Meet the Man Reimagining Neuroscience: Michael Edward Johnson
Jonny Miller (00:01.265)
the real -time audio.
Mike Johnson (00:02.798)
Sure.
Jonny Miller (00:07.786)
Pause upload and I'll do the same on your side as well. There we go. This makes the conversation easier. It might mean that you need to stay on for another 15 minutes at the end just so it finishes uploading.
Jonny Miller (00:26.1)
Okay, great. Alright, well, welcome to the Curious Humans podcast, Mike. It is a real pleasure to have you here.
Mike Johnson (00:38.488)
Thanks, Johnny. I'm glad to be here and it was really great to meet you this summer too.
Jonny Miller (00:44.949)
Hmm, how are you feeling in this precise moment in three words?
Mike Johnson (00:50.892)
Hmm
Mike Johnson (00:55.031)
A little nervous?
centered and warm.
Jonny Miller (01:06.397)
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?
Mike Johnson (01:20.822)
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 it worked really well.
And in terms of just curiosity, I guess I was omnivorous that I read literally anything. Dictionaries, travel brochures, yeah, just anything.
Jonny Miller (02:06.697)
that fully tracks with my experience of you today. Well, so how did you, and I don't know the backstory here, but how did you find your way into theoretical neuroscience and co -founding Qualia Research Institute and the work that you're doing today with Open Theory? What's the arc of the journey there?
Mike Johnson (02:27.862)
Yeah, that's interesting question. So I helped my dad out with his sort of algorithmic market trading interest. So he's a farmer, he trades the Coloradans markets. I helped a little bit on that. And then, 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 I got really interested in sort of this question of pain and pleasure.
Jonny Miller (03:06.773)
Hmm.
Mike Johnson (03:26.208)
of what makes some things feel better than others. What is depression? What is happiness? Et cetera. And I was expecting I could find the right things to read. It take me a few months and I would sort of understand that. 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
So it took about seven years to sort of work through that and write a short book on that. So that's Principia Qualia, high in 2016. And from there, just kind of memed QRI into existence. And left it maybe two and a half years ago.
Since then, so I find 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 brain as well. So that kind of got into
Jonny Miller (05:37.049)
Mm
Mike Johnson (05:48.43)
different, I would say different theories of self -organization and sort of, you know, free entry principle and harmonics and whatnot as a blind sub -prime.
Mike Johnson (06:09.966)
Yeah, so I guess that's the super short version but I think
Mike Johnson (06:20.454)
When it gets down to it, this has been a very broad and personally exciting quest to understand. And if I can understand myself, then I can understand what kind of thing humans are in general.
Jonny Miller (06:38.443)
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 off hand 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?
Mike Johnson (07:23.435)
Right. So I think that a very important thing in, I guess you could say in the system of vassal 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 vassal muscular system. And both of these sort of
have a particular computational role. But in terms of the wind chime analogy, I think that essentially, there's just so much data coming in, information coming in, and sort of hitting our nervous system. And I think that 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 can can vibrate or resonate or 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 NURT system itself as this very sensitive set of chimes that as you sort of feel your environment, as information, as data kind of hits this system, it sort of hums in different ways. And then based on which
Jonny Miller (09:15.85)
Mm.
Mike Johnson (09:23.065)
resonances are present in the system and which resonances are absent in the system, you can get a feel for your environment.
And I think that we can tell a certain story like this in terms of how the brains, or 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
Jonny Miller (09:59.888)
Mm
Mike Johnson (10:05.409)
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.
Jonny Miller (10:20.9)
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. 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 from Bandicoq, but no one really understands the mechanism and as a consequence, practitioners like myself, it's been it's been very difficult to objectively track progress when it comes to somatic modalities because there aren't really before and after things besides subjective, I feel differently or I'm noticing less triggers, etc. So with that as context,
Perhaps as a jumping off point, could you share an overview of your principles of VASO computation and how you came to even discover it? Where did this emerge from in the first place?
Mike Johnson (11:29.273)
Sure, So there are many, 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 vascular muscular system. So all your blood vessels are 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 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, pretty good processing systems. And basically,
Jonny Miller (13:10.803)
Hmm. Okay.
Jonny Miller (13:19.95)
Mm
Mike Johnson (13:29.627)
If your nervous system shows that it cannot be trusted with its full range of freedom, the vasomuscular system will contract cutoff 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 20 or more in healthy tissue.
Jonny Miller (13:59.064)
That's wild. I heard you say that before. had no idea. That's incredible.
Mike Johnson (14:03.739)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, and this this touches on the it's called the VASO. It's the EMO neural hypothesis by Moore and Kao. That's from 2007 or 2008. And they basically put forth this idea that blood flow regulates neural dynamism, 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 holding, they keep holding. Basically, there's sort of a local freeze of pattern there.
Mike Johnson (15:40.117)
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 little network, we'll clench, 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 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 of that. But I would be very... I think the particularly interesting story here is about latches in the vascular system. And so these latches, can... They maybe take...
Jonny Miller (16:42.251)
.
Mike Johnson (17:02.497)
a few seconds to a minute to set and a few seconds to a minute to dissolve. But they can last for days, weeks, months, years, a whole lifetime. So, I mean, this idea of, or this question of how does the 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 don't have the 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 latches.
Jonny Miller (17:57.011)
Mm -hmm.
Mike Johnson (18:03.105)
and they can stick with us for a long time. basically, for as long as we have them, if we want to call them trauma, and I think that's probably fair, the trauma will stay with us.
Jonny Miller (18:25.875)
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 evolutionary mechanism?
Mike Johnson (18:43.729)
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, you know, it's a very bad way of living and being and feeling, and I wish, you you could just open up. But from the perspective of evolution, from the perspective of the body, I mean,
Jonny Miller (19:10.867)
Mm -hmm.
Mike Johnson (19:19.695)
We're sort of born into sensory chaos, what William James calls blooming, 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 there are so many degrees of freedom in terms of, you if you think of
Jonny Miller (19:27.444)
Hmm.
Mike Johnson (19:49.735)
Okay, 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 I think that, you know, evolution has needed to sort of take short cuts.
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 the more we hold, the more predictable the system gets. Now, obviously, we don't want to hold everything.
Jonny Miller (20:36.552)
Hmm.
Jonny Miller (20:41.449)
Right.
Mike Johnson (20:50.042)
and we can't, but it's just a very useful systems intervention to sort of take the variability out of a component.
Jonny Miller (20:50.6)
Mm -hmm.
Jonny Miller (21:04.05)
Yeah, 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. And something that I'm wondering, so now kind of based on what you just shared, I'm wondering how do practices such as say breath work or MGM -A 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 that 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 of MDMA assisted psychotherapy and breathwork for now, how are they able to create the conditions for the releasing of these latches?
Mike Johnson (22:04.178)
Yeah, that's great question. So in terms of the sort of chaos thesis we could say, I wrote a piece in 2019, Neural and Healing, 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, et cetera. Then you get sort of entropic disintegration. This is a term used by Robin Carhart -Harris in his Entropic Brain paper.
Jonny Miller (22:46.825)
Right, right.
Mike Johnson (23:04.4)
And then you get reorganization and then a cooling process and an annealing, which is what happens when you sort of cool metal down. You get kind of a recrystallization of microstructure. This would be one approach to say, OK, well, breath work increases the temperature parameter. MDMA increases the temperature parameter.
I'm always interested in exploring new angles. And I would say to get a little bit more specific for psychedelics such as LSD, maybe MDMA. I'm not sure. I have a working up a pet hypothesis about MDMA. basically,
I expect them to have huge effects on the vascular system. so for psychedelics specifically, mean, basically these latches, these smooth muscle latches, these glued clenches that sort of are restricting blood flow and then sort of limiting the
Jonny Miller (24:27.219)
Mm
Mike Johnson (24:31.268)
of the network to change. It's basically just this hard muscular clench. And it's this question of, 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...
Jonny Miller (24:38.952)
Mm
Mike Johnson (25:00.582)
vasodilators, are, you know, 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, you know, flood the system with vasodilators, but also to sort of cycle clench, release, clench, release. And I think that something like LSD may be doing that.
that LSD is sort of known as a strong vasoconstrictor. But I think that this is actually just a slight misnomer because I like, I expect what to be happening is it will produce constriction and then a wave of realaction and then a wave of constriction, wave of realaction. And you can basically
Jonny Miller (25:57.264)
Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm.
Mike Johnson (26:01.006)
randomly pop latches with this. With very valid results, we can say.
Jonny Miller (26:09.59)
Mm -hmm. a couple of things come to me I a bunch of things come to mind one is that I notice 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 It's also very possible without the use of either breath work or
any kind of psychedelic substance, if there are conditions of sufficient internal and external safety and permissioning, then these processes and these 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 like the wind chime that you mentioned earlier is picking up on and then is allowing this latch to unfold. What's your sense there?
Mike Johnson (27:12.649)
Sure. Yeah, that's good question. I understand too, I'm sort of getting ahead of myself on questions you had asked about breath as well. Okay, great. Just to touch back briefly on breathwork. I think that, yeah, like humming produces NO, but also breathwork leads to a CO2 buildup and
Jonny Miller (27:21.65)
No, no, that's great.
Jonny Miller (27:40.909)
Thirdly.
Mike Johnson (27:42.033)
Everyone, like it's sort of common, a common 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 that too much is bad. But I don't know. I don't know if you're familiar with the work of Ray Peet. Very interesting, okay, very interesting sort of metabolism focused.
biologist and he does kind of bioenergetics, I guess I would say, or that he recently passed. And his thesis is that CO2 is actually incredibly important for cellular respiration, cellular metabolism, and it can be a problem if we sort of lose too much CO2.
Jonny Miller (28:33.182)
Mm -hmm. Yep.
Jonny Miller (28:39.379)
It increases oxygen uptake via the Bohr effect, I'm not mistaken. So it actually helps the cells to be more oxygenated counter -intuitively.
Mike Johnson (28:47.017)
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,
Jonny Miller (29:12.488)
Mm, okay.
Mike Johnson (29:15.495)
You know, they both have their benefits, but I think that, yeah, like 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 latches.
Jonny Miller (29:40.11)
Which explains, I'm remembering in Jamie Wills' Recap to the Rapture, he has the kind hedonic engineering protocol where there's breath work and then there's inhaling nitric oxide and it creates this like incredible like ecstatic deep psychedelic experience and that's maybe just like multiple latches popping. So then that brings me to another I think really important question which is that you know 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 breath work 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.
Mike Johnson (30:39.625)
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 glute shut.
but a little bit more blood gets kind of pushed in. And so that will sort of give a little bit more activity arranged 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 have, you actually pop a latch. And like this is a pretty big deal to,
pop a laugh. And then, you know, 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 and not a latch, or maybe it just relatches. So I do think that sort of, you 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 Even or especially when things kind of feel good but out of control, to sort of not reflexively clamp down on that.
Jonny Miller (32:39.592)
Mm
Jonny Miller (32:50.804)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. 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, I mean, like one, 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 demonstrate 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?
Mike Johnson (33:31.281)
Yeah, so it should be extremely testable. I've had discussions about using something like Doppler ultrasound or fMRI with contrast to track fluid flow around the body. And you can basically find the dark spots, find the black holes, find places where basically there's only a trickle of fluid flow. And you can kind of assume,
Jonny Miller (33:40.808)
Mm
Mike Johnson (33:59.795)
These are the places which are latched. Blood can't really flow there very easily. I think that making a map like this or validating this with neuroimaging, saying, OK, this person has PTSD. We can actually find the places of low circulation. I've heard of body workers using thermal imaging.
higher -res thermo and basically the places on the outside which are cooler and probably getting less circulation. And so that would be one example. So yeah, I think that there are deep
Jonny Miller (34:29.796)
Mmm.
Mike Johnson (34:52.231)
scientific and clinical implications. And there are also implications for sort of... I'm gonna give two threads here. One is mapping personality, or mapping agency, And in terms of like, if your latches are the set of constants in your nervous system, things that just absolutely will not change.
Jonny Miller (35:07.881)
Mm.
Mike Johnson (35:21.983)
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 attention whereas there's attention there's blood flow
Jonny Miller (35:45.182)
That's a big claim. Yeah, wow. Cool. Okay.
Mike Johnson (35:52.703)
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, then you kind of have a map of agency. Here are the things that they can't think about, that they can't feel.
they can't change. Here 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.
Mike Johnson (37:03.839)
So I can say a few words there or if you have any questions.
Jonny Miller (37:07.228)
Yeah, well, I mean, I absolutely want to go down both threads. Let's start on the agency one, because that's something which agency was interestingly like the common thread that I came to in my work with nervous system mastery. And I have a framework of like rise out of reactivity. And the more that we were able to cultivate interceptive awareness, which is certainly correlated with blood flow, 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. And when those pieces are in place, like you say, there is more freedom between stimulus and response without the kind knee -jerk reactive kind of classical reactions, whether it's like emotional reactivity or the classic hyper or hyper 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 kind of conclusively show that this is the case. Maybe there's before -after sessions. You mentioned, think, before that there might be a kind of distinguishable density signature associated with these latches. What would you recommend to some researchers who might want to explore this for themselves?
Mike Johnson (38:38.722)
Yeah, yeah, that's good question. So just playing up some notes here. I would say that the four things that are, yeah, four things that one could try to use to sort of...
map someone's nervous system. One is Doppler ultrasound, another is fMRI post -contrast. These are sort of researcher -grade stuff. Then there's the thermal imaging, which I think is more, you know, hobbyist. You can just buy a thermal imager on Amazon or whatever and play around with it. And like, I think if I was
Jonny Miller (39:17.64)
Mm -hmm. Yeah.
Mike Johnson (39:24.113)
If I was a massage therapist, I would. And I'd sort of try and see if this can predict the places which...
are sort of least functional in a person, like they have the least feeling to, or whatever, and sort of are worth focusing on. I would also say that like a part of this to, okay, and also if you can sort of do density imaging, probably with UltraSound, of the vasculature.
Jonny Miller (40:02.036)
Mm
Mike Johnson (40:05.942)
Probably, probably, these smooth muscle latches will have a distinct density signature that you should be able to pick up.
I would also say that a lot of this also revolves around not just the latches, of crystallized points of constant pattern in your nervous system, but also your reflexes. As you were saying, emotional fluidity and sort of what is your response reaction.
and can you sort of do this in a better way? this is actually, I was kind of thinking about, 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,
Jonny Miller (41:05.842)
Yeah.
Mike Johnson (41:13.682)
And I think every tradition is going to have their different terminology here. I would put it in terms of different forms of virtue.
Mike Johnson (41:27.75)
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, if you just trust yourself and just let the energy go, if you just kind of are in the moment.
Jonny Miller (41:35.474)
Hmm.
Mike Johnson (41:53.974)
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...
Jonny Miller (42:13.233)
Mm -hmm.
Mike Johnson (42:23.766)
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, man, like I trusted it last year and it caused me so much trouble. Yeah, and like, or like, you know, I trusted it and then my human 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.
Jonny Miller (42:46.036)
Fucked me over.
Jonny Miller (43:04.542)
Mm -hmm. Mm.
Mike Johnson (43:05.206)
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 it's a little schizo. Maybe it's a little lazy. And maybe sometimes just when activity flows through your nervous system, maybe sometimes bad things happen. Like you get impulsive about this or you eat
kilo of ice cream or you know who knows and so then when the nerve when the vascular 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 movement cognition more neurotic more anxious etc but
more careful, basically. And so I would expect that the vascular muscular system 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. To a large degree, think, sort of
Jonny Miller (44:40.02)
Mm -hmm.
Jonny Miller (44:50.035)
Yep.
Mike Johnson (44:55.51)
deep well -being comes from.
turning that system down and also leveling up your nervous system so that you can afford to turn that system down.
Jonny Miller (45:12.294)
There's a piece around building capacity as well as openness. What's come to mind for me is the framework of
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 vasa 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, even courageous awareness of the clamping that may or may not be happening. And it seems like there's this interplay of these two systems happening at the same time.
Mike Johnson (46:03.21)
Yeah, absolutely. And I also think I'm sort of very interested in sort
If you're aware of the clamping, like, can you feel latches? Can you feel them when... Can you sort of create a menu option of, some trauma happened, or like some sort of very painful thing happened, and now I feel like, there's like, there's a pain in my heart, and like...
this sensation that I sort of connect with, maybe this could be a latch forming. And then if I let it form, I'll be more closed. Maybe I can choose to just feel the pain, sit with the pain, accept the pain, not create the latch.
Jonny Miller (47:08.404)
So two things come to mind. One is I have a very visceral memory of that exact experience. I was a year into a grieving process and I remember approaching this memorial bench and these waves of intensity came through and at a certain point it felt like something just like...
imploded internally and a 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 this torrent of energy is being released in the system and and perhaps an even more challenging question is like
Because I still don't have a good answer for this, but like what the heck is that energy? Like what is that experience that we have when these things happen? To the best of your understanding.
Mike Johnson (48:07.105)
Yeah, I suspect that if it's a discontinuous experience that it's like something happened and then this energy came and it was very intense. I would suspect that that would be a latch opening. And like another way to frame that is you gave enough evidence to your vasomyselular system
that you could handle it. You could handle freedom in that network.
Jonny Miller (48:37.086)
Mm.
Hmm. That's interesting. it's almost like you have to show your muscle system that you are trustworthy of being able to have ownership or stewardship of this much capacity or this much energy. Yeah, interesting.
Mike Johnson (48:48.034)
Yes.
Mike Johnson (48:55.287)
Yes.
Jonny Miller (49:03.132)
One question that Oshaan Jarrow shared, which I think is relevant to bring up here, 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?
Mike Johnson (49:29.805)
Sure.
Mike Johnson (49:34.637)
So I would have to say that the logic of the body is sometimes strange. you know, maybe sort of there'll be some sense of, I have to keep this muscle clenched or else, you know, something bad will happen. And then if you sort of investigate, okay, well, what do I feel? What bad thing would happen if I released this? And then you might...
if you can sort of successfully ask your body that and kind of get a feeling and response, the answer might be kind of bonkers, might be nuts. 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'm gonna, I think to answer this question, I'm gonna transition to this second thread.
Jonny Miller (50:07.967)
Mm
Jonny Miller (50:30.11)
Great, I was about to kind of bring us there as well. That's good timing.
Mike Johnson (50:32.777)
Nice, nice. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Perfect. So, very simple story about... Bring up my notes here.
Hmm.
Mike Johnson (50:52.237)
So a very simple story about these latches and we can say radical well -being is once again we're sort of born into sensory chaos. Everything is happening all at once and it's very confusing and we have tons of prediction errors and sort of to become
functional in this, the body sometimes kind of gets a little greedy, we can say, or like uses this very simple ancestral approach of finding places to pinch to sort of make the rest of the system more stable. And I would expect that.
Jonny Miller (51:42.985)
Mm
Mike Johnson (51:53.289)
especially around the age of one and half and two years old. And think Romeo has talked about this as well. But basically, a lot of latches get set up and mostly they're very useful. And I think especially, like we talk about the self arising in this timeframe. And the thing that the Buddhists say so many bad things about, but it's...
it's sometimes useful to have a cell.
Jonny Miller (52:25.776)
Very useful, generally.
Mike Johnson (52:28.031)
Yeah, it's predictive. It's defensible. If you're in some sort of adversarial social interaction, you better have a self to be able to maintain as invariant.
the things that are good for you to have.
Jonny Miller (53:01.642)
Mm
Mike Johnson (53:07.362)
But evolution is 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, we can say, the first muscle reflex. It's the base. And it's sort of the reflex that the system is built from, that we
we find a safe pattern and we grab, we clench it and we keep it. Or like we find something useful and we keep it that way. And then, 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 latch forms. And we grab this and we do it and maybe it latch forms. And then,
And then we grow up and we use these in many, circumstances. And maybe often they're helpful and sometimes they prevent us from our sort full freedom, but they help us survive. Then we can say, and we can phrase this in terms of personal development or just you hit, you
2025 and you get a new toolset. You get a toolset of high level moves to manage uncertainty. And these moves are much more nuanced and careful and rich and multidimensional than the sort of clench or know, flinch into certainty.
you can start sort of managing ambivalence, managing uncertainty with these sort of higher level tools. And we can talk about Keegan levels and Keegan 3 and Keegan 4 or Keegan 5, whatever.
Jonny Miller (55:19.348)
Yeah, just like one question there. Do you think, and I imagine the answer is yes, what is the connection between these latches and certain beliefs, 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 there's almost like a correlatory latch in their system that is related to their inability to be with the uncertainty?
Mike Johnson (55:47.107)
Sure, it definitely could be. I mean, it's gonna be a little bit different in each circumstance, but I could definitely 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's talking about a concept that maybe touches on this pattern, but it's like it would need
Jonny Miller (55:52.938)
Yep.
Mike Johnson (56:16.599)
that network to be holding a different pattern. It's like you're holding a certain pattern and that maybe has latched and it's basically a permanent part of your identity and you very physically, physiologically, you can't change that thought for as long as the latch is there. It's like maybe you can like construct some complex arrangement of a
of your nervous system where you can act as if you can, but it always collapses and says, okay, there's just no freedom there. 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 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, rejection, many of these sort psychological defense mechanisms. you know, I think it's part of the challenge of being a human.
Jonny Miller (57:29.16)
Mm
Mike Johnson (57:47.785)
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.
Jonny Miller (57:57.236)
Hmm.
Jonny Miller (58:04.158)
Yeah, I'm really curious to unpack a little bit more 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 like 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, like is it that simple?
Mike Johnson (58:46.007)
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. kind of the, we can call a blood flow as kind of a lens of attention. And the more blood flow there is somewhere then sort of
the more differentially amplified that region of the brain is. And he said, you 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, felt safe to sort of lean into that. I think a rare occurrence. don't think people should...
Jonny Miller (59:18.886)
Hmm
Jonny Miller (59:32.529)
Hmm.
Jonny Miller (59:36.167)
Mm -hmm.
Jonny Miller (59:40.817)
Yeah, So 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? And from my kind of lived experience, it almost seems as if there's two vectors. One is like arousal energy, which kind of is that.
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, that kind of area. And that also correlates to some degree with the jhanas as well, which we haven't touched on yet. So, yeah, what is energy? 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 blood flow into these areas.
Mike Johnson (01:01:00.226)
Sure, it's a great question. I think that I mean, I'm sort of answering from a position of curiosity here. But I would say that, first of all,
Jonny Miller (01:01:10.847)
Mm
Mike Johnson (01:01:15.884)
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 what cells have the biggest polarity from inside to outside, negative charge inside and positive charge outside. And also sort of communication and just kind of how big of a splash do they make in the
Jonny Miller (01:01:27.465)
Hmm.
Mike Johnson (01:01:44.898)
field when they fire, when they discharge. neurons have a very strong signature, but actually heart muscle has a stronger signature.
Jonny Miller (01:01:56.746)
I think it's like 37 feet or something. I think the heart sends out.
Mike Johnson (01:02:02.048)
It's crazy, like 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. I would expect that if we understand this as 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 sort of the inside and the outside of, I'm going to punt and say the energy body, like if measure key parts in the brain, like the inside of the brain and the outside, this came up in discussion with Maxodak, but also in the heart as well. Basically, the amount of voltage potential
Jonny Miller (01:03:10.698)
Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm.
Mike Johnson (01:03:28.738)
may correspond with the intensity of the experience. And so if you're having a very intense experience, there's probably a higher voltage potential between sort of your core and your outside.
Jonny Miller (01:03:43.326)
Hmm. Hmm.
Mike Johnson (01:03:46.392)
And I mean, this would be very testable. And I would anticipate that this would sort of go down over age, or with age, go up with sort of intense experiences, go up with psychedelics, go up when, I guess, this gets into the enlightenment thing. But.
Jonny Miller (01:03:49.674)
Totally, yeah, yeah.
Jonny Miller (01:03:56.328)
Mm -hmm.
Jonny Miller (01:04:10.891)
So yeah, let's go there. perhaps like where my curiosity... I have many curiosities, but the question that's coming up at the moment is like, is there a difference between someone who has experienced, let's say, a biting kind of classical awakening? their default state is more or less in a non -dual state.
versus having 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 them. So what's your sense of the connection between the
the process and the journey of awakening versus latches.
Mike Johnson (01:05:08.826)
Sure, yeah, that's a good question. And this would 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, if the fewer latches you have in your 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 few latches in your system, relatively speaking, but yet be very reactive. You can sort of have a nervous system, your fast and muscular system doesn't trust, and you get these sort of strong reactions and uncontrollable reactions. And these are not exactly apples and oranges because
Jonny Miller (01:06:07.496)
Hmm.
Mike Johnson (01:06:26.255)
you know, very like strong 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 for two, then you could kind of take this track of, well yeah, few latches but a lot of sort of strong micromanagement by the Vesemuscular system.
I want to take us back a little bit to sort of the, I want to say the logic of the body and latches. And this idea that like when you're small, it's a very efficient shortcut to latch networks. Then when you're big, you have many more tools. You can sort of use these high level approaches to manage
situations in ways that can sort of not require these latches. However, if you've made it to 20, 25, 30, whatever, you basically just have this sort of foundation of latch networks. And then sort of the healing journey, we can say, or
sort of more classical Buddhist approach as well involves, okay, let's open these up and get my freedom back, basically. And I see this as a, like, I think the Buddhist way is long and
Mike Johnson (01:08:27.512)
safe and good. It's sort of you trust the body of when to open. You're not sort of doing, you know, crazy drugs to get these, know, to fry these open. You're basically like, I see the process of meditation as, mean, first of all, okay, you have all these latches, kind of hard constants in your nervous system, which we can call the self.
Jonny Miller (01:08:43.711)
Hmm.
Mike Johnson (01:08:57.36)
And then, okay, you go to a very safe environment. So, nice meditation hall. You have a teacher that you trust, and you kind of do the process, and you know, maybe you...
Maybe it takes some years, many retreats. You go on a two month retreat and you get serometry. And basically, I think like to dig into the technical process of, can speak very narrowly and from a place of humility about and then we can say in terms of Vipassana insight meditation.
Jonny Miller (01:09:41.13)
Please.
Mike Johnson (01:09:47.886)
So my teacher is Anthony Markwell. He describes it as you're present, you're not in the future, you're not in the past, but you're in the present moment. You're inside, you're internal, 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, kind of with this foundation, you try to develop a noting practice, where you sort of try to notice each sensation, often focusing on the breath, and you inhale the rising and falling as well. And so you note the sensation.
and then you tried to know the sensation, you tried to kind of fully feel the sensation, and you let it go, and do it 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 with here.
And then with the noting practice, I mean, you're sort of dialing down, like all this practice dials down your vasomuscular 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 the this thing practice,
Jonny Miller (01:11:28.105)
Mm
Jonny Miller (01:11:33.012)
Mm
Mike Johnson (01:11:43.044)
You get really weird sensations. Really sort of... You get to a pretty strange, strange place. And in a Bayesian frame, I think you're basically...
showing your nervous system wildly out of distribution data that it is absolutely failing to predict.
Jonny Miller (01:12:02.986)
Mm
Mike Johnson (01:12:08.138)
And you're basically trying to tease it open. You're saying, okay, nervous system, you didn't see this coming. Like this is, you're totally failing at predictiveness. But maybe if you opened a few latches, you could predict it. It wouldn't be out of distribution. It would be sort of predictable. And...
Jonny Miller (01:12:12.809)
Hmm.
Jonny Miller (01:12:20.712)
Yep.
Jonny Miller (01:12:28.414)
Hmm. Hmm.
Mike Johnson (01:12:37.516)
It's not trying to force these latches open, but it is trying to tease them.
Jonny Miller (01:12:41.45)
It's like teet teasing. Yeah, it's like the Huxley's Doors of Perception, like the aperture opens a few degrees more to let in even more of the chaos outside. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.
Mike Johnson (01:12:52.93)
Right, exactly. And I think that in result, you don't suddenly become a perfect person.
by all accounts, it's a significant step change. If you can kind of, and I think that there's like.
There's a lot of, it's like that, I think it's, Tostoy quote? All happy families are like, all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way. We can kind of adapt it to nervous systems and say.
All happy nervous systems are like all unhappy nervous systems aren't happy in their own ways. And you know, it can take many many many years until people sort of can even begin on kind of a recognizable meditative path. And maybe that's kind of their particular set of latches that they sort of have to work through and they're
their reflexes and so on. But then kind of it's this funnel where things become more more similar as you're sort of digging into these sort of nigh -universal latches that almost everyone has.
Jonny Miller (01:14:17.428)
Yep. Yep.
Jonny Miller (01:14:31.988)
Hmm. One, one, 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 like the protector parts, like the firefighters, et cetera. Do you think those, 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?
Mike Johnson (01:15:01.329)
I might suggest that he's not necessarily describing different kinds of latches, but different kinds of reflexes, different kinds of vassal muscular reflexes. There's going to be a pretty wide set of strategies to reduce uncertainty, reduce predictor.
Jonny Miller (01:15:27.518)
Yep, and those could be things like the developmental reflexes, 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 is both incomplete reflexes and latches, and those are two separate but related things.
Mike Johnson (01:15:54.565)
Yeah, yeah. I mean, there are...
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. I'll be like, okay, I gotta remember this. Like I have the burner on. And it's like very useful to do that.
Jonny Miller (01:16:21.02)
Hmm.
Jonny Miller (01:16:28.018)
I've forgotten that many times, to my wife's frustration.
Mike Johnson (01:16:29.731)
Yeah, 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 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 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.
Sometimes that may just be a muscular thing and that sort of regenerates, you know, when you wake up and so on. But sometimes that might get physically latched, like with a bad breakup or something. And so, yeah, I suspect that there's some overlap. Like if you can never get closure, then maybe your body just latches it and says, okay, let's move on.
treat the constant.
Jonny Miller (01:18:02.324)
Got it, 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 thinks that mitochondrial cells emit low levels of UV light and that sunlight also plays a crucial role. What, in your model, what is the role of metabolic health in the...
encouragement of latches to release.
Mike Johnson (01:18:34.247)
Sure. Yeah, that's a great question. Just a note, I might have to pause to plug in my phone. It's at 5%. I'm into this question. Let me try and answer the question and we can talk. Nice. So, Metaphytic Health, I've really been getting into, and I think it's at the core of so much in health. if you don't have energy, then
Jonny Miller (01:18:41.916)
yeah, we can pause. Let's take a bathroom break.
Jonny Miller (01:18:50.994)
Okay, all right, great.
Mike Johnson (01:19:04.851)
You start to fall apart and if you do have energy, like this is the repeat 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 to maintain ourselves and to accumulate more order now, I think that metabolic health and vessel computation are
Intimidly linked.
Because the sort of latch solution that muscle can sort of be freely cycling, and it takes a lot of energy to freely cycle. It takes a lot of fuel. And actually, the contracted state is the metabolically insufficient state. like rigor mortis comes from, OK, you ran out of ATP.
Jonny Miller (01:20:02.365)
Hmm.
Jonny Miller (01:20:07.777)
Mmm, right,
Mike Johnson (01:20:09.022)
So yeah, really kind of a little counterintuitive. So it actually, in one formulation of this, and the details are a little complex, but it takes more energy to relax than to be tense.
Jonny Miller (01:20:23.402)
Hmm that's interesting That's really interesting. I mean that that applies to a lot of like stressed out type -a people who really struggle with relaxing Yeah, huh? That's a fascinating reframe
Mike Johnson (01:20:31.038)
Totally. And I would also say, yeah, yeah, this idea of metabolic health too, like when the body is sort of bumping into metabolic insufficiency, when it's saying, basically we have rolling brownouts here 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 muscle freely cycling state and it can just latch that muscle. Then it doesn't have to spend energy 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 deal with that later.
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 tissue and the blood would sort of, you'd need the blood to pay for the metabolic cost of
Jonny Miller (01:21:49.534)
Mm
Mike Johnson (01:21:57.51)
releasing the LAMP. So it's like.
Jonny Miller (01:21:58.078)
Yeah, right, right, right, right. Yeah, that's such a fascinating insight that it takes more energy to be tense than it does to relax. That's incredible.
Mike Johnson (01:22:08.392)
Right. 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. I mean, can sort of... To create the conditions for release, it really helps if you're sort of above the waterline in terms of, you have more energy than you absolutely need. You can afford
to the body can kind of feel, yeah, like maybe I need to keep this latch for this reason, but at least metabolically speaking, I can afford to relax. And so then at least you have the possibility of release. Whereas I think if you're metabolically insufficient, I think basically, you you get a lot of random microspasms in your basomuscular system.
And this is probably very unpleasant.
Jonny Miller (01:23:23.242)
Yeah, it speaks to or reminds me of like the Dieter, kind of before ceremonies that is traditionally practiced. Are there any specific supplements or things that you think are supportive for people listening who might be engaged 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 objective way of measuring that?
Mike Johnson (01:23:49.726)
Yeah, the best measurement... So, I my thought tends to go to the thyroid and, like, markers of thyroid health. And, like, the sort of mainstream way to do this is measuring, like, 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
Jonny Miller (01:24:25.729)
which is practised in Ayurvedic lineages as well.
Mike Johnson (01:24:30.814)
Nice, yeah, nice. And so just kind of tracking that over time would be great. And then, okay, I'm at 2%. Maybe you... Okay. Perfect.
Jonny Miller (01:24:40.751)
Let's hit pause. I'm going to use the bathroom. Find a charger and we'll come back in a few minutes.
Jonny Miller (01:27:33.487)
I just brewed some more tea.
Mike Johnson (01:27:35.218)
Nice.
Jonny Miller (01:27:40.898)
This is so much fun.
Mike Johnson (01:27:43.764)
Yes, Steve.
Jonny Miller (01:27:51.012)
Okay, you found the charger? Everything good.
Mike Johnson (01:27:52.872)
Yes, yes, final check. So.
In terms of...
I would say that most of the low -hanging fruit, so as in everything in life, most of the low -hanging fruit is in the form of stop hitting yourself. And so I think it's mostly about removing things from your diet, from your environment, things that are, like, I think that, like, I sort of buy the repeat view.
Jonny Miller (01:28:26.558)
Mm -hmm. Yep.
Mike Johnson (01:28:33.844)
that people used to have much more active metabolisms and now we've sort of become like body heat is I think a full degree Fahrenheit lower now than it was in like 1870 or something. And I think that
Jonny Miller (01:28:40.18)
Mm
Jonny Miller (01:28:53.812)
Hmm.
Mike Johnson (01:28:58.93)
I mean, it's sort of the iceberg thing.
Mike Johnson (01:29:09.428)
So it's sort of the iceberg meme where you have the surface and then the next level, the next level, the next level, and you know, you can keep going pretty far down the metabolic health rabbit hole. But the most simple thing would be to avoid seed oils.
Jonny Miller (01:29:32.552)
Hmm.
Mike Johnson (01:29:34.536)
So it's sort of this idea that oils that are generally made from seeds are not particularly healthy. They have forms of fat that are very reactive, easy to oxidize. like, humans are like, for cows, know, whatever they eat, they have four stomachs, they're ruminants with
with these four stomachs and then the bacteria in the stomach like turns whatever fat that they eat into sort of cow fat, high in saturated 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 eat something
Jonny Miller (01:30:17.193)
Mm
Mike Johnson (01:30:32.766)
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.
Jonny Miller (01:30:43.198)
Mm
Mike Johnson (01:30:44.24)
And so if these FET molecules are...
particularly.
not ideal, we could say. If they're reactive, if they break down in light, if they are usually oxidized, if they aren't a good fit for provoked need, then slowly we rebuild ourselves out of these sub -substandard fat molecules. So fat quality is important in ways that protein quality isn't. For protein, it's just, you know, get enough
amino acids and there's arguments that glycine is especially important and so on. for fat, it's really, you you become what you eat. And the seed oil hypothesis is that unsaturated fat and especially polyunsaturated, polyunsaturated fat, or the acronym is PUFA, polyunsaturated fatty acid.
Jonny Miller (01:31:32.345)
Mm
Mike Johnson (01:31:54.612)
is particularly unhealthy and there's a lot of voices, like very loud voices on both sides that, you know, if you ask the American Heart Association, they'll say, yeah, know, untetered fat is better than tetradet fat. And I think that's deeply wrong.
Jonny Miller (01:32:04.104)
you
Jonny Miller (01:32:22.866)
Hmm, hmm, hmm.
Mike Johnson (01:32:22.916)
And I think that if you want to focus on metabolic health, 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 move. Coconut oil is almost entirely saturated rather than poof.
Jonny Miller (01:32:52.004)
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. That seems maybe very counterproductive.
Mike Johnson (01:33:00.232)
Yes, yes.
Mike Johnson (01:33:05.738)
Yeah, yeah, and I think that's gonna be surprisingly important. And I think there's a real space to open up our truth center that is sort of like pro metabolic health, like explicitly this is the priority. if step one is not eat seed oils, there's many, many, many steps, but you can just go down the list.
Jonny Miller (01:33:20.254)
Yeah.
Jonny Miller (01:33:31.27)
Sure.
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 had time to kind of unpack what you meant by that. So I'm curious in what ways do you think poly... What does polyvagal theory get right and what is it...
kind of not quite what was it Mr. Micon?
Mike Johnson (01:34:05.771)
Yeah, so I mean the D. vagus nerve is kind of the wandering nerve, it's called, and it sort of travels throughout, you know, up through the spine and I think by one year.
Jonny Miller (01:34:13.78)
Mm
Jonny Miller (01:34:21.216)
The right side, yep, yep.
Mike Johnson (01:34:24.807)
And yeah, like, Vagal Tone is, I would expect, centrally important throughout. I think that that really nails it. And then there's the sort of frame of, there's the Sympathetic Tone and Parasympathetic Tone and kind of the Fight or Flight.
Jonny Miller (01:34:47.835)
Your audio has just gone kind of fuzzy and... Okay, that sounds better, yeah.
Mike Johnson (01:34:51.677)
Okay, how is this? Okay, cool. So I think that there's a lot to like in this framing, but it's not exactly a gears level approach. can't, like, there's...
Mike Johnson (01:35:18.149)
little actionable physical mechanism involved. You know, it's this meme, you know, is this polyvagal tone in the room with us right now, Anand? And, maybe not. We can't measure it. can't directly manipulate it. We can hypothesize that there is such a thing as polyvagal tone. So I think I'm most
Jonny Miller (01:35:21.585)
Mm -hmm. Mm
Jonny Miller (01:35:31.561)
You
Mike Johnson (01:35:48.125)
excited about approaches that eventually will cash out in something physical, something measurable, something measurable.
Jonny Miller (01:35:56.577)
Yeah, yeah, me too.
Me too. do you have a sense of, 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 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 outside of the window of tolerance. Do you have a sense of what might be happening there and is it connected to latches in any way?
Mike Johnson (01:36:28.363)
Short answer is I'm not sure. I need to do my research there.
Jonny Miller (01:36:33.588)
Yeah, okay. It seems like the system almost get, there's almost like too much energy in the system and it could be, you know, connected to an emotion. And 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 you mentioned earlier
Mike Johnson (01:37:06.709)
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and I mean, just in general, like there's kind of a very odd trade off in the nervous system where we will almost...
like, somewhat reliably prefer pain and failure over uncertainty and ambivalence. And like, sometimes this manifests as like, you sort of act to collapse the uncertainty and destroy the situation. And like, why did you do that? That's not optimal, we, it's honestly really hard to tolerate uncertainty.
Jonny Miller (01:37:29.203)
Mmm.
Mike Johnson (01:37:50.271)
and
Jonny Miller (01:37:50.927)
And is that because we are wired to minimize prediction errors in our system? Yeah.
Jonny Miller (01:38:01.89)
Beautiful. Well, had one other question from, I think this was from Steven from the JANAS or JANA Tech. How has your work and theories been received in kind of the broader community? Like, have you had any interesting pushback from smart people also in theoretical neuroscience?
Mike Johnson (01:38:24.383)
Yeah, so I think that people seem...
Mike Johnson (01:38:35.979)
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 minimization could extend to his work. I think people kind of want this to be true. And people are kind of looking and saying, okay, well,
Jonny Miller (01:39:00.232)
Hmm.
Mike Johnson (01:39:06.079)
this is a nice clean story. What's the next step? And what's the next step after that? so on. And I'm kind of in the position of, there's a lot to do. one of me. And I kind of want to tell the more full story first before I sort of dig into anything.
Jonny Miller (01:39:12.362)
Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm.
Jonny Miller (01:39:21.256)
you
Jonny Miller (01:39:32.244)
Mm
Mike Johnson (01:39:36.008)
very, very empirical. I'm trying to see if some outside groups will test this sort of density differential or Doppler ultrasound to find latches and so on. I guess the feedback that I've got has actually all been positive.
Jonny Miller (01:39:37.866)
Hmm.
Mike Johnson (01:40:03.188)
which tells me that maybe I need to be a little bit more aggressive at finding stuff. And I guess, like, just to give the...
Jonny Miller (01:40:13.647)
Ahem.
Mike Johnson (01:40:18.754)
the larger context. So VESA computation parallels the work of Moore and Kao. They had this 2007 -2008 paper, the hemo -neural hypothesis. They don't talk at all about latches though. They just talk about, okay, like blood flow 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, in a computational sense, like this could regulate computation.
Jonny Miller (01:41:11.658)
Mm.
Mike Johnson (01:41:17.002)
It's sort of building in this no -man's land that, okay, there's this sort of sense that blood flow is sort of important and like, more in Cal show that, or I think, yeah, more in Cal and then there's some follow -up papers that say that changes in blood flow actually precede changes in neural activity. It's not that... Yes, yes. It's not that...
Jonny Miller (01:41:42.103)
That's fascinating.
Mike Johnson (01:41:47.028)
neurons do stuff and then the blood comes to pay for it, it's the blood arrives first and then neurons change.
Jonny Miller (01:41:50.398)
Yeah.
Jonny Miller (01:41:55.986)
And I mean, I would have imagined that neurons, excuse me, travel faster than blood flow. But I guess that it's still possible that the blood flow rises and then the neuronal changes happen. that, that, it's sorry. I mean, that just seems like such a huge insight that you'd think that would be more widely shared or known in, in like, that was the first time I'd heard that.
Mike Johnson (01:42:09.302)
Right. Yeah. And I guess that's…
Mike Johnson (01:42:24.034)
Right. Yeah, the second thing that I'd say about this is, 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... Yeah, and I've said about that, but I would say that I'm very optimistic that...
Jonny Miller (01:42:25.35)
Yeah, that's wild.
Jonny Miller (01:42:41.844)
Mm.
Mike Johnson (01:42:54.294)
like this sort of free energy principle, active inference paradigm, the sort of sense that, we have predictions and minimizing prediction error. 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.
Jonny Miller (01:43:09.822)
Mm
Mike Johnson (01:43:25.564)
And I'm incredibly optimistic about VESO computation offering the physical substrate for the predictions that a 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.
Jonny Miller (01:43:27.24)
Hmm.
Mike Johnson (01:43:54.914)
to sort of relieve stress on this. And sometimes you even latch a prediction and then you might call that something like a strongly held prior about the world. you know,
Mike Johnson (01:44:15.924)
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. I'm very optimistic that, well, actually it's vascular tension. Every piece of vascular tension is implicitly a 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
Jonny Miller (01:45:00.684)
Yeah.
Mike Johnson (01:45:15.23)
scan someone and find their latches and like we can figure out exactly what their nervous system is predicting.
Jonny Miller (01:45:16.836)
Yeah, yeah.
Jonny Miller (01:45:26.266)
Totally, 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 as an aside. And I was wondering like, 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 and smooth muscle reflex to exist? And you know, it could be called like the body scorecard prize. But I do, I mean, I feel like this would be insanely, insanely useful.
Yeah, let's say like research, like a team of innovators, people came to you, 20 people, they're like, okay, Mike, we're gonna do this thing. 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?
Mike Johnson (01:46:24.377)
Sure, nice. Yeah, great question. I would frame this in terms of distinct steps. step one would be create a blood flow of a body. And then step 1 .5 would be, and then do PTSD sufferers have dropouts on this map?
Jonny Miller (01:46:35.729)
You
Mm
Mike Johnson (01:46:54.52)
highly accomplished 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 induce, like, you know, can you take something like ultrasound, which I'm told
like the effects of ultrasound on neurons. There are various stories about how that works and the stories are kind of loose and imperfect. That yeah, ultrasound has effects on populations of neurons, but it's not a precision thing of changing neurons in exactly this way or that.
That said, ultrasound seems even better after, or like, using muscle cells as targets. Like, the idea 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
Jonny Miller (01:48:04.371)
Mm
Mike Johnson (01:48:24.076)
basically everyone is targeting the wrong kind of self. 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, gonna need a safety protocol for, okay, well,
Jonny Miller (01:48:27.273)
Hmm.
Jonny Miller (01:48:42.698)
Mm
Jonny Miller (01:48:49.069)
Totally.
Mike Johnson (01:48:52.28)
Sometimes these life is exist for a reason. like.
Jonny Miller (01:48:55.114)
Mm
Mike Johnson (01:48:58.872)
maybe like the Buddhist process grows certain kinds of virtue where you need to have in place before you pop a latch. So like there's not just the Buddhist process but like you know just like the emotional fluidity stuff and just kind of nervous system.
Jonny Miller (01:49:12.713)
Mm
Jonny Miller (01:49:22.903)
Yeah, I mean that would be my dream in the same way that you can go to hospital today and get in an x -ray machine 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. I mean, I think that would really, it would really put somatic work kind of on the map and have mainstream scientists and people take it seriously. Cause 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 he's going to leave it over here.
Yeah, it feels incredibly exciting to me.
Mike Johnson (01:50:22.604)
Nice. Yeah. And then, yeah, then it's also like leveling up as researchers or as practitioners, dealers, whatever. And like, 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, I think, for example, psychology shows that, well, sometimes good things happen and sometimes people have a rough time. But I think it's like, this is, I find a promising way for the field to grow.
Jonny Miller (01:51:01.278)
Yeah, I feel like 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.
Jonny Miller (01:51:15.358)
Yeah, yeah, beautiful. Is there anything else that is alive for you that you'd like to share or talk about before we begin to close?
Mike Johnson (01:51:26.296)
I think we covered a lot. Yeah, guess nothing that can't wait until part two.
Jonny Miller (01:51:37.244)
Okay, beautiful. Well, I have a few quick rapid -fire questions and then we'll wrap this up. So, first question is, if you were to define an emotion in relatively simple terms, what might you say?
Mike Johnson (01:51:50.648)
I would define an emotion as a low frequency resonance in the nervous system which essentially functionally acts as a Bayesian prior for all the higher frequency resonances in the body.
Jonny Miller (01:52:17.194)
What is one idea in neuroscience that you disagree with or you think is given too much weight?
Mike Johnson (01:52:23.896)
Basically, every single way we're using neuroimaging. I could go down the list, but it's all like good technology, but well, sometimes. But I think that we need better sort of foundational stories.
Jonny Miller (01:52:29.962)
You
Jonny Miller (01:52:35.327)
you
Jonny Miller (01:52:45.455)
What is one book or paper that you've read that disproportionately impacted your thinking?
Mike Johnson (01:52:51.896)
the free energy principle by Friston. It was a very brilliant paper.
Jonny Miller (01:53:00.37)
What is one question or direction that is very alive in your research currently?
Mike Johnson (01:53:13.295)
How to...
Mike Johnson (01:53:18.387)
to heal people. And I think that's kind of obvious, but I just think it's not too obvious to repeat.
Jonny Miller (01:53:32.978)
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?
Mike Johnson (01:53:44.761)
So I'm gonna give a slightly longer answer to that. My 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, Principiae Pauli, and probably the big result from the book was the symmetry theory balance.
Jonny Miller (01:53:47.828)
Please.
Mike Johnson (01:54:14.963)
And I think that that's going to be very important for sort of quote unquote solving consciousness. And I talk 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 philosophical, metaphysical. What is consciousness? What is pleasure? The second branch was more thermodynamic. It's neural annealing. It's sort of taking a look at music, meditation, psychedelics, as increasing the energy parameter, the temperature parameter of the brain of the nervous system. And then sort of...
implications thereof.
And the third big branch now is VESO computation. 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 VESO muscular regulation of this.
And so.
Mike Johnson (01:55:34.873)
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 qualia, we could say. So for the first branch...
These are the foundational questions of what is the domain of value, and if consciousness is the domain of value, then like...
Like, what is a good feeling? What is a bad feeling? 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 third branch, VESA computation.
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 recipe for, yeah, like...
really good states exist. And then the question is, well, how do we very respectfully and carefully get people to
Jonny Miller (01:57:16.276)
Beautiful, Mike, this has been such a pleasure. I'm so, so grateful that you took the time for this conversation. 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 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.
Mike Johnson (01:58:09.679)
My pleasure. Thank you.
Jonny Miller (01:58:12.355)
Where can listeners 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?
Mike Johnson (01:58:22.095)
Everything is available on my website, opentheory .net. And you can click best of if you want to.
Jonny Miller (01:58:31.124)
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 right now? And what question might you leave our listeners with?
Mike Johnson (01:58:53.935)
Hmm.
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
Jonny Miller (01:59:31.027)
Well, I've opened enough latches to be able to sit with that uncertainty, I think. Mike, thank you. Thank you so, much. I really appreciate you and just super grateful for this conversation.
Mike Johnson (01:59:45.667)
Thanks, Sean. It's my honor.
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