Mechanism for Change

Imagine a bowl sitting on a table with a marble inside. No matter where you drop the marble on the inside of the bowl, high up on the rim, halfway down, wherever, it will always roll down and settle at the bottom. The bottom of the bowl is what scientists call an attractor state: where systems naturally settle and stay. Push the marble and it'll roll up the side a bit, but then it comes right back down. This is the key feature of an attractor, the system tends to return to it even after being disturbed. The 'basin of attraction' is the entire inside surface of the bowl, all the places the marble could start from and still end up at that same stable point.

This started as a mathematical concept, formalized in the 1960s for describing how dynamic systems behave, and was popularized by John Hopfield in 1982 when he showed our human neural networks work this way too, for which he won a Nobel Prize in 2024. Since the 80s when it was discovered, researchers have been finding attractor dynamics everywhere in biology, in things like cells, immune responses, and brain states. In 2022, a team at the Kavli Institute in Norway captured this happening in real time; using electrodes they could actually watch the brain settle into stable patterns exactly the way the math predicted.

A small-scale attractor state that most people have probably seen in their own lives is that it’s easier to maintain our weight than to change it. Once we sit at a certain weight for a while, the body treats that as its set point and resists changing it; the marble of that system wants to roll to the bottom of the bowl, maintaining its homeostasis.

This same dynamic plays out at the level of whole-body health. Any given system can have multiple stable states, and which one you end up in at any given moment depends on context, (like with the context based memories) and your reaction to the context. Remember when we talked about how people often feel better on vacation, and then snap back to illness the minute they return home? That’s an example of this in action. You have a healthy attractor state, a stable, maintainable healthy state that can get activated when you get out of the context of your disease. And then another attractor state, your pathostatic attractor state, where your chemical threat response is turned on, and that contains your disease expression, one with multiple entry points that pull you back in when you return to your normal life. And this is why healing can feel so hard, and why medicine thinks it’s incurable. Because we can never get rid of this disease attractor state, they are right about that piece; the disease has been wired into our threat response, so when our threat response gets turned on and stays on our disease expression comes with it. Remember that we saw in Bouton's research, our threat wiring doesn’t go anywhere, it can just be situationally inhibited. So if you’ve been cancer free for 5 years and your spouse dies, it’s possible, without conscious awareness, that you fall into that old basin and your cancer returns, the grief naturally turning back on your threat chemistry, and the well worn grooves becoming a feedback loop that puts you back into your disease state. Or you haven’t had IBS in years, but something pulls you back in and all of a sudden it’s like your entire symptom symphony has shown back up and started playing the slow march to decline your body knows so well.

And because we haven’t known what this was, we have seen this as “relapse”. It feels helpless and hopeless and crushing. And with what we know about the PAG states, this feeling of helplessness can lead to an immobilization threat response, which then further cements your fate of being stuck in this state. But what is ALSO true is that the healthy bowl you’ve been in for years at that point, that bowl is available too, and you can snap back into the healthy bowl just as quickly with the right approach.

And attractor states aren’t a new concept to us at this point, because they are actually exactly what we walked through in chapter 9 when we talked about neuroplasticity. Think about the Merzenich monkeys. When those monkeys spent weeks spinning discs with their fingertips, the cortical map for those fingers expanded dramatically, literally overtaking neighboring territory. This enlarged map then becomes the attractor, with the neural real estate dedicated to that activity growing so large that signals naturally flow there. Electricity follows the path of least resistance, and the most-used pathways have the lowest resistance. They have more synapses, more connections, and more myelin wrapping those connections. And pathostasis is an attractor state; it’s a bowl your system has settled into. So given that, let’s put together everything we’ve uncovered in the research and see how we can build a new competing bowl.

What doesn’t build a new bowl

Medicine says your disease is caused or worsened by poor diet, lack of exercise, inadequate sleep, and too much ‘stress’. Which means the answer becomes lose weight, eat better, sleep more, reduce stress by changing your lifestyle, and your condition will improve. Wellness says something similar. It says you need to optimize your inputs through clean eating, movement, sleep hygiene, stress management, supplements, and routines. So the message on both sides of the aisle seems to be: the problem is your inputs, and the solution is perfecting them.

But our ancestors had terrible inputs by these modern standards we have been optimizing for. They didn’t have modern mattresses or shoes or even consistent shelter. They didn’t have consistent food sources. They had actual predators and tribal warfare and high infant mortality rates. Our ancestors’ stress, the lifestyle kind we blame for our poor health, was very high and persistent. But studies of hunter-gatherers show that they don’t have epidemic levels of chronic diseases like we do. Our bodies are actually robust and able to adapt and tolerate extreme levels of imperfect inputs, they had to be. The animals that could handle the stress and imperfect inputs of our ancestors were the ones that survived to pass on their genes. Which means the difference isn’t the inputs. And if you think about this logically, it just makes sense. If optimizing our macronutrients and exercise and sleep were the solution, don’t you think more people would have actually healed using these methods? Even medicine doesn’t seem to think those things will heal us, or they would have a model for curing chronic illness and not just remission. What medicine seems to think is that we are on a death march to dysfunction and disease, and the only way to stave it off is to optimize everything perfectly.

But what we have discovered as we’ve looked across all the research, is that optimizing inputs, when it does help, helps by pushing you up the sides of the bowl for a bit. But ultimately people end up sliding back down, and from the outside it may look like you weren’t trying hard enough, but the reality is that it was a losing battle from the beginning. Because the problem was never the inputs, the problem was being stuck in a pathostatic attractor state.

The way all animals' brains work is that they have a threat detector system that is always on. You can think of it like Alexa or Siri waiting for you to say their name. Our brains are scanning for danger in a similar way, it’s a passive system that is always watching and listening. For 500 million years, this detection system only activated when an actual threat was present or suspected, and when that happened it would fire off your threat response and ready you for the danger it had perceived. But with the cognitive revolution came the ability for our brains to find threat cues through thoughts alone. Which means that we are always looking for danger and threat, and we can always find it. And the threat system can't tell the difference between a real threat and a thought about a threat, it just responds. So we can fire the full physiological cascade sitting safely on our couch, worrying about something that might never happen or that has already happened.

And even that doesn’t keep pathostatic chemicals on, or every single human would be sick. What has seeded and fueled pathostasis world wide is that through our ability to optimize our world for food and shelter safety, we have accidentally optimized ourselves right into a social famine. We evolved to bathe in constant easy, attuned social connection, and then we slowly one advancement at a time developed our way into isolation. This puts our bodies into a state of persistent threat. In this state our brains ability to keep threat chemicals on through thought alone, and to wire dysfunction in through attention and repetition, produces the global levels of pathostasis we see today.

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Similar to how medicine saw the complex outputs of chronic diseases and assumed the mechanism needed to be equally complex, we have seen the complex output of our disease and suffering on an individual level and it can seem like it should require an equally complex solution. Years of therapy. A lifetime of medications.

But now with the science laid out for us, with the actual cause laid out clearly in front of us, we can see what the active ingredients are, and we can simplify and speed up the healing process. And having the science also validates our suffering in a way we’ve never before been able to see clearly. Whether you have a “real” disease, a “psychological” disease, a “functional disorder” or something completely unnamed, we can now see that it’s all the same process: pathostatic chemicals changing your brain and your chemical composition and your physiology at a full body scale. Those changes causing predictable downstream dysfunction like vasoconstriction and glucose elevation and clearance failures that lead to all of the diseases that we have defined. This then creates attractor states that can run for years or decades. All of this is expected given our 500 million year old threat detection system as it’s now paired up with our human cognition. It’s all the same thing, and it’s no one’s fault. And now we have the simple map of what’s wrong, we can address what’s upstream rather than playing whack a mole with downstream expressions.

With all of this knowledge, it becomes clear that addressing illness and suffering demands a reframe. Healing is not a destination, but a new bowl we build one moment at a time, over time. Each momentary change makes the load easier, the bowl stronger, and the work more automatic.