present musings I was working on a series of posts on the vagus nerve and the polyvagal theory, and I kept going in circles. Not good enough, too short, too long, not academic enough (3 years of academic writing still showing its teeth), too scientific, not enough scientific… I decided
The impala goes down. It doesn't fight anymore, doesn't run. It lies there, completely still, while the cheetah catches its breath. Then the hyena shows up. The cheetah and the hyena start their own altercation - and in that window, something shifts in the impala. Not a
We are carrying ancient wiring into a modern world it was never designed for. This is worth sitting with. The autonomic nervous system - the ANS - developed across hundreds of millions of years of evolution. It predates us by a long stretch. Parts of it were already present in primitive animals,