Hello everyone, welcome. As everyone's entering the room, we'll give just a few moments to have everyone settle in. And I'm doing a few technical things behind the scenes here.
Yes. Welcome, everyone. I see a lot of familiar faces. And so I'm going to ask everyone, I'm going to just do this in a week. Use your mic.
Let me just make that setting here. No. Okay. Wow, a lot of people still showing up. So I want to say good morning because we're on the, Steve and I are on the East Coast, but I know we have an international audience, so good day to everyone.
Welcome to our author talk with Dr. Stephen Porges, also known, I'll say if Steve's some breath, as Steve. Welcome, Steve. Thank you, Jerry. Good to see you. Today, good to see you as well.
Today, we're talking about Steve's new book, Polyvagal Perspectives, and I'm going to let Steve explain what I just said wrong in that introduction about Steve's new book, but maybe we should start with that, Steve. Welcome. Well, first we're going to show the book, Jerry. Beautiful. Okay, so we're going to, the first point, first of all, welcome.
It's good to see actually several familiar faces. I mean, I'm going to have to do these things with larger screens so I can see people more. connect a little better. Anyway, the book called Polyvagal Perspectives, the title is very meaningful to me. The theory came out in a publication in 1995, which was my presidential address to the Society for Psychophysiological Research.
By around 2005, there was discussion about doing a special issue focusing on polyvagal theory for biological psychology. And that issue was edited. by John Allen, who's a professor or was a professor at the University of Arizona. And what I wanted to do, he wanted me to write literally a paper focusing on polyvagal theory, literally an update. So it was like a decade later, where is it?
And what I wanted to do in the paper was to basically say that the theory was more than a theory. It was a way, it was a perspective. It was a way of looking at life.
looking at human relationships, looking at how we interact with the world. And so that was really the goal of that paper. And I've kept that notion and used that term polyvagal perspective in many papers. But that paper was published. And really, I believe it's the most frequently downloaded paper in the history of biological psychology.
So it got a lot of hits, a lot of reads. And I liked the title. And so when Norton contacted me and asked me if I would kind of put together another book of readings, basically explaining or telling people where the theory has gone, I grabbed that title. Now, what I also did was put in the appendix of this book an abbreviated portion or part of that paper so people could see where I was. Interestingly, it's really quite clunky.
the paper from 2007, because I'm just kind of like stretching out and asking questions and throwing out hypotheses. But what's happened in literally almost the 20 years from that paper to today, so we're at the end of 2024, and that paper is really, let's say, mid-2000s. And there was a total expression of the theory in different areas.
And so what I wanted to do was to, in a way, displace the initial book that came out in 2011 with a newer book that would serve the same purpose, which is literally a resource or one could say an archive of where a user or reader or. a person interested in polyvagal theory would go to get information. But I wanted to do more than that. I wanted to show the diversity of application. And I wanted also, I wanted the book to convey a little bit of who I was.
So I included some blogs, some interviews. And so I was trying to spread out the notion of what the theory was and also applications like there's an article in the Harvard Business Review. They're basically a whole array, including a couple of book forwards, where the polyvagal theory is now used to reframe Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, autism, and other issues.
So people could see or get a sense of what I was doing with these ideas and to think of polyvagal theory, not as a, let's say, a locked-in theory, but as a scaffolding, upon which one... takes the scaffolding and builds whatever building they want to build, move it to whatever area, whether it's human or social justice, or whether it's education or the work environment. So I was basically, this is my turn to try to put things together. The other, in a sense, focus of the book was not merely the diversity, because I've been around for, as an academic, writing papers since the late 1960s.
So there are a lot of decades and a lot of papers. And so the decision was, is this going to be a historical journey or is this going to be a reframing of the theory from basically this contemporary period? And the book focuses on virtually all the papers.
There are a couple that aren't from the 2020s. So they're really very contemporary and they were basically selected for very specific reasons. And, you know.
book is organized in a very, I would say, a strategic foundational way. So the first part of the book is really more focused on theory. And so those papers are, in a sense, denser, and they're heavier to read and go through.
But by the time you get to the end, you're dealing now with blogs and interviews, where it's all over the place, we're talking about everything. But let's go to the theory, the first part of the book, which I consider the foundations, or in my own mind, pillars of what polyvagal theory is about. And there are four papers which become these four chapters.
One is a chapter which is the vagal paradox, which goes into deep levels of the physiology, and it also kind of gives you a physiological basis to understand what the theory is, its applications, and even to be prepared to deal with people who don't understand the theory. who make misstatements, misrepresentations. So that's a physiological, neurophysiological science foundation. Then there's a paper on what I call the, it's called a polyvagal theory of biobehavioral journey to sociality.
And it's really to emphasize what is one of the main teachings from polyvagal theory. And that is, we're a social species, and we really have this biological imperative. to connect and to co-regulate.
In fact, our society is based on trust and co-regulation and connection. And then the third chapter is really polyvagal theory, a science of safety. And this is really to change our thinking about feelings of safety from kind of this optional thing to understanding it as an obligatory state that our body needs so that we can be who we are. We can express the creativity.
the compassion, the benevolence, the generosity of what it is to be a human being. And the fourth chapter was an interesting paper. Well, they're all, I can't say the others aren't interesting, but the fourth chapter really was this kind of challenge to give it, because I was asked to give this keynote at a transdisciplinary conference.
And when we start thinking about what is the theory, the theory is transdisciplinary. It crosses disciplines. And because it crosses disciplines, it literally, I kind of view it as solving a Rubik's Cube, because what you're looking at is the surfaces, and those are the different sciences or different disciplines.
But underneath those surfaces is a common core. And if you kind of twist the sides appropriately, you get at that core. And what my work has been doing, literally, has been twisting the sides to get at that common core.
And that's really what I, when in writing that, I realized that I crossed these disciplines. And in that paper, I go back to a quote from a book that I read when I was a senior in college. When I took a course that was dealing with, it was really the interface between sociology and physics. So it was like, in a way, we can say that polyvagal theory is this, you know, take the hard basic sciences, even the quantitative aspects of neurophysiology, and then the psychological feelings, the visceral feelings, and the behaviors.
So polyvagal theory has all these surfaces that make it transdisciplinary. But what I was referring to the paper I read in college was a book called, I think it was called Two Worlds by C.P. Snow, who was an English philosopher.
It's a small book. Some of you may have read it. I don't know if it's part of the literature anymore. But basically, it was saying that we have the sciences in one place, and we have the arts and humanities someplace else, and there's this amazing gap in between it. And unless we bridge that gap, we're going to be in trouble.
And what I basically, and in fact, if we look at education today, we know where that gap is going. It's getting larger and larger as humanities and the arts are minimized in undergraduate education, when people are now more product-oriented, professionally-oriented, and literally vocationally oriented, that they're no longer allowing themselves to be, quote, educated or philosophically educated. And even the concept of being a... liberal arts, or when I was an undergrad, it was liberal arts and science.
And everyone had to take some humanities, had to take some science. And it created a common language of, let's say, a more generalized or generally educated person. But what I learned from a very good friend of mine who was dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Indiana, I learned from him that by the let's say 2015, by then only about 15% of undergraduates were getting their degrees in liberal arts and sciences.
They were really gravitating to professional degrees and it's worse. I would say worse. It's fewer now.
We don't want to put values on it, but it has an impact because what it's really saying is limiting the information that people have to develop their perspective of the world. So I wanted to really emphasize that polyvagal theory is It has many facets. And what I wanted to do with this book was to literally show the reader my journey through this.
And what I was trying to do with it was to basically give a core that is foundational and then let it blossom outward and let people understand that the theory is there for them to use. It is scaffolding and for them to be creative. So that's the preamble.
I'll get a quick Google search. I think C.P. Snow, The Two Cultures in a Scientific Revolution. Is that something that you said?
That's it. Was it 1956 or something like that? 1959. And I will not say that I've read it, but maybe I will.
But after I read the Polyvagal Perspectives book, of course. Yeah. Thank you. There's a lot there. And you kind of got into the purpose of it towards the end.
But if you were to succinctly say. who should read this book and what would the reader get out of this with all these different perspectives? Who did you have in mind when you were putting this together?
Well, look, when we put our stuff together, who do we have in mind? So we have multiple goals. One goal is a type of archive. So where would a person go if they were interested not just in learning more about the science of the theory, but also its applications.
Where would they go? What's out there? You have many clinicians using polyvagal theory in the title of their books.
It's an expanding bookshelf, but it's an application of a theory. But if you want to get more information of the foundation, where do you go? Do you go to the primary sources?
Do you go to Google Scholar? Do you start reading papers? Or can you get a volume that kind of gives you a sampling?
And this, or a sampling of... by the person who created the theory, so that you know that there's a sense of validity, that if the person says that this is the theory, you may not agree with the theory, but you know at least that he said it. And that's what the book, the book is in a way for this broad, growing, polyvagal, informed community.
It's a reference book. It's not a book you read for on vacation, although I'm sure some people will. I was always shocked. that they read the other books, other than the book with Seth.
Seth's book is a book for reading. But the other books were really trying to create a resource for this amorphously expanding community to give them information. Thank you.
I know that as a layperson, I've learned so much out of reading and also attending these talks as well with you and colleagues about polyvagal theory in general. And it's really kind of changed my perspective on life and challenges and such. such as that. So thank you from me to you. But I know many of us have similar experiences with learning about the nervous system and how that affects our daily life.
So when we're reading this book, is there anything that you keep in mind or that you would recommend that we would use? So it's a very interesting question, because when I published the first book, I guess it's 2011. And I was, in a sense, mildly embarrassed about publishing it because it wasn't a really integrated book. It was a book of my papers.
And, you know, it was very dense because it started off with, you know, the Polyvagal Theory paper, which is certainly not an evening read. I was shocked that people even bought the book. But I was also shocked that when people would come up to me at meetings, they would ask me to sign the book.
And the book had all these... uh postums in it all these uh earmark you know the pages turn the book was like getting really thick and i was just totally shocked but then i started to understand something and that was i wanted to give them a guide to reading it and that's what you're really asking me the guide i was telling them is the papers in the front of the book are heavy they're very science but as you go further in the back in that first book it's clinical applications so maybe you want to read the book from the backwards forward This book has some of the same features, but it's so you really have a set of theoretical papers, you have a set of clinical application papers, and then you have papers really that are shorter papers that are targeted to different clinical groups and then blogs and interviews. So it does start expanding into a more, let's say, into the vernacular of our culture. Thank you. I know that compassion is a big part of what you're talking about.
And I would assume that polyvagal perspectives would talk about compassion. And how do we be compassionate in a world right now that's a little kind of upside down in many ways, but not lose track of humanity? And how can we be compassionate to each other through our nervous systems specifically? Okay, so... we're going to kind of like step back and kind of refine the problem.
So we were saying we need to be compassionate, but why do we need to be compassionate? Because people's biobehavioral states are shifted into defense, and therefore they're not witnessing, they're not listening, they're not co-regulating, they're not interacting. So the real problem is not compassion. The real problem is the biobehavioral state that they are locked into and locked into for a very adaptive state. survival-related reason.
And that's where we get into polyvagal theory. We get into this understanding that physiological state basically is a major determinant of our experience in the world, but not just our experience, the experience of others who are interacting with us. So we were talking about basically therapists who are in war zones, and I was telling you about how my interactions with them. What I learned was that you really can't talk to a therapist in a war zone as if that person is unaffected by being in the war zone. So you start understanding that their bodies are under states of fear and they're angry.
But if they're in that biobehavioral state of defense, they're broadcasting that to their clients. So what I start doing in my talks with them was to say, look, you're totally justified in having these feelings. This is what, you know, you're under threat.
This is what your body does. But when your body moves into that state, you better be aware of it because you can't be an effective therapist when you're locked into that state. So you have to develop a strategy to co-regulate with another or other trusted individuals, whether that means going for a walk or reducing your clinical load. And remember, when people are in these zones of threat and danger, they feel that their obligation is to do more clinical work to help people.
And I was really trying to get them to understand that. Doesn't work that way, because if they're locked into a state of threat, they can't do their work. They are broadcasting signals of threat to their clients, and their clients are just not going to do well. So we have to, in a sense, step back in a different way, and in a sense, where they may think they're acting through compassion, their body is broadcasting that they are not in the state to be compassionate. They're in a state in which they are projecting.
signals of threat. So the simple part of this theory is that we need to basically learn more about how to signal the nervous system to literally give up defenses. And that's really what I can, in my mind, see as the real goal of polyvagal theory is one, to be aware of that, to understand the mechanisms, and two, to understand the algorithm that our nervous system is looking for to give up its defenses. Thank you for that.
Steve, so I'm going to ask a question that may not be scientifically acceptable, but it's something that always comes to my mind. And I think I know some of the answer to this, but what you just described about a person trying to help another person through psychology or therapy or using the nervous system cues of danger and safety. Steve, would you say that our bodies are able to receive information on an energy level or a Or are we picking up cues from microexpressions and prosody of voice and such things?
Or does it all roll into one big thing? Okay, I would say it's basically all the same. A lot of people talk about a field or they talk about their intuition, but we can deconstruct that with polyvagal theory and say, well, you're having neuroception. What are the features that your nervous system is using to detect signals of threat?
Now, we might not know all of them, and that's really where we get into this vagueness of saying the person is carrying bad energy. Well, if I were to see the person carrying bad energy, and someone said, whispered in my ear and say, okay, Steve, deconstruct what's going on. I would look at their face, which would be flat, the intonation of their voice, their presence, their posture. So I would find a lot of signals that would be unambiguous to the nervous system.
And so What people are doing is that they are responding to another neuroception, but they don't know what the signals are. And I see that as, quote, this energy. And I think what polyvagal theory gives us is an alternative way of operationalizing that bad energy that fits more closely with, I would say, contemporary science and health.
Thank you. Steve, when we're in a state. uh you talked about states of uh well emergency states i guess uh in warrior zones and such but even for us people that are privileged enough to live in a world where our danger is not so present but we still might be in certain states are there things we can do as humans that can self-regulate or move us to a different state um dance movement music somatic or regulation what sorts of things would you Well, you're dealing with a lot of them now.
So you're really moving into my current goal in life. My current goal in life is to make the transmission of these signals of safety scalable and less dependent upon intentional behavior. So even the way you phrased it is like, are there things that someone can do or someone can do for you?
So it becomes this operational. mechanical, if it's broken, this is how you fix it. And the reality is that we're a self-organizing, self-repairing system. And we need to have the signal to our nervous system that it's okay to repair, because you can't repair if you're fighting. And even in that paper that I mentioned about transdisciplinary, I used the Starship Enterprise as the model, because if you're putting up your energy shields...
you're utilizing your energy resources and you can't do certain things. And this is exactly what happens with humanity. When we create our energy, whatever we want to call it, our defenses, we interfere with our healing, with our sociality, with all of what I would call these generalized homeostatic processes, which include interacting with others. We are not a solitary type of species.
We are a species. that evolved to co-regulate with, and I use this very broadly, with another appropriate mammal. Because when you're injured, greatly injured, by your interactions with humans, The interaction with a dog or a horse or a cat may be the portal that enables your nervous system to give up its defenses. Steve, how important is co-regulation?
I know that we both have cats. And what does another mammal that we think is loving towards us? Maybe they're not, but they pretend to be. But how important is co-regulation with a loved one? Oh, this is a sense.
Trust. I would always like to replace the word love with trust because we can operationalize trust. And I think our society gets confused with the word love because many people think they love individuals, but they don't trust them. And so the benefits of that love are not very useful because they're getting triggered all the time.
But so when we talk about. mammals, let's say your cat or my cat or people's dogs or horses, there's a great degree of trust that you see that is symmetrical. You trust the animal and the animal trusts you.
And that enables both of you to give up your defenses. And the part that I find really interesting with the cat is that cats have some, quote, playful behaviors that humans react to as if they're aggressive. but they're just being a cat and we have to i make this statement because it's kind of interesting because my cat likes to mouth or nip a little but not to break skin and this is part of if you watch kittens or cats play that's part of their their uh portfolio of behaviors but it's not acceptable to me because it's going to break skin or potentially could break skin and i'm trying to some animals are easily trainable others I think you need to just put gloves on and rough and tumble with them.
So the issue is that you have to understand the behavioral repertoire of the other. And we are, so when we do the co-regulation with another pet, we have to know what it is to be a normal dog or to be a normal cat. I think cats to me, now I had cats when I was young, and then when we had cats when we had kids, and then we got dogs.
And so it's like a 20 or 30 year period we didn't have cats. And in that period of time, polyvagal theory started to be developed. And now I see cats in a very, very different way.
I see them as extremely interesting co-regulators in which they are using you to regulate their state while we want our children and our dogs to regulate us. So there's a difference. So when you watch a cat, we say the cat may be faking this, may be doing that. But when you watch the cat, the cat is basically, there's one agenda, and that is for the cat to feel safe and comfortable. So the cat will come in proximity.
When the cat wants to be touched, the cat allows itself to be touched, gives permission. When the cat is overwhelmed with being touched, the cat withdraws. But the withdrawal seldom is out of visual sight.
The cat likes to keep you in proximity. So the cat is using you to reduce any type of uncertainty in that cat's frame of the world. And we have to understand that this is a brilliant strategy.
And why people don't, I'd say, let's say some people are not cat lovers because they see this as literally selfishness. They superimpose the human bit. But what they're really saying is, I want the cat to come up to me when I'm not feeling good and to comfort me.
And I start to make these phrases that if we treated our spouses and our children more like cats, life might be a lot better. In a sense, we feel a violation of expectancy or a violation in reciprocity. So the reciprocity, if you're a cat, is different than the reciprocity if you're a dog or a human.
That's an entire book in itself, Steve. I know there's a chapter on the sensitive patient through the lens of polyvagal. That brings some interest to me.
It kind of relates to what you were just talking about. Would you speak about other challenges with working with sensitive patients using polyvagal theory or their benefits? Well, I think the great benefit is really the explanation that many of the hypersensitivities are.
are basically reflecting a body that's in a state of threat. And that's a very clear polyvagal principle. And that state of threat can create inflammation just as well as it can create behavioral withdrawal or behavioral aggressiveness.
So what the functional medicine, the application of polyvagal theory in functional medicine is basically saying there is an explanation of these defensive systems, whether we're talking about inflammatory defense or autonomic defenses. It is. it makes sense that the body is doing what it evolved to do. And now, so we now just need to signal the body that it doesn't need to do that anymore. And that is this more complex texture of what we're calling a biobehavioral state. So now inflammation is just part of a defense portfolio.
And if you come in and do it from functional medicine, you say, well, maybe there's a sensitivity and we can find... blood and we do this blood test and then we can titrate medication or treatment. Polyvagal theory says you might, but also if you can signal the nervous system to give up its defenses of threat, maybe the body will self-organize and heal itself. The part with functional medicine, Jerry, is that the word functional disorder is the, it's the evolvement of illness that doesn't have an identifiable pathophysiology. And this really means that many of the diseases or disorders within internal medicine are not confirmed with biopsies or other forms of, let's say, blood tests.
And that is because many of the disorders are neurofunctional disorders. And that is the big gap in medicine. There are very few indices that are able to monitor the dynamic neural regulation of the end organ, the organ itself.
The measure that's most prevalently used is heart rate variability, because heart rate variability is actually documenting the dynamic regulation of the heart through neural connections. And there's a little bit, I would say, also in gastroenterology, there's something called electrogastrographs, which study the rhythmicity of the gut. And that maps into gut disorders that the rhythms get disrupted.
There's some general rules that rhythms are part of our homeostatic system, their feedback loops. And under any form of challenge, these rhythms get depressed. They get depressed because it's metabolically costs to service them. And when we're under threat, our resources, just like in Star Trek, are out to our defense shields.
So... we're in a sense diverting our metabolic resources to defend and not to heal. And if we saw it that way, polyvagal theory fits very nicely into the model of functional medicine, saying that these are really neurophysiological disorders that are potentially reversible.
Steve, we have a lot of people responding to the subject in the chat, which we won't have, I should say that we're not going to be able to take questions from. from our attendees today live, but I wanted to just point out that I think Stephanie's here, that Stephanie, if you could put a link for the app for communication of these subjects, we can follow up there as well. But Steve, what you were just speaking about with functional medicine and conditions and such, there's a lot of research happening for long COVID and POTS and such.
I don't know if we call them diseases yet, but what you're talking about, is there a place for polyvagal theory and application in these sorts of neurobiological? Very, very much. I actually just wrote an invited paper for neurogastroenterology and motility.
Interesting. It's really this new emergent discipline in gastroenterology that basically respects the nervous system. And in that paper, I go through literally the history of medicine.
And medicine started off in terms of this strategy called nosology, N-O-S-O-L-O-G-Y, which was really symptom clusters. The idea was that if you're a good observer, you create symptom clusters, symptom clusters define diseases, and then diseases will have a pathophysiological substrate. And then we move this forward into the 20... 20th and the 21st century, and it not only will have a neurophysiological or pathophysiological substrate, it will have a genetic underpinning. Now, that's really great in terms of a model, if it were correct.
The issue is more than 50% of many of the so-called clusters don't have a neurophysiological or pathophysiological basis. And they get put aside called medically unexplained symptoms or functional disorders. And the patients often feel that they're being abused because the internal medicine, the physicians say to them, you need to see a psychiatrist. or a psychologist because it's all mental. It's not real.
It's neural. And the issue is, neural is real. Neural is neurophysiological shifts. And it's a perspective.
And without the tools, without the metrics, the physicians are helpless. And so they're fitting the diagnosis and the treatment within their own models, which is symptoms, assays, biopsies, genes. And it works for many.
it doesn't work for all. It doesn't work for a lot. And so we use the term psychosomatic illness, which was saying it's psychologically caused when in reality, you don't know, you don't know what's happened.
Yes. And Steve, what is your opinion on the healers, the doctors, nurses? Is there a place for polyvagal, I'm going to say informed, but polyvagal theory on... how a doctor will walk into a room to heal a person.
Well, this is really, I would say, one of the embedded agendas for the Polyvagal Institute was really to change the delivery of medicine, at least that was mine, and to, in the long term, change the training of physicians. I mean, it's a global, it's a very big question, but the point was to really acknowledge that the context in which you deal with healthcare impacts on the client, on the patient. So if you treat the patient like a piece of meat, they're not going to feel safe or welcome. If they feel like they're stealing your time, it's just not going to work. So all levels of interaction require a sense of co-regulation, awareness, sensitivity to the other.
Literally, it requires a... Now we can move into the word compassion and the ability to witness. I think as a society, we don't do a good job witnessing others.
I think in medicine, there was a long history of the power of a physician as a witness and the power of healing by basically people believing that they would be healed. And what they're really saying is, if I believe I'm going to be healed, I will downregulate some of the defense systems. And many of the symptoms of my illness are being driven by my body being locked into states of threat or defense.
So it doesn't mean that it's a placebo effect. It's a real effect of co-regulation. And medicine needs to get very serious about the context.
I want to bring up one point. This goes back over 20 years ago. I interviewed for a major administrative position at the National Institutes of Health.
And I was in this interview with the director of the National Institutes of Health, and I said to him, we know too much about literally human physiology to allow medicine to be practiced the way it is. And basically, he was a radiologist. He didn't have a clue of what I was saying. And so we started to understand the disconnect between these hallowed halls of research and medicine and the ability of being a human.
I had another interaction. during that interview with a person who was head of one of the institutes. And he was basically a dermatologist. And I basically was saying to him that the skin is a major sensory system that impacts on how we react to the world. So it communicates signals of safety and threat.
And he said, I don't think it matters very much. This is what he told me, the sensory part of skin. He was basically interested in the tissue itself, not in the way that the tissue was this sense organ affecting information that we were processing and changing biobehavioral state. So it's not that people are antagonistic to ideas. It's just that their orientations are not inclusive of these very important alternatives or possibilities.
Do you find that your research and... researchers that you're working with or have worked with are making a headway into changing that dynamic of the, you know, the official medical world? Yeah, yeah.
But I'm really going to say pragmatically, My time is ending. It's like, if we go back to, let's say, early 80s, I had this really optimism that all you needed to do was to show these things, show the neural regulation and its relationship to survival or to illness, that it would be embraced as measuring that intervening variable, which is really part of a polyvagal theory, which says our physiologic state is that intervening variable between... stimulus and response between cause and effect. So medicine needs to have a better understanding of that physiological state, but so does education.
And so this is the workplace that if our physiology is in a more homeostatic safe state, then we have the potential to be much more creative, productive, and literally nicer. Thank you. It kind of brings to mind that the looking at the outline of Polyvagal Perspective book that you've intentionally brought people in or different ideas. And I don't want to dwell on the fact that you just said that, you know, your time's coming to an end because I don't believe that.
But it feels like you're pulling more and more people in, which you've always done. But what is the future of polyvagal theory and how will you help guide? Okay, so part of the question is a good question. Part of it is kind of an inference. The question really is you basically bring people who share principles, who are creative, who are explorers, pioneers.
You give them a scaffolding and see what kind of mountains they can climb. And that's all I'm doing. I don't want to own what they do.
I want them to generate. So the part of this is that there's... it's easier.
Let me basically, my goal is not to be too much in the action, because then it becomes me and not them. And they need to be identified. They need to be nurtured. They need to get all the benefits of being creative individuals.
And it's kind of an interesting world we're in where there is always placement of hierarchies. And we want... And Ponte Vecchio, as a principle, says, OK, I basically will tell you what the principles were that I had developed for what I call translational research.
And that was proximity and parity. Those were the two principles that I thought the research needed. It needed the notion that it didn't matter what your degree was in. It didn't matter.
What mattered was whether you were in proximity, whether you interacted. Proximity. So laboratories.
needed to get out of their hierarchy of they needed to be more welcoming to people and they needed to develop this interactive one. Now, of course, the pandemic shifted this whole aspect of proximity. So many labs and many organizations have become virtually totally, they have virtually become virtual. So, and something is lost.
It's not that I don't mind seeing you, Jerry, on Zoom. but I certainly would rather sit down and have a beer with you in person. And if we use this term, field or energy or presence, whatever word we want to use, and we flip it into neuroception, it's the ability to see signals in three dimensions versus two. And it's not really three, it's really four. You're moving in time.
So I'm getting a different communication. And this is what our bodies evolved to respond to. It doesn't mean that seeing you on a two-dimensional screen is not good, but it's not as good.
I would love to have a beer with you next time we see each other as well. Thank you. Maybe we shift over into some leadership.
There's a lot of the world that really needs, I want to say, good leaders, and there's a lot of world dynamics happening now that leadership could be better. How does polyvagal theory and polyvagal perspectives address leadership and what we can do to improve things? Well, I think, again, this is where longevity pays off, where you start seeing things differently through your own eyes as you mature. If I go back to myself as a young assistant professor, I had answers and I had kind of ways that I would do things.
And I thought that was how you you. did things. What I've learned over the years is the power of witnessing and listening to the other.
And so when we start talking about, in fact, I put this into play when I became chairman of a department. And I realized that when you were given this responsibility to chair a department, it wasn't being given a kingship. I mean, you could treat it that way. You could take the resources and you could manipulate people if you wanted to. But really what it was, was given a type of responsibility in which your true responsibility was to listen to your constituency.
Now, you could never please everyone. That was not the goal. But you could listen to everyone.
And I think that's all most people wanted. They wanted to be heard. Now, they wanted to be heard and they wanted someone to make a decision.
But decisions did not need to be consensus decisions. And I think leadership has to take that into mind, that what people really want is to be acknowledged. And leadership, in a way, is a model of family.
So actually, we have people in Pauly Vigel Institute who are actually focused on family. But in a sense, leadership takes on a hierarchical feature that is very much like a family. And I keep thinking of departments and colleges and my life as an academic, and also my life being disappointed in being an academic, in terms of which was really on the leadership domain. And that is people not listening, people not having core values. But what polyvagal can do as a theoretical perspective is to give people, make people understand that they need to listen.
And listening does not mean doing certain things. It means acknowledging that the other person has a voice. And we see this all around the world. And we see this even in our elections.
It's not that everyone expects their vote to be the vote. that is followed, but they want to make sure that their perspective is respected. Thank you. I know that safety is a core value of polyvagal theory and pretty much everything that's being taught, especially in therapy.
Would you say that safety can be defined? clinically or scientifically, or is it more of a personal definition? And if it is a personal definition, how do we find safety for ourselves and our surroundings? Okay.
So this goes to that third chapter in the book, which is Polyvagal Theory and Science of Safety. And interestingly, this is a paper that was published in an open access journal called Frontiers. And it was published in, I believe, 2022, which is just a couple of years ago.
It's already been cited in over 220 peer-reviewed papers within a two-year period, less than a two-year period. That makes it kind of a hot item. And what that paper is doing, it's saying that feeling safe is not a subjective feeling.
It's a visceral state. You have the opportunity to feel safe if and only if your body is in a state that supports homesthetic function. And all we have to do is look to the the vast number of polyvagal informed therapists, and they are telling you that the autonomic states of their clients are dysregulated.
And therefore, the biobehavioral states that they can regulate in are very compromised. So feeling safe is an option only that can only occur when our body is not in the state of defense. And so it can be objectively measured.
And the goal of that paper was to move it from that subjective feeling that had vagueness and was optional to something that was literally obligatory in our own survival. That in a sense that if we're not feeling safe in our body, meaning our homeostatic processes are not functioning to support health growth and restoration, we are not merely mentally challenged, we are also going to be physically, physiologically challenged. And again, our clinical colleagues tell us that, look, when people are in these states, when they suffer from severe trauma or excessive stress or chronic pain, their psychological phenomena is not oblique or unrelated to their physiology. They have many symptoms that are very predictable, like gut problems. And again, if you're polyvagal and foreign and people have gut problems, you say, well, That's dorsal vagal defense.
What does that tell you? It tells you that that body has, in a sense, experienced life threat and hasn't resolved it. For my brain, I'm...
Actually a little curious right now. I think I know the answer again on this, but I would love to hear what your thoughts are. Are states that you've kind of clarified in the theory, is it okay to be in all the states? Or is it actually healthy to navigate through all of the states of being, in other words, is it healthy to be activated? Or is it unhealthy to always be in a calm state?
Okay, obviously, you'll know intuitively the answer. Flexibility, resilience is the answer. And it's like, I actually wrote this unusual book called Conversations with Shiva, a bio-theology, which I never published for good reason. But it's all about the concept of the Garden of Eden being talked, being written from the perspective of polyvagal theory. And that is, In the Garden of Eden, everything's taken care of for you.
You're like a reptile. You're a sit-and-wait eater that comes by, you eat, and you have immortality. Now, there are a couple things that are very important in the human narrative, and that is motivation, the ability to acquire, the ability to develop, and the ability to experience change and novelty. We like novelty. In fact, what we learn, of course, from individuals who are neurodivergent or even those who have a diversity history is that novelty is too challenging for them.
But in a sense, the flexible person craves novelty. This is part of what it is to be, in a sense, physiologically safe and to have homeostatic functions because the novelty triggers that homeostatic system. It can create that withdrawal that you're talking about. But when you finish the task. there's a recovery cycle.
So the real issue is flexibility and resilience. Thank you. I think we, would you mind talking a little bit more about neurodiversity, autism, and how polygynal theory can be applied to people that, yeah. I'm actually working on this right now. So I was going to mention the Yeah.
acoustic technology that I'm developing or have developed with Anthony Gorey. It's now being called Sonoc, S-O-N-O-C-E-A. Basically, it's a technology that augments music with endogenous biological rhythms to signal the body.
So it's a technology that is designed to signal the body to move into different biobehavioral states. So if we step back and say, what is the world that we want to be helpful in? And that is the world we want to be helpful with is to enable people to regulate their biobehavioral states.
This does not necessarily mean you always want to be calm or sleeping. You want to be organized and motivated and engaged and literally integrated. So flipping into neurodivergent, which is really a platform and where we see these states play out. So difficulty in sleeping, difficulty in regulating one's gut are common with the neurodivergent population.
But the other one is difficulty in calming and relaxing. And the one that gets kind of like forgotten is difficulty organizing to be curious and mobilized in a social setting. So we are targeting different, basically creating different compositions, which will have music, and this embedded technology to shift biobehavioral states into sleep relaxation and to organize behavior and we're actually it's going to be a suite of of music composed with this technology with the targeted biobehavioral states and the product will hopefully will have it within six months for the neurodivergent community so so the the way i want you to think about it is um Okay, for many of us adults, we can get really wrapped up or wired or perhaps even kind of uncomfortable or angry, and we would like to calm down. And of course, the history of humanity was, well, there's alcohol and there's other substances, or I would say the 20th century and 21st, it was, well, I'll just exercise.
And of course, from a Pali Vego perspective, is exercising going to be calming to your nervous system? Not exactly. Hopefully what you want is the rebound from exercise to take over and calm you.
So you basically feed the fight flight system with the expectation that you'll have a rebound that would comfort you, not the most efficient or effective way of getting calm. So what I want to do is create. a tool that people, when they listen to it, their body knows what the signals mean. And we're having actually, in terms of like sleep and calming, really good effect with it.
So I just think the future is not, okay, I was thinking of these things as literally stealth, stealth tools with a, but you don't, they're not instructed, the body knows what to do with it, and basically create this portfolio. tools that enable people to shift states without, in a sense, getting angry at themselves or angry at people around them. So they go and they sit and listen.
And I hope to have this ready. So the goal is scalability. The tools themselves, the initial tool is actually a clinical tool that will be released within six months by Unite.
It's called Rest and Restore. But the clinical tool is like safe and sound protocol. It's a neural exercise.
So it is meaning that the goal is to build resilience, but the goal is also not to use it as a standalone therapy, but as an adjunctive therapy with other forms of psychotherapy. So that when you experience these biobehavioral states, then you have a therapist that can kind of walk you through and discuss it with it. So the future, in my view, is... refinement for what I'm doing anyway, my view, is creating a toolkit that signals the nervous system to move into different biobehavioral states and to provide either a user manual or clinical support model that will enable people to develop greater resilience.
Just a quick question on that. Are you calling that neuromodulation or is that this something that's slightly different? No, you could call it neuromodulation because what we're doing with the acoustic stimulation is signaling the nervous system to regulate the visceral organs. So that is neuromodulation. The only difference is that we're not putting an electrode on the body.
We're using an acoustic signal. Thank you, Steve. We have about two and a half minutes left for the official time. So I want to be mindful of that. A quick question.
You spoke about heart rate. variability earlier, you know, my watch, my Apple watch gives me a HRV reading. Is that something I could be using?
Yeah. Okay. Yes.
And with caution. So the issue is heart rate variability from any wearable is a descriptive statistic of the variations of beat to beat sequences. This includes arrhythmias and false detections.
So you You can get high heart rate variability just by having arrhythmias, and you don't want that to be who you are. My strategy, and this goes for 50 years plus, in developing more refined metrics of components of heart rate variability, and I was developing a very refined index of the respiratory rhythm in heart rate variability, which was an accurate index of the ventral vagal circuit. That, to me, is more related. but it's not in the wearables.
But the bottom line is, yes, higher is in general better, assuming you're not prone to arrhythmias. Thank you. So I just wanted to bring you back to the book, Polyvagal Perspectives, and see what do you want us, as the reader of this book, what do you want us to really take away from it or keep in mind as we're reading this book?
Is there something that you can really narrow down? Yeah, I want everyone who reads it to feel that there's a place for them in polyvagal theory to use it, to be creative, to apply it, basically to use it and to be expressive with it. So for me, what I really have enjoyed is really how the clinical community, especially the world of trauma, has embraced it.
And it's not really the therapists, many of the people who have experienced trauma. continued to write to me on a daily basis about how it reframed their understanding of themselves. And that was the first step in their own journey of healing. And I think, in a sense, what the theory enables us to understand is who we are.
And when we understand who we are, we get less angry at ourselves, and we start to learn how to manage ourselves better. Steve, thank you so much. I'm just going to put a slide up. This is the book Polyvagal Perspectives.
You can find it at our PVI bookstore. You can scan in there. Go to polyvagalinstitute.org.
And it's also elsewhere as well. So Steve, thank you so much. Hopefully we can do more of these for all of your many years ahead of more.
Maybe I'll take a backseat role. But yeah, I look forward to the many years in the future and watching the whole community grow and looking forward to the creativity that it brings forward. Thank you, Jerry.
It's been really wonderful. Thank you. And with that, I will stop the recording.
And thank you, everyone, that's attended today. I know this was a discussion and not a question and answer, but we have those available in our courses on polyvagalinstitute.org. Steve has some courses, and every once in a while, I think quarterly, we have people come on, Steve and Dana sometimes, to answer questions and answers.
So I invite you to go to polyvagal.org, shameless plug there. Look at the courses there. resources. There's a lot of the papers Steve spoke about.
And yeah, have fun. So thank you so much. Thank you.