From Mitochondria to Meaning: Intrinsic Health, Coherence, and the Biology of Civilization | ChatGPT5.1 & NotebookLM

Contemporary medicine has achieved extraordinary success in diagnosing and treating discrete diseases, yet it increasingly struggles to explain the global rise of chronic fatigue, inflammatory disorders, metabolic disease, pain syndromes, mental illness, and population-wide burnout. These conditions often persist despite technically appropriate treatment, pointing to a deeper failure of biological solvency rather than isolated organ pathology.

This book introduces a unified, biologically grounded framework of Intrinsic Health defined as the adaptive capacity of living systems to absorb stress, resolve physiological cost, and maintain coherence across time. Beginning at the level of mitochondrial energetics and cellular timing, the framework extends through neural prediction, autonomic regulation, immune defense, endocrine gain-setting, biomechanics, development, environmental forcing, and socio-cultural stress. These layers are integrated into a single dynamic field, denoted H(t), representing organismal solvency.

The work reframes chronic disease, burnout, and systemic fragility as failures of recovery and coherence rather than failures of will, compliance, or isolated mechanisms. It further extends the biological logic of intrinsic health to institutions and civilizations, demonstrating how labor systems, food systems, built environments, media ecosystems, and economic structures directly shape population physiology.

Finally, the book proposes a new clinical, ethical, and policy architecture grounded in regenerative rather than extractive biology, aligning bedside medicine, public health, and governance within a single solvency-based framework.

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Coherence as the Integrative Principle of Embodied Self-Regulation: A Tri-Field Model of Proprioception, Interoception, and Exteroception | ChatGPT5 & NotebookLM

Adaptive human functioning depends on the continuous alignment of three regulatory domains: proprioception (the organization of body form and mechanical tension), interoception (the regulation and sensing of internal physiological state), and exteroception (the interpretation of environmental context and meaning). These domains form three coupled sensory fields that maintain coherence across bodily structure, metabolic state, and perception. When coherence is intact, individuals experience emotional stability, embodied presence, and a continuous sense of self. When coherence is disrupted, patterns of dys-coherence emerge, presenting clinically as anxiety, chronic pain, depression, dissociation, trauma-related symptoms, and functional neurological conditions.

This paper synthesizes evidence from affective neuroscience, fascia and proprioception research, autonomic physiology, predictive processing, developmental attachment science, and cerebellar control theory to show that coherence is an emergent property of integrated autoregulation across systems. The Hinductive Coherence Principle is introduced as a formal framework describing how alignment across the three fields is maintained through fast (proprioceptive–cerebellar) and slow (interoceptive–insula–ACC–hypothalamic) regulatory loops.

Clinically, this framework reframes diverse symptom profiles not as cognitive or psychiatric disorders, but as physiological strategies for managing mismatched predictions across form, state, and world. Treatment must therefore proceed in sequence: first stabilizing form (postural and myofascial tone), then recalibrating state (interoceptive tolerance and autonomic variability), and only then reshaping world interpretation (salience and meaning). Coherence-based care restores regulatory capacity rather than suppressing symptoms, providing a unified, cross-disciplinary foundation for assessment and intervention.

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Prof Mark Solms – A Neuropsychoanalytic Perspective on the Hard Problem of Consciousness / Why and How Consciousness Arises / Consciousness Itself is Affect: Felt Uncertainty in the Face of Oblivion

Video Presentations A Neuropsychoanalytic Perspective on the Hard Problem of Consciousness Why and How Consciousness Arises At our Feb. 5 Grand Rounds, Mark Solms, PhD, of the University of Cape Town, presented on how the metaphysical experience of consciousness relates to the physical brain—and why psychiatrists should care. Consciousness Itself is Affect: Felt Uncertainty in… Read More