Thirty-nine scientists just declared polyvagal theory “untenable.” Then the internet did what the internet does: collapsed a complicated disciplinary dispute into a headline:
Polyvagal Theory Has Been Debunked.
Therapists panicked. Bodyworkers questioned everything. Social media piled on. I’ve been watching this unfold from my treatment room, where bodies continue to do things the debate cannot account for, and I want to say something that neither side seems willing to say:
Stephen Porges was right about something enormous.
But then he made it small.
The Insight
Porges’ real contribution was never a nerve. It was an organizing principle: that the body arranges itself hierarchically around safety and threat, that this arrangement is physiological before it’s psychological, and co-regulation between nervous systems is the substrate of healing. These ideas changed how an entire generation of clinicians understood trauma. They gave biological language to what bodies do when overwhelmed—freeze, collapse, dissociate—and why telling someone to “calm down” is like telling a drowning person to breathe.
That insight remains true.
It remains clinically indispensable.
Not one of the thirty-nine signatories disputes it.
What they dispute is the wiring diagram.
The Mistake
Porges had a revolutionary insight about the body as a whole system organized around felt safety. Then he went looking for one nerve to be the hero of the story. He needed an empirical anchor—something measurable, something that would earn him a seat at the reductionist research table—and he chose respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA), the subtle fluctuation of heart rate that synchronizes with breathing. He treated RSA as a clean readout of “ventral vagal function.” A window into the social engagement system.
This was his first mistake, and it was fatal to his theory’s credibility. He took the easy road, built on heart rate variability research, already well-established, and made too much of it. He tethered a whole-body truth to a single metric twice removed from the phenomena he was actually describing.
Paul Grossman—the researcher who’s been hammering this point for twenty years—finally got thirty-eight colleagues to co-sign on this: RSA is confounded by too many other variables to serve as a pathway-specific index of anything. The dorsal motor nucleus doesn’t produce the cardiac effects Porges suggests. The evolutionary phylogeny—reptilian vagus versus mammalian vagus—just doesn’t hold up against comparative biology.
These are legitimate scientific arguments. They deserve to be taken seriously. But here’s the part the debunkers don’t say out loud: none of this means that the hierarchy of autonomic states is wrong. It means Porges chose the wrong instrument to measure it.
Porges found the right room
but knocked on the wrong door.
The Deeper Error
But I want to name something bigger than Porges’ measurement problem, because the same error lives inside the critique. Both sides—the polyvagal camp and the debunkers—are arguing about which nerve does what to the heart. While they argue about the wiring, bodies on my massage table do things neither of their models explains.
The reductionist fallacy isn’t that
Porges got the vagus wrong.
It’s that everyone—Porges included—
keeps trying to locate the body’s
regulatory intelligence in its nerves.
What the body itself keeps trying to tell them:
Gil Hedley—the anatomist who has dissected more human bodies than most people—has documented confounding anastomoses in the vagus nerve that connect it to both sympathetic and parasympathetic pathways. Let that land. The vagus nerve, the very structure at the center of this entire debate, does not respect the boundary between the two branches of the autonomic nervous system. At the level of actual tissue, the “parasympathetic” vagus is cross-wired with “sympathetic” pathways in ways that most neuroanatomy doesn’t map.
Porges says the dorsal vagus does X. Grossman says no, it doesn’t. And Hedley opens the body and finds the wiring doesn’t respect the categories either of them use. That’s not an inconvenient finding.
That’s the body saying: your filing system is not my filing system.
The entire polyvagal debate is arguing
about a border that does not exist.
If the clean division between sympathetic and parasympathetic isn’t even anatomically clear, then the entire polyvagal debate is arguing about a border that doesn’t exist in actual tissue. Reality intervenes to show both sides drawing lines on a map while the truth of the territory ignores them. We don’t see the complete picture. What we see is that reductionism wants convenience, but convenience is not truth.
Has anyone in this debate ever heard of the neuroendocrine system?
I ask this without sarcasm, because the entire polyvagal controversy proceeds as if “state” is an electrical event—a nerve fires, heart rate changes, and the predicted autonomic hierarchy clicks into gear. As if the body’s response to safety and threat travels on named pathways, like data through a cable.
State is not an electrical event.
State is a whole-body electro-chemical event.
”State” Lives in the Milieu
When someone drops into a state of dissociative freeze on my table—or when they come out of it—I am not watching a nerve fire. I am watching a cascade. Cortisol and adrenaline flooding or receding. Oxytocin and vasopressin shifting the relational field. The entire HPA axis reorganizing. Cytokines signaling the immune system. Gut peptides talking to the brainstem. The endocannabinoid system modulating all of it. Inflammatory mediators crossing the blood-brain barrier or, mercifully, standing down. Fascia shifts in unexpected and dramatic fashion.
This isn’t limited to an axon potential inside a nerve. It’s happening in fluid (which nerves contain). It’s in the extracellular matrix and the interstitium—that body-wide, fluid-filled network Neil Theise identified in 2018. Nobody in the polyvagal debate nor its detractors bothered to mention.
Your connective tissue soaks in this chemistry. Fascia responds to it. Scar tissue shapes itself over months and years. And gut flora—your most ancient intelligence, predating the vagus nerve by hundreds of millions of evolutionary years—is producing the neurotransmitters that determine your mood, depositing them in crypts between your intestinal villi at a density of 25,000 per square inch, each one innervated by a branch of the vagus that takes its orders from those gut flora.
The Cartesian Error Inside the Correction
Here is the irony that makes me want to throw things: polyvagal theory was supposed correct Cartesian dualism. Porges said, “The body matters. Physiological state shapes (I would add precedes) psychological experience.” True. Revolutionary. Essential.
And then he went looking for one nerve to be the entire driver of the mechanism. Which is still brain talking down to body through a wire. Still neuro-centric. He thought he identified the correct wire.
The critics did the same thing in reverse. Grossman says the dorsal motor nucleus doesn’t produce bradycardia the way Porges claims. Fine. But Grossman’s alternative isn’t “the body is more complex than any single-nerve model can capture.” His alternative is “the ventral nucleus does more of the cardiac work than the dorsal one.” He’s arguing about which brainstem nucleus deserves the credit. He’s rearranging deck chairs on the same brain-centric ship.
Meanwhile, on my treatment table, a woman’s connective tissue is releasing scar tissue in her adductor from a forgotten trauma, and as it floats from tissue to memory, implicit to explicit, she is sweating, her teeth are chattering, her hands have gone ice cold, her color is cycling through the whole spectrum of autonomic states—and nobody in that debate can tell me which nucleus is doing that. Because no single nucleus is. Her whole body’s doing it. Her chemistry, her tissue density, her fluid dynamics, her immune system, her endocrine cascade, her fascia, her interstitium—all of it. Simultaneously, in concert.
The body doesn’t regulate
through one single channel.
It regulates through… everything.
What We Actually See:
I’ve been tracking autonomic states in clinical settings for over twenty-five years. Not through RSA. Not through heart rate monitors. Through what the body actually does when it’s moving through its own hierarchy of responses.
Color changes. Observable, reproducible, mappable color changes that track physiological state-shifts in real time. From the ashen grey of deep shutdown through the blotchy red of sympathetic activation through the warm pink of regulated presence. I call such states The Regulation Rainbow, and it’s a more honest index of autonomic state than anything a heart rate monitor can capture, because it reflects the whole milieu—the vascular response, the inflammatory status, the endocrine output, the tissue perfusion—instead of one electrical proxy.
This is what literalists miss. They reduce everything to bean-counting—which nucleus fires, which measurement validates—and in doing so they lose the forest for the neuron. The body’s intelligence is not located in any one structure.
It’s distributed.
Through the entire matrix.
Faster Than Nerves
There is a claim in the bodywork tradition, originating with the osteopath Rollin Becker, that fascia transmits information at speeds up to 200 times faster than neural conduction. This is, by conventional neuroscience standards, highly speculative. I hold it lightly. But I hold it because I have to account for what I observe clinically: information arriving in tissue before any neural pathway could have delivered it. Practitioners who sense pathology under their hands before conscious cognition has time to process what they’re feeling. I call the phenomenon clairnascence — the numinosity of something coming into being that has not existed before — perception and even sentience that seem to emerge from the tissue itself rather than the brain.
If the fascial matrix, continuous from dura to dermis, is an information-conducting medium—if microtubules in every cell (not just neurons, but fibroblasts, osteocytes, smooth muscle cells) are the priming substrate of processing—if the interstitium is a body-wide signaling network bathed in fluid that carries all chemical information everywhere all at once—then we have a model for embodied intelligence that doesn’t need to route everything through the brainstem.
We have, in other words, what “intuition” might actually be. Not fast thinking. Slow arriving—information that was already in the tissue, processed at a speed and by a mechanism the reductionists haven’t (yet) built an instrument to measure.
Polyvagal theory couldn’t see this because it was still looking through the neural lens. The critique can’t see it for the same reason. Both stand there in the same room, arguing about which light switch controls the chandelier, while sunlight pours through every window.
Totems, Not Laws
Let me be clear about what I’m not saying. I’m not saying the vagus nerve doesn’t matter. It’s a staggeringly important structure—the primary interface between gut intelligence and brain awareness, the carrier of ascending signals from the most ancient biology in your body to the cognitive overlay that believes it’s running the show. The vagus matters.
I’m also not saying Porges’ hierarchy is wrong. Bodies organize in graduated states from immobilization through mobilization to social engagement. Clinicians see this every day. It’s observable, reproducible, and clinically actionable. The hierarchy is real.
But the hierarchy is architectural. Older cranial structures didn’t arrive with species labels on them. Worms evolved before lizards, which evolved before mammals. The brainstem predates the limbic system, which predates the cortex. These are timestamps, not taxonomies. When we say, “reptile brain,” we’re using a totem, not citing law. Evolution is real. Our capacities are real. But calling it “reptilian” is a poetic shorthand for “this was here first”—literalists mistake poetry for a scientific claim.
Evolution actually works as a layering of capacities, each one absorbed into the next, the previous version still running. Your brainstem didn’t stop being ancient when your cortex showed up. Your gut flora didn’t stop making neurotransmitters when your prefrontal cortex learned to do math. All of the old systems are still there, still primary, still making the decisions that matter most—whether you’re safe, whether you can digest, whether the next breath comes easy or hard—while the newest layer writes papers about which dorsal or ventral nucleus gets the credit.
Hierarchy is enacted by the whole body, not by one nerve. It’s chemical, mechanical, fluidic, fascial, endocrine, immune, and neural—simultaneously. The limbic system makes and distributes messages that affect gut motility. The pituitary gives marching orders to the thyroid, pancreas, adrenals, ovaries, and testes. These glands release chemicals—estrogen, testosterone, opiates, oxytocin—that further shape the state. The thalamus converts electrical information into chemical information. The gut flora produce dopamine, serotonin, norepinephrine, and epinephrine and deposit them in your intestinal crypts. Inflammatory cascades from a permeable gut cross the blood-brain barrier to narrow perception itself.
We cannot be reduced to one nerve.
We are an entire ecosystem.
An ecosystem doesn’t need polyvagal theory to be perfectly correct to do what it does. The body was organizing around safety and threat long before Porges described it, long before Grossman critiqued it, and long before thirty-nine scientists signed a paper about it. The body was doing this when we were still sea creatures. It was doing it before we had a vagus nerve at all.
A Note to Eager Deconstructionists
There is a flavor of controversy that goes beyond legitimate scientific critique, and I want to name it because it’s becoming a pattern. The speed with which social media turned “some neuroanatomical claims are contested” into “everything you learned about the nervous system is a lie” is not accidental. There is a constituency that feeds on debunking—that finds a colonizer in every lump of sugar, that reduces a paradigm-shifting clinical insight to its most vulnerable technical claim, and then dances on the grave.
This is the social reconstructionist move: locate the flaw, amplify it beyond proportion, and use it to delegitimize the whole. It happens to somatic modalities with particular ferocity because the body’s intelligence is already culturally suspect. Anything that can’t be bean-counted is vulnerable. Anything that relies on practitioner perception, on clinical observation rather than a double-blind protocol, is fair game.
The literalists who insist that polyvagal theory’s imprecision invalidates its clinical utility are making the same error as literalists who insist chakras can’t describe real physiological phenomena because chakras aren’t anatomical structures, although they certainly have anatomical analogs. They’re confusing the map with the territory. They’re demanding that the only valid description of the landscape is a satellite photo. It’s not.
What Comes Next
Porges provided the insight that the body organizes around safety. His mistake was tethering that insight to a single measurement in a single nerve, because that’s what our reductionist culture demands. That gave his detractors the very weapon they needed.
What comes next requires holding a harder truth: the body’s intelligence is distributed, humoral, fascial, chemical, and mechanical—and we do not yet have instruments precise enough to capture it. The laboratory method—controlled, timed, isolated—may be incapable of seeing what emerges in private conditions of safety, presence, and relational co-regulation.
In my clinical world, we work with four domains—biochemistry, biomechanics, emotions, and scar tissue—because no single domain explains what we see and feel in the territory of the whole body. The scar from a cesarean section is biochemical (inflammatory), biomechanical (restricts fascia), emotional (terror, loss of agency), and by definition, a scar (producing aberrant collagen) all at once. Release the scar, and the whole ecology shifts. Not one nerve. The whole system.
Gil Hedley’s anastomoses. Rollin Becker’s fascial transmission speeds. Neil Theise’s interstitium. These are not fringe observations. They are dispatches from territories the map hasn’t caught up to yet. The body confounds every category we impose on it, keeps cross-wiring between systems we insist are separate, and keeps healing through mechanisms we haven’t named.
The polyvagal debate is a tempest in a teapot—not because the science doesn’t matter, but because both sides are fighting over a teapot when the ocean is right here.
The body is not a machine with wires.
The body is a sea with currents.
And the currents don’t care which nerve gets the credit.
With well-tempered rage and a lot of love, Ellen
Ellen,
Reading this feels to me like entering a cathedral and listening to Bach or the world itself singing.
My intelligence, such as it may be, bows and smiles and is grateful you are in the world.
So much YES to all of this!