A research program on chronic pain and illness
People with chronic pain and illness turn to mind-body practices in search of relief and greater agency. Some describe meaningful changes. We want to understand what these practices can offer, how they might work, and how to evaluate them well.
Santa Barbara · August 2026 · ongoing research program
Could the body keep restoring pain or disease, and what would allow that pattern to shift?
A valley represents a pattern the system tends to return to. One path settles back into the same valley after a disturbance. The other crosses a ridge and settles into a possible healthier pattern, representing the reset hypothesis. Active-inference and dynamical-systems models ask what could produce either trajectory. Whether this landscape exists for a particular condition or phase of illness, and whether any practice can change it, are empirical questions.
The research questions
Question 01
Symptoms, loss of function, physiological changes, and disease activity may reflect different combinations of ongoing pathology, residual injury, sensitization, learning, behavior, treatment, and context. We study which processes matter in a particular condition and phase of illness.
Question 02
We examine the practice itself, the process it may affect, who benefits or worsens, and whether change appears in symptoms, daily function, physiology, disease activity, treatment burden, or the long-term course of illness.
These questions are connected, but their answers may differ. A person may feel or function better without a change in disease activity. Understanding what sustains a condition also does not guarantee that a particular practice will help.
We are developing measurements and study designs that can locate where change, nonresponse, or harm comes from and test competing explanations over time.
The conceptual paper Have you tried switching it off and on again? is one reference for a candidate model of persistence and change.
Following several outcomes over the same period can show where a program's effects appear.
Current work
Each project addresses part of the research agenda through evidence review, program evaluation, measurement, experiments, or shared research infrastructure.
A field map and research agenda for studying how symptoms, function, physiology, disease activity, and recovery relate across conditions and treatments.
Current work includes evidence mapping, claim tracing, and the design of studies that can distinguish competing explanations.
A structured way to examine what mind-body and nervous-system programs ask people to do, what they claim, what evidence they cite, and how they handle benefit, nonresponse, harm, cost, medical care, and exit rights.
The Primal Trust pilot and an independent review are complete. The audit method, software, public-source cases, and cross-program comparison are continuing.
Measurements and experiments that follow chronic pain and illness over time, including continuously active processes, thresholds, response size and duration, recovery, recurrence, conditioning, and actual exposure to practices.
Current study designs compare explanations such as ongoing pathology, altered reactivity, sensitization and learning, treatment effects, natural history, and measurement error. The multimodal pilot is an early methods case.
An adaptive interview for following how experience changes across a session: what a person notices, when it changes, where it is felt, how it is interpreted, and whether attention, agency, or sense of self also change.
The current prototype is being developed as a repeatable instrument. The work will compare it with a fixed interview and test reliability, sensitivity to change, and whether it adds useful information alongside physiology and simpler self-report.
Research on who benefits, who does not, who worsens, which outcome changes, and how timing, dose, medical coordination, and stop rules affect results.
This work is defining the evidence and prospective measurements needed to replace broad responder stories with testable selection questions.
Conceptual and empirical work on how conscious belief, expectation, learning, social context, autonomic regulation, immune processes, and tissue state may relate.
Current projects are turning broad cross-level ideas into defined variables, bounded claims, rival explanations, and measurements.
A shared research environment where people and their agents can work from the same sources, preserve claims and disagreements, and develop versioned research with its provenance attached.
The Commons now supports source search, contributions, review, artifacts, member collaboration, and a growing transcript stewardship process.
How we study it
Mind-body practices here may involve attention, movement, breathing, interpretation, exposure, relationship, and repetition. We study them through mechanistic models, accounts of experience, and tools for measuring change. Each contributes a different part of the answer.
Active inference and dynamical systems may show how a practice alters attention, expectation, learning, action, or a recurring response pattern. We turn those accounts into predictions and compare them with pathology, sensitization, ordinary learning, treatment effects, and natural history.
Interviews, participant accounts, and program audits show what people actually do and experience, including relief, greater agency, no change, adverse effects, and the influence of explanation, relationship, and context.
We develop interviews, repeated measures, physiological sensing, and experiments that track symptoms, function, physiology, disease activity, treatment burden, adverse effects, and durability separately.
The Healing Science Commons connects the sources, claims, disagreements, prototypes, and studies so that this work can accumulate and be reviewed across people and their agents.
People
The group brings experience in chronic pain and illness, pain recovery, neuroscience, phenomenology, movement, physiology, philosophy of mind, and research infrastructure.
Inflammatory illness, healing practice, program audits, research infrastructure
Neuroscience, interoception, self-transcendence, multiscale models
Pain recovery, PRT, active inference, phenomenological methods
Mathematical active inference, AI, adaptive neurophenomenology
Google DeepMind, self-recognition, embodiment, AI systems
Movement science, motor rehabilitation, somatic practice
Philosophy of mind, active inference, self-experience, biofeedback
USC neuroscience of interoception, physiology, consciousness
Contribute
Choose a project or research question, then send a short note describing the contribution you can make. Useful starting points include reviewing a claim or method, contributing condition-specific evidence, improving an experiment, building Commons infrastructure, or supporting a defined next step.
What to include
Name the project or question, what you can contribute, and one useful first step. A brief note is enough.
Please do not send private health records or proprietary material by email.
Bring scientific, clinical, engineering, design, advocacy, or implementation expertise to one of the active workstreams.
Challenge a mechanism, test an instrument, improve a study design, or identify evidence and alternatives the current team has missed.
Help define meaningful outcomes, surface nonresponse and harms, and prevent a model that fits one condition from being generalized to another.
Support the phenomenology instrument, multimodal methods pilot, comparative program audit, or a discriminating experiment with an explicit scope, budget, timeline, and failure criteria.