As the father of Againstness, I could probably say quite a lot here that folk would like to know.
For now, though, I’ll inject just three notes:
This class was, unbeknownst to me at the time, basically a reinvention of polyvagal theory. The obvious glaring difference being that I wasn’t talking about the vagus nerve, nor was I meaningfully subdividing the PSNS. (I implicitly was doing so anyway, though, when talking about “dead relaxation” vs. “living relaxation”. In polyvagal theory, that’s the difference between the PSNS dorsal & ventral vagal systems respectively, not about a balance between PSNS & SNS like I thought at the time.) The whole thing actually emerged from my martial arts & meditation experience, with Dan Keys pointing out that the phenomenological model and practical how-to seemed to map super neatly onto the branches of the ANS.
The “remember your feet” trick came from an Enneagram Institute workshop I went to in April 2013. I don’t think that matters for its epistemic status. It just feels meaningful to cite the source. It was a trick for getting people to stay in their bodies and be aware of the present moment.
I now suspect the basic mechanism behind metacognitive blindspots is left-hemispheric model fixation. This is both a feature and a bug. It’s the same phenomenon that Scott Alexander talks about in The Apologist and the Revolutionary. Againstness sort of accidentally honed in on a bunch of “left hemisphere is overreaching” signals — but I say “accidentally” because there’s something of a symmetry between (a) the dynamic of the PSNS & the SNS and (b) the dynamic between the right & left hemispheres of the brain. My guess — and I want to emphasize the “guess” part here — is that evolution keeps reusing this trick of creating a pair of antagonistic systems where one side of the pair tracks the pair’s relationship while the other executes tasks. The result is that PSNS physiology correlates with right-hemispheric functions, but the reason is that systemic coherence leans that way for each of (a) the ANS and (b) the brain, rather than calmness and big-picture-ness being causally tied to one another.
As the father of Againstness, I could probably say quite a lot here that folk would like to know.
For now, though, I’ll inject just three notes:
This class was, unbeknownst to me at the time, basically a reinvention of polyvagal theory. The obvious glaring difference being that I wasn’t talking about the vagus nerve, nor was I meaningfully subdividing the PSNS. (I implicitly was doing so anyway, though, when talking about “dead relaxation” vs. “living relaxation”. In polyvagal theory, that’s the difference between the PSNS dorsal & ventral vagal systems respectively, not about a balance between PSNS & SNS like I thought at the time.) The whole thing actually emerged from my martial arts & meditation experience, with Dan Keys pointing out that the phenomenological model and practical how-to seemed to map super neatly onto the branches of the ANS.
The “remember your feet” trick came from an Enneagram Institute workshop I went to in April 2013. I don’t think that matters for its epistemic status. It just feels meaningful to cite the source. It was a trick for getting people to stay in their bodies and be aware of the present moment.
I now suspect the basic mechanism behind metacognitive blindspots is left-hemispheric model fixation. This is both a feature and a bug. It’s the same phenomenon that Scott Alexander talks about in The Apologist and the Revolutionary. Againstness sort of accidentally honed in on a bunch of “left hemisphere is overreaching” signals — but I say “accidentally” because there’s something of a symmetry between (a) the dynamic of the PSNS & the SNS and (b) the dynamic between the right & left hemispheres of the brain. My guess — and I want to emphasize the “guess” part here — is that evolution keeps reusing this trick of creating a pair of antagonistic systems where one side of the pair tracks the pair’s relationship while the other executes tasks. The result is that PSNS physiology correlates with right-hemispheric functions, but the reason is that systemic coherence leans that way for each of (a) the ANS and (b) the brain, rather than calmness and big-picture-ness being causally tied to one another.