Principal Investigator

Gabriel Kram

The Autonomics Innovation Lab

Hearth Science

Affiliations

The Autonomics Clinic

THE AUTONOMICS INNOVATION LAB

Working on novel in vivo cartography of the Autonomic Nervous System & its application to human and planetary flourishing.

For the past decade, Hearth Science has been developing a novel in vivo neurophysiological cartography of the Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) and its affiliated neurochemistries that redraws the functional architecture and inter-relationships between the three primary autonomic systems, significantly updating their embodied neural cartography beyond what is commonly understood in both traditional neurology and Polyvagal Theory (Porges, 1994). This novel neurological mapping, and its de-coupling from affiliated neurochemistries metabolized by the ANS (classical autonomic neurological namings conjoin neurological systems and their affiliated threat chemistries) combine with the Porgesian concept of neuroception, the moment-to-moment autonomic neural detection of safety, danger, or lifethreat to define a three-variable system whose integral is autonomic state. This novel conceptualization provides a more nuanced and descriptive quantifiable description of eustress and allostatic loads, of the neurobiological sequelae of salutogenic and stressful events, alterations to, or retained deflections of autonomic baselines, and explains clinical observations about the transitions between various modes of stress response, dramatically increasing the precision and delineation of autonomic state, in its particular embodied neurology, as well as demarcating more precise intervention pathways for stress metabolism and release mechanisms. Since much of what is making modern people unwell is stress-related, and since the Autonomic Nervous System, as the neural architecture of the mindbody connection, is the primary neurological and neurochemical conduit of both ill and well-being, developing more precisely descriptive mappings of the functional in vivo embodied (e.g., extra-cranial) dynamics of these systems, and their relationships with both salutogenesis and disease etiology has profound implications for medicine, mental health, performance, and human flourishing broadly construed.

Research

In June of 2024 we codified and reduced to practice a new foundation model of living autonomic physiology, the research for which we had been assembling since 2012.

At this point, we are particularly interested in

  1. novel diagnostic methods for quantifying and visualizing in vivo autonomic dynamics with a particular focus on respiration as the primary autonomic portal

  2. neural interacts between interoception, proprioception, the vestibular system and vision in the felt mapping of space around the body. Neuroscience has taught us that proprioception is the ability to feel the body in space, but our work with patients and clients who have lost and recovered their proprioception has taught us that it is also the ability to feel space around the body.

  3. interoception as the mother of all senses. Most of us have been taught from a young age that we have five senses, but these are in fact intero-senses. Humans have numerous inwardly oriented senses, the most primary of which, interoception, is capable of co-opting or collaborating with all of the extero-senses if they need to be recruited by the autonomic nervous system

Publications

Kram, G (2025) Towards an Accurate In Vivo Reconceptualizing of Autonomic State, white paper on ResearchGate, doi: 10.5281/zenodo.17159077

Kram, G (2025) Autonomics Poster - Foundation Model, poster prepared for the International Society for Autonomic Neuroscience, doi: 10.13140/RG.2.2.36776.43523

Kram, G (2025) AUTONOMIC DIAGNOSTICS: Towards Accurate In Vivo Autonomic Measurement, white paper on ResearchGate, doi: 10.5281/zenodo.17391070.

Kram, G (2025), A typology of chronic defensive autonomic states as specific antecedents to disease etiology, white paper on ResearchGate, doi 10.5281/zenodo.17243687

Application of Research in the world

In addition to informing our own product ecology, we are applying research within the realm of our ‘Autonomics Inside’ partnerships, and in our neurotechnology incubator.