solved mentally0:34:40 – Overdetermined physical explanations0:38:41 – Dizziness, nausea, tinnitus, and the doshas0:41:35 – LLM decision-tree triage0:47:10 – Measuring pain0:53:10 – MyĀyu and making Ayurveda accessibleLinksmyĀyu.com This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit essays.debugyourpain.com

Mike Johnson is a philosopher and neuroscientist working on the science consciousness. His major works include Principia Qualia (2016), Neural Annealing (2019), Vasocomputation (2023), and A Paradigm for AI Consciousness (2024). In this conversation we work through the three sub-hypotheses of vasocomputation, latches at multiple levels of resolution, Thomas Hanna’s sensory motor amnesia, John Sarno and chronic pain, active inference and Mike Levin’s nested agents, sub-agents as semi-sovereign regimes anchored in organs like the stomach and heart, and what kinds of evidence might ultimately confirm, or falsify, the theory. Timestamps0:00:00 – Intro0:01:30 – Physical signatures and cutting the Gordian knot0:06:25 – What is vasocomputation?0:10:15 – The latch mechanism, latch bridges0:14:20 – Role of the hippocampus, Hebbian reinforcement0:16:35 – Thomas Hanna and sensory motor amnesia0:19:30 – Physical and mental decoupling0:24:00 – “Grabbing” as the core human physical and mental movement0:26:15 – Treasure maps and maps with treasures, Sarno0:28:30 – Pain as allostatic imperative and bodily boundaries0:33:20 – Three types of latches0:38:00 – Piriformis release and voice-typing anecdotes0:43:45 – Agents vs priors, what is a subagent0:48:35 – Internal Family Systems0:52:00 – Active Inference0:59:15 – Semi-sovereign regimes1:05:30 – The stomach as the first brain, cognition as digestion1:11:00 – Only smooth muscles latch1:14:00 – Persistence of latches1:18:50 – Connecting to chronic pain1:21:10 – Performance envelopes, material science of tissue types1:23:40 – Fascia1:28:15 – Open problems in vasocomputation1:32:00 – The question gameLinksMike Johnson’s Website:opentheory.net“The Games of Life” talk: This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit essays.debugyourpain.com

Dr. Douglas J. Tataryn is a psychologist and researcher whose work spans hypnosis, emotion, chronic pain, meditation, and complementary medicine. He received his Ph.D. in clinical psychology in 1991 from the University of Arizona, then spent ten years as a research professor with the University of Manitoba, before entering private practice in 2001 to focus on his Bio-Emotive Framework. In this conversation we talk about a paper he wrote as an undergrad on the physiological basis of repression, why Doug still finds the triune brain model useful, the electrochemical case for meridian systems, how sadness moves through the body and what happens when it’s blocked, and three significant unpublished studies to which he hopes to finally return.Timestamps0:00:00 – Intro and Caveat0:06:00 – Writing the paper on repressed emotions0:09:40 – Muscle tension and cognition0:12:15 – How muscle tension suppresses emotion0:19:05 – Four core emotions and Doug’s triune brain framework0:22:05 – Defining emotion0:26:30 – Defending the usefulness of the triune brain model0:28:30 – Energy and meridians0:34:00 – Taoist ideas about qi, constriction, and emotional flow0:38:00 – Heart math and energetic transmission0:42:35 – Chronic pain from repressed emotion0:45:20 – Jhana as pain relief0:52:00 – The second arrow, pain asymbolia, and the affective component1:00:00 – The relaxation response1:02:55 – Why tension doesn’t always become chronic pain1:05:30 – How sadness moves through the body1:09:55 – Role of culture in expressions of pain1:15:00 – The emotional meaning of typing1:20:10 – Returning to unpublished research1:31:50 – Leaving and returning to academia1:37:00 – An offering on psychological interventions for the reduction of painLinks* Douglas J. Tataryn’s website* 1983 paper: A Physiological Basis for Repression* Interview on the Deconstructing Yourself podcast* Doug Tatryn’s Summer program on emotions This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit essays.debugyourpain.com

Gay Hendricks is a psychologist, somatic practitioner, and author of dozens of books including Conscious Loving and Conscious Breathing. After earning his PhD at Stanford and teaching psychology at the University of Colorado, Gay went on to develop his own approach integrating breathwork, movement, emotional awareness, and conscious relationship practice. In this conversation we talk about his entry into somatics through a painful Rolfing session, his connection to Sarno’s anger-pain model, how fear and sadness require different approaches than anger, and Gay even leads a live demonstration of the “yes breath”. Timestamps0:00:00 – Intro0:01:05 – Tashi Lhunpo Monastery0:03:30 – Buddhism: Tibetan, Theravada, TM0:05:40 – Feldenkrais, Reich, and Rolf0:08:30 – John Sarno and the anger-pain connection0:14:10 – Working with sadness vs fear0:16:00 – Tension in breathwork0:18:35 – Reich vs Feldenkrais, grounded breathwork0:23:05 – Live breathwork demonstration0:29:55 – Thirty years of radiance0:34:55 – Live body language reading0:39:20 – Learning how to see0:42:35 – Tuning your instrument0:46:20 – Research, science, and learning from individual cases0:50:20 – Wonder0:54:20 – Getting into altered states of consciousnessYou can find Gay Hendricks at his website and check out his books, Conscious Loving and The Big Leap. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit essays.debugyourpain.com

Simon Cox is a scholar and practitioner whose work traces the history of the subtle body across Taoist, Tibetan, medical, alchemical, and Western esoteric traditions. He studied history at Oxford, spent six years training in a Taoist context at Wudang Mountain, and later wrote his dissertation at Rice on the genealogy of the subtle body. In this conversation, we talk about internal maps of the body, Taoist and Tibetan somatic cartographies, the challenges of translating contemplative practice across cultures, and how different ways of inhabiting the body may open into different experiences of reality. Toward the end, we touch on the ontology of pain, cultural differences in interoception, and embodied cognition.Timestamps00:00:00 – Intro and Background Context00:03:50 – Development of Internal Maps00:08:00 – The Neijing Tu and Practice-Based Internal Cartography00:11:30 – Porting Taoist Practice to the West00:14:00 – Qigong, Neigong, and Modern Chinese Practice Categories00:17:20 – Taoist Diversity and Tibetan Subtle Body Maps00:21:10 – Medical vs. Spiritual Maps00:25:10 – Paradigms, Tibetan Medicine, and the Three Turnings00:27:30 – Two Unsatisfying Views of the Subtle Body00:32:20 – Novel and Inevitable Syncretisms 00:35:00 – Historicizing and Genealogies00:38:10 – Reality, Truth, and Embodiment00:40:00 – Awareness, Inhabiting the Body, and Taoist Theories of Mind00:43:20 – The Mind Outside the Body00:46:00 – Fate, Ancestors, Purpose, and Lines of Affinity00:49:00 – Polyontology, Political vs. Policing, Frequency Resonance00:54:20 – Esalen, Western Somatics, and Theory vs. Practice00:56:50 – Paradigm Shift, New Materialisms, Distributed Agency/Intelligence01:00:50 – Ontological Pluralism and Eurocentrism01:05:30 – Mutual Vulnerable Knowing and Minds Knowing Minds01:09:30 – How Scientists and Technologists Can Contribute, and The Ontological Turn01:15:10 – Embodied Mathematicians01:20:00 – Technology with Different Ontologies, Tsien Hsue-shen, Cybernetics01:26:30 – A Genealogy of Pain01:31:20 – Ontology of Pain, Christian Suffering vs. Buddhist Suffering01:35:00 – Biocultural Disease and the Social Transmission of Pain01:40:00 – Simon’s Current Projects: Esalen, Harvard, Energy, and Qi01:43:10 – Eugene Gendlin and Therapeutic ProcessExcellent interview with Simon Cox on The Integral Stage where they actually talk more about the subtle body as a term.The Subtle Body: A Genealogy by Simon Cox This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit essays.debugyourpain.com

A couple of months ago, I gave a presentation the set point theory of chronic illness, it was an attempt to use a new language, the language of cybernetics to shift out of this mind body duality when talking about illness.The inspiration for this presentation was a paper by. Dr. Tom Pollock and Mike Levin. fter reading the paper and giving the presentation, I decided to reach out to the lead author, uh, Tom Pollock and have a chat. This conversation was the result. He’s a neuropsychiatrist based in the uk. We talk about his experience with a.Which doctor and how that partly inspired, uh, section in the paper. And more broadly on the role of, of experience and challenges when wading into this field where there’s a clear interface between the mind and the body. I hope you enjoy.Dr. Thomas Pollak is a neuropsychiatrist based in the UK who works at the interface of immunology and mental health. We talk about his encounter with a Balinese witch doctor, the cybernetics of chronic illness, and why psychiatry needs a more dynamic model of inflammation.Episode Outline — Dr. Thomas Pollak: Reboots, Resets, and the Immunopsychiatry of Stuck States00:00:00 Introduction and the Set Point Theory of Chronic Illness00:01:30 The Witch Doctor Story00:08:00 Humiliation, Shame, and One-Pointedness as Therapeutic Tools00:12:00 A Room With a Dead Body00:15:30 Meditation Practice and the Constructionist Turn in Neuroscience00:18:30 The Tantric Phase of Science00:24:00 Reset vs. Learning vs. Unlearning00:30:00 Safety Behaviors, Canalization, and Narrowing of State Space00:37:00 Long COVID, Interface Disorders, and the Two-Camps Problem00:43:00 The Role of Awareness in Healing00:45:00 What Kind of Awareness Is Therapeutic?00:49:00 Neurostimulation and Embodied Experience00:50:00 Autoimmunity and Psychosis: The Main Research ThreadYou can find Dr Pollak’s substack here. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit essays.debugyourpain.com

Elena Lake was a math major at MIT who later transitioned from her software engineering career into bodywork. We talk about her journey, and the role of perception in bodywork.Episode Outline — Elena Lake: From Engineering to Regenerative Touch00:00:00 Introduction and Early Background 00:01:00 Trauma, Mental Health, and Limits of Talk Therapy 00:02:00 First Encounters with Touch and Somatic Relief 00:03:30 Massage School as a Foundation, Not a Revelation 00:10:00 Qualities of Touch, Trance States, and Sensory Depth 00:12:00 Advanced Touch Perception 00:14:00 Lineages of Somatics and Extreme Sensitivity 00:18:00 Developing “Regenerative Touch” 00:21:00 Awareness, Attention, and Where People Live in Their Bodies 00:23:00 Practice as Research and the Role of Presence 00:25:00 Models of Pain: Continuity, Tangles, and the Camel’s BackYou can find out more about Elena through her website.If you’re convinced of the role of the nervous system in perpetuating pain and other symptoms but are having weak results pursuing it on your own, feel free to reach out to [email protected]. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit essays.debugyourpain.com

This past weekend, inspired by a recent preprint from Thomas Pollak, Mike Levin, et al, I gave a talk on how cybernetic models (predictive processing, dynamical systems, homeostasis/allostasis) are a hugely powerful lens to understate the current epidemic of the recent rise in chronic illness.You can watch the video while looking at the slides here, or read the essay version below:Here’s the essay version (generated by Claude from my transcript). It is less good than the talk, but faster to read:Chronic Illness as a Stuck Set PointIn 1910s Vienna, one in five young men had syphilis. The medical community was helpless—a deep nihilism pervaded as they watched patients die from this bacterial infection that would spread across the body with devastating mortality rates.Then a German psychiatrist noticed something strange: some of his late-stage syphilis patients got better after getting more sick. Specifically, after contracting malaria.In what seems like utter insanity in hindsight, Julius Wagner-Jauregg began drawing blood from his malaria patients and injecting it into those dying from syphilis. There was even a criminal investigation involved.But here’s the thing—it worked. Even though 10-15% died from the malaria, a larger fraction survived what was previously a death sentence. Wagner-Jauregg won the Nobel Prize in 1927.Nobody could explain why it worked. Medical research today still does not have a biomechanistic account. But it clearly worked.The Wrong Level of AbstractionThis shouldn’t make sense within the biomedical model that dominated (and still dominates) medicine. How do you give someone something that makes them more sick, yet they become better?The biomedical reasoning is straightforward: diseases have specific causes, specific dysfunctions. Diphtheria —> Kill the bacterium. Clogged arteries —> Widen them. We find and fix the broken part of our biomechanical bodies.But the malaria example isn’t unique. If you look at long COVID and other post-viral syndromes, there are well-documented cases of secondary infections leading to resolution. In the case of MDMA trials for PTSD, the drug doesn’t remove some “PTSD toxin” but somehow resets the entire system. In my own research, we have increasingly hard to ignore evidence about the widespread efficacy of nervous system reprocessing resolving chronic pain.This is still the dominant approachIn 2021, Congress gave NIH $1.5 billion to research long COVID—all focused on biochemical pathology, systematically excluding researchers studying nervous system approaches.Bodies as Problem-SolversWhat if we stopped seeing the body as a collection of chemical pathways and started seeing it as a multi-scale collective intelligence solving problems at different layers—from cell to organ to your whole being?Your body wants to keep you in a range of safe values. Try this experiment—on your next exhale, stop yourself from inhaling. Feel that rising tension, that panic. Your throat tightens, blood vessels dilate, emotional systems activate. That’s the homeostatic impulse, happening across multiple scales simultaneously.Normally, you breathe at 13-15 breaths per minute. If you start jogging, that set point shifts higher. If you work a chronically stressful job, your breathing becomes shallow and fast, and paradoxically, tissue oxygen can decrease over time.The key insight here is that sometimes our bodies get stuck in these maladaptive states.Try clenching your abs like you’re bracing for impact. Notice how hard it is to breathe? Now relax. Feel the difference—the ease, the fuller breath, the sense that more of your body is available. If you walked around with clenched abs all the time (as many do under chronic stress), your breathing would be persistently altered. You might even forget you’re clenching at all.The Reset MechanismRemember when your computer freezes and nothing works except turning it off and on again? That’s the metaphor driving this new understanding of chronic illness.We already use resets in medicine without calling them that. During a heart attack, emergency responders shock the heart with high voltage—not to teach it the proper rhythm, but to create a perturbation that allows the tissue to recalibrate. Fecal transplants work similarly—overwhelming the sick person’s microbiome with healthy bacteria, then allowing repopulation in better proportions.Think of it like this: imagine illness and health as valleys in a landscape. In chronic illness, the valley walls are steep—it takes enormous energy to climb out. But during a reset, those valleys flatten temporarily. The body can move between states with less resistance.Maybe that’s what happened with Wagner-Jauregg’s malaria cure. Maybe that’s what’s happening when a secondary infection resolves long COVID, or when MDMA allows PTSD to lift, or when nervous system work dissolves chronic pain. The perturbation creates a window of plasticity where the system can reconfigure.What This ChangesThis isn’t just semantic reshuffling. If our bodies are intelligent problem-solving systems that can get stuck, then treatment becomes about creating the right conditions for reset—understanding not just the magnitude of perturbation needed, but the context before and after.The questions now are practical: What variables actually define these states? How does conscious attention affect plasticity? (There’s something here about how becoming aware of your body’s defensive patterns might itself flatten the landscape.) What makes a helpful reset versus a harmful one?We’re at the beginning of something. The patterns are here for us to explore. And for someone who spent months unable to type, watching my own pain system reset through understanding and careful perturbation, I can tell you—this paradigm shift matters.In four images: This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit essays.debugyourpain.com

We’ve known for decades about culture-bound syndromes that just seem so weird and only occur in a small subculture. Like men in South Central Asia who get the idea that they have semen loss and their semen loss is making them weak and tired... and we go ‘that’s crazy’. But how do we know that back pain isn’t our culture-bound syndrome?Today I’m talking with Dr. Howard Schubiner, who’s one of the creators of Pain Reprocessing Therapy (one of the most important and exciting new modalities for addressing chronic pain). We met at a conference in Boulder, and this conversation was a chance for us to explore how he got into this space and his stance on where it’s going.Dr Schubiner is one of the pioneers of modern pain science. After being a professor at Wayne State University for 18 years, he now directs, advises, and supports many of the key initiatives around understanding pain through this neuroplastic lens.Timestamps00:00:00 – Intro00:02:00 – Meeting Dr. John Sarno00:06:00 – From MBSR to Mind-Body Medicine00:13:00 – The Evolution of Somatic Tracking00:21:00 – Predictive Processing and the Brain’s Need for Certainty00:35:00 – The Cultural Epidemic of Pain Syndromes00:38:00 – Long COVID and Neuroplastic Conditions00:43:00 – Healthcare System Reform Vision00:47:00 – The Future of Neuroplastic ResearchResources:* Howard’s book, Unlearn Your Pain, just had a Fourth Edition update.* Effect of Pain Reprocessing Therapy vs Placebo and Usual Care for Patients With Chronic Back Pain.* Correction: I mentioned anorexia and The Geography of Madness, but the correct book is Crazy Like Us. Here is a good book review.* All the Rage (Saved by Sarno) - documentary featuring Dr. Sarno* ATNS (Association for the Treatment of Neuroplastic Symptoms)Questions and comments welcome! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit essays.debugyourpain.com

If there is a sharp knife pressing into my hand, and let’s call it pain, if I resist, resist it, and hate it and want it gone, I stick the knife deeper in my hand.Try to push it away, okay. Deeper. Now if I relax my hand, okay, it’s a totally different experience. Now, this is like the ABC of dealing with pain. Not focusing on the pain, but focusing what you do against the pain. Because the general attitude of people is pain is the enemy. Pain is bad. Pain is the devil. When people are experiencing pain, they immediately contract and stop breathing. Those two actions push the knife more into the body because you take away the respiration, the person doesn’t breathe, or his body doesn’t have enough energy to deal with the pain.He contracts muscles, he blocks the energy flow in the body. Now the pain can only accumulate.” My guest today, Avi Grinberg, is a deep practitioner. He started out as a paramedic and traveled around the world to learn from different indigenous heals. I was particularly excited to talk to Avi because, in my own journey of exploring pain, I’ve come to a set of intuitions that’s hard to articulate about the role of awareness and how we generate the pain in our own way.When I saw Avi speak, I felt there was a deep connection that we were coming from the same place and seeing things, and so naturally I reached out to have a conversation. While I might not agree with all of Avi’s conclusions. I found a lot to learn from him in this conversation and I hope you will too.00:00:00 Introduction and Early Encounters with Healing00:04:00 “Most People Don’t Know How to Experience Pain”00:08:00 Pain Is Energy Seeking Completion00:12:00 Indigenous Healers in the Middle East and South America00:36:00 Demonstration of the Exercise: Relaxing Into Pain00:44:00 Trying Hard Breeds Chronic Tension01:04:00 The Danger of “Easy Healing”01:17:00 Closing ReflectionsGrinberg method websitehttp://www.grinbergmethod.com/YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@GrinbergMethod This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit essays.debugyourpain.com