This is a frame I've been waiting to see articulated — health as a cross-disciplinary, energetic process rather than a purely molecular one. I'd offer one addition, from a discipline that rarely gets a seat at this table: the built environment.
You describe the mind as “the subjective interface between our inner biology and our outer environment.” But that outer environment is now largely one we construct — and some of its inputs may act on cellular energetics through pathways that don't begin with conscious perception.
Light is an intriguing example. Mitochondrial dynamics and respiration appear to be clock-controlled and aligned with the light–dark cycle (Ceccato et al., Mitochondrion, 2026), while Glen Jeffery's group at UCL has reported wavelength-dependent effects on mitochondrial function, including opposing effects of shorter blue and longer red wavelengths.
The environment isn't simply a backdrop the mind perceives. It is also a continuous source of physical and sensory information to biology.
So perhaps the frame is not only mind–body, but mind–body–space. We evolved for hundreds of thousands of years in natural environments, yet in little more than a century we have radically remade the conditions in which we spend most of our lives.
If reductionism's failure is leaving things outside the field of view, the spaces we now spend around 90% of our lives inside may be one of the largest things still outside it.
That's the bridge I spend my days on, from the design side. I'd love to see it built from yours too.
One challenge is that our health frameworks and measurement tools are still overwhelmingly built around asking which compound is present than at characterizing the signals in an environment, how they are patterned across space and time, and what they mean for a living system. That may be why findings like this still seem surprising, even though people working across circadian biology, architecture, environmental design, and physiology have been pointing in this direction for some time.
Thank you — and that New Scientist piece is incredibly timely.
You've named the exact gap. And I'd frame it in your own terms: energy.
The nervous system is predictive. It uses information from the environment to anticipate what is coming and prepare the body accordingly. The circadian system is perhaps the clearest example: light doesn't simply allow us to see; its timing helps the body anticipate the biological day and organise resources around it.
That makes the environment more than a backdrop. It becomes part of the information system through which biology regulates energy and prepares for demand.
And I think your point about frameworks is crucial. Wearables and exposome research are giving us increasingly sophisticated ways to measure what surrounds us. But our health models still rarely ask what those environmental signals mean to a living system.
I've started thinking of the modern built environment as a source of ultra-processed biological inputs. Signals that historically arrived in coherent patterns — light, temperature, sound, activity — have been stripped apart and recombined in novel ways. We now spend most of our lives inside those environments, yet these inputs rarely appear together in our models of health.
It feels as though we're approaching the same question from opposite ends — you from biology and energy, me from the environments supplying the information. I'd love to find where they meet.
Love this conversation! Long ago, I was an evolutionary ecologist studying how organisms survive and adapt in the natural world. Fitness (the biological term) could be measured using structural equation modeling (path analysis) tracing multivariate inputs on the overarching output of lifetime organismal fitness. Without needing to be bound by a strict hypothesis of mechanism, we could start with trying to identify the major causal pathways that impact health. The microhabitat or built environment definitely needs to be a factor included!
Absolutely. Integrating longitudinal physiological, behavioural, social, and environmental data could help identify the pathways through which lived conditions become biologically embedded.
The essay does not yet present a mechanism, causal model, or experimental design that would distinguish these interpretations from more conventional neuroendocrine, behavioral, or psychosomatic explanations.
At this stage, such claims therefore remain speculative rather than empirically distinguished.
A better approach would be to consider the extensive placebo and nocebo literature, which has experimentally demonstrated expectation-dependent changes in physiology and symptom expression under controlled conditions.
These studies could provide a much more robust empirical basis for testing specific causal pathways between mind and body or cosmos. Or whatever.
I agree. The next step is not simply to invoke subjective experience, but to develop rigorous ways of linking first-person reports to the physiological and behavioural data collected alongside them. That means treating phenomenology as structured data: defining what is experienced, measuring how it changes over time, and testing its relationship to specific biological states and interventions. Building this bridge would give questions at the boundary of mind and body the same empirical infrastructure we expect of any other scientific model.
As we increase the understanding of the science of life, it is also essential not to forget the philosophy of life. We are not robots. Perhaps the physical life we live is just the tip of an iceberg.
Yes, mind and consciousness must be more completely understood if we are to arrive at a realistic picture of health. This is where ancient knowledge may be superior to modern thinking. We need a complete science of consciousness and mind to properly explore health, and the ancients appear to have been far ahead of us in this field. I recently wrote a story intended to help bridge the gap between subjective and objective and help us to attain a new standard of health care, available here: https://jeantobin.com/true-health-care-research.
What we feel is not decorative. It is informational. Emotions are the body’s real-time report on the quality and direction of its own energy. They do not merely accompany physiology; they reshape it.
This is why physical optimization alone is incomplete. An optimized body is still an energy system, and energy systems respond to the quality of the information running through them. Emotion is high-bandwidth information. It can amplify or degrade every other variable—sleep, digestion, hormonal rhythm, even the efficiency of mitochondrial ATP production—because those systems are downstream of the nervous system’s appraisal of safety and meaning.
I guess the mind is well explored in Hindu as well as Buddhist philosophy. Mind is considered as a driver of the body's senses and functions. So the control of mind is the first thing needed in our welfare. This is where the meditation practice has its roots.
This is a frame I've been waiting to see articulated — health as a cross-disciplinary, energetic process rather than a purely molecular one. I'd offer one addition, from a discipline that rarely gets a seat at this table: the built environment.
You describe the mind as “the subjective interface between our inner biology and our outer environment.” But that outer environment is now largely one we construct — and some of its inputs may act on cellular energetics through pathways that don't begin with conscious perception.
Light is an intriguing example. Mitochondrial dynamics and respiration appear to be clock-controlled and aligned with the light–dark cycle (Ceccato et al., Mitochondrion, 2026), while Glen Jeffery's group at UCL has reported wavelength-dependent effects on mitochondrial function, including opposing effects of shorter blue and longer red wavelengths.
The environment isn't simply a backdrop the mind perceives. It is also a continuous source of physical and sensory information to biology.
So perhaps the frame is not only mind–body, but mind–body–space. We evolved for hundreds of thousands of years in natural environments, yet in little more than a century we have radically remade the conditions in which we spend most of our lives.
If reductionism's failure is leaving things outside the field of view, the spaces we now spend around 90% of our lives inside may be one of the largest things still outside it.
That's the bridge I spend my days on, from the design side. I'd love to see it built from yours too.
I love the way you’ve articulated this. Serendipitously, this article (https://www.newscientist.com/article/2582914-the-shock-revelation-that-light-bulbs-are-wrecking-your-metabolism/) that came out today emphasizes that the environment around us isn't a backdrop to our internal states, but a continuous source of biophysical information.
One challenge is that our health frameworks and measurement tools are still overwhelmingly built around asking which compound is present than at characterizing the signals in an environment, how they are patterned across space and time, and what they mean for a living system. That may be why findings like this still seem surprising, even though people working across circadian biology, architecture, environmental design, and physiology have been pointing in this direction for some time.
Thank you — and that New Scientist piece is incredibly timely.
You've named the exact gap. And I'd frame it in your own terms: energy.
The nervous system is predictive. It uses information from the environment to anticipate what is coming and prepare the body accordingly. The circadian system is perhaps the clearest example: light doesn't simply allow us to see; its timing helps the body anticipate the biological day and organise resources around it.
That makes the environment more than a backdrop. It becomes part of the information system through which biology regulates energy and prepares for demand.
And I think your point about frameworks is crucial. Wearables and exposome research are giving us increasingly sophisticated ways to measure what surrounds us. But our health models still rarely ask what those environmental signals mean to a living system.
I've started thinking of the modern built environment as a source of ultra-processed biological inputs. Signals that historically arrived in coherent patterns — light, temperature, sound, activity — have been stripped apart and recombined in novel ways. We now spend most of our lives inside those environments, yet these inputs rarely appear together in our models of health.
It feels as though we're approaching the same question from opposite ends — you from biology and energy, me from the environments supplying the information. I'd love to find where they meet.
Love this conversation! Long ago, I was an evolutionary ecologist studying how organisms survive and adapt in the natural world. Fitness (the biological term) could be measured using structural equation modeling (path analysis) tracing multivariate inputs on the overarching output of lifetime organismal fitness. Without needing to be bound by a strict hypothesis of mechanism, we could start with trying to identify the major causal pathways that impact health. The microhabitat or built environment definitely needs to be a factor included!
Absolutely. Integrating longitudinal physiological, behavioural, social, and environmental data could help identify the pathways through which lived conditions become biologically embedded.
The essay does not yet present a mechanism, causal model, or experimental design that would distinguish these interpretations from more conventional neuroendocrine, behavioral, or psychosomatic explanations.
At this stage, such claims therefore remain speculative rather than empirically distinguished.
A better approach would be to consider the extensive placebo and nocebo literature, which has experimentally demonstrated expectation-dependent changes in physiology and symptom expression under controlled conditions.
These studies could provide a much more robust empirical basis for testing specific causal pathways between mind and body or cosmos. Or whatever.
I agree. The next step is not simply to invoke subjective experience, but to develop rigorous ways of linking first-person reports to the physiological and behavioural data collected alongside them. That means treating phenomenology as structured data: defining what is experienced, measuring how it changes over time, and testing its relationship to specific biological states and interventions. Building this bridge would give questions at the boundary of mind and body the same empirical infrastructure we expect of any other scientific model.
The bridge is simple; the dam is human resistance to change. You don't fight it, you ignore it and get on with your life.
🔥 🔥
As we increase the understanding of the science of life, it is also essential not to forget the philosophy of life. We are not robots. Perhaps the physical life we live is just the tip of an iceberg.
Yes, mind and consciousness must be more completely understood if we are to arrive at a realistic picture of health. This is where ancient knowledge may be superior to modern thinking. We need a complete science of consciousness and mind to properly explore health, and the ancients appear to have been far ahead of us in this field. I recently wrote a story intended to help bridge the gap between subjective and objective and help us to attain a new standard of health care, available here: https://jeantobin.com/true-health-care-research.
What we feel is not decorative. It is informational. Emotions are the body’s real-time report on the quality and direction of its own energy. They do not merely accompany physiology; they reshape it.
This is why physical optimization alone is incomplete. An optimized body is still an energy system, and energy systems respond to the quality of the information running through them. Emotion is high-bandwidth information. It can amplify or degrade every other variable—sleep, digestion, hormonal rhythm, even the efficiency of mitochondrial ATP production—because those systems are downstream of the nervous system’s appraisal of safety and meaning.
I guess the mind is well explored in Hindu as well as Buddhist philosophy. Mind is considered as a driver of the body's senses and functions. So the control of mind is the first thing needed in our welfare. This is where the meditation practice has its roots.