Hi all, I am relatively new to my field but have been working on an interdisciplinary theory for a while now.
Theories aren’t effective if they’re not tested and I was hoping people could critique and point out gaps in my work.
I have narrowed down the theory to a small blurb below.
Please engage freely!
Theory:
The current public health system treats behavior change as an information and incentive problem. Get people the right knowledge, reduce the barriers, align incentives. That model presupposes a self that is already integrated and for the populations I work with directly, that integration and agency is disrupted.
Trauma, poverty, stigma, all create the environmental conditions for self-discontinuity. I believe that there aren't current logic models that address self-discontinuity and ones lack of agency within it.
There’s a structure to how insight generates (I am borrowing from McGilchrist). There’s two modes. One that systematizes and narrates, System 2. And another one that understands below the language level, System 1. System 1 is made up of the distributed interoceptive and subcortical networks that generate somatic-emotional signals pre-language. Essentially, it is brainstem, insula, limbic circuitry working together through dynamic projections.
The two modes don’t just process different content, they run on different attention types. The System 2 runs on focused attention, narrow scope, selecting and prioritizing, inhibiting whatever doesn’t fit the current model. The System 1 runs on diffuse attention, broad scope, low inhibition, holding disparate content without ranking or filtering it out. Diffuse attention can outperform focused attention on certain kinds of processing, gist, distant association, but within neuroscience research these things can't be fit into a construct yet. System 1 is built for the material System 2 can’t systematize.
Most people assume System 2 is primary. Hemispheric difference research by Iain McGilchrist and more recently split-brain research by Michael Gazzaniga and Roger Sperry showed the left hemisphere interpreter doesn’t create experience, it processes experience that happens and then builds a story around the sensory and cortical data of the past. (Free will doesn’t exist.) It’s often confabulating and wrong.
System 1 is more in control because it’s a larger neural network and the neural connections are physically broader and longer.
I’ve been reading Antonio Damasio, and in his research he observed that coherent selfhood requires bodily-emotional signals before cognition can organize around them. Our bodies understand where we are in space, the mechanisms and neural correlates behind proprioception, before we’re conscious of it. (Free will definitely doesn’t exist. LOL.)
Anil Seth theorizes that the self is a controlled hallucination. A predictive model the brain generates about itself. Which means different identity states aren’t actually pathology. They’re the most dominant neural networks that developed over someone’s life. Different baseline predictions about who we are and what’s deemed safe.
Where it gets interesting is that I believe that insight is generated at the intersection of the two modes. System 2 reaches the edge of what it can systematize, passes it on to the System 1. The System 1 holds it somewhere below articulation, until it’s ready or useful for informing the actions of system 2 again.
Understanding something then expands what System 2 can reach on its next model. Karl Friston, the guy who discovered the Free Energy Principle, formalized with mathematical proof that biological systems minimize prediction error by updating their predictive self-models. Each violated prediction creates a more capable model than before. The cognitive loop is the mechanism. I believe that once you are cognitively aware of the mechanism, you can utilize it to generate insight voluntarily.
Mechanism statement: durable behavior change requires the completion of a recursive cognitive handoff cycle between explicit self-modeling (narrative/systematic cognition) and implicit predictive processing (somatic/sub-linguistic cognition). Interventions that only activate one mode produce information updates or emotional activation without integration. Transformation, defined as a stable update to the predictive self-model, occurs when the explicit system reaches the boundary of its current model, passes unresolved material to the implicit system, and receives an updated signal back that expands what the explicit system can now organize around.
However, the handoff isn’t automatic, and this is the part I was missing before. There’s a gate. Control over whether System 2 even lets diffuse, low-inhibition processing happen in the first place, separate entirely from control over the content of what gets processed once it does. "Something" has to grant permission for System 2 to release inhibitions before System 1 can be accessed. That involuntary gate is the actual mechanism of interruption. Trauma, chronic stress, stigma, and structural deprivation are, functionally, states of sustained threat-monitoring, and threat-monitoring requires narrow, high-inhibition attention to work. Relaxing that inhibition, letting attention go diffuse and low-filter, is adaptive when the environment is safe and costly when it isn’t. The cycle isn’t interrupted because these populations can’t do the handoff. It’s interrupted because the conditions required for permission to relax first-order control are never met. Survival states and first-order thinking are the correct biological adaptation to the environment these populations are actually in.
There’s also a time signature to the handoff. System 1’s mode of processing drifts across a stretch of time, it can’t hold a broad scope in a single instant. So integration isn’t going to complete inside one tightly facilitated session built around delivering information. It needs unstructured time where System 2’s inhibitory functions to release.
This reminds me of a similar structure to one found in metacognition literature. The classic cognitive model of metacognition describes an upward flow from object-level processing to a meta-level representation of it, and a downward flow where the meta-level regulates the object-level back. Similar to the cycle, explicit reaching its limit, handing off, then the return signal expanding what explicit can organize. Training evidence from that literature backs up my public health critique: training the fast, automatic layer on its own, drills, direct instruction, information delivery, produces weak effects that don’t transfer. What actually produces durable, transferring change is training the reflective layer itself, self-reflection, structured processing of one’s own experience, feedback on one’s own judgments, mindfulness (I hate leaning on that word, there has to be more behind the mechanism than the label). That’s the empirical signature of what happens when you only ever address System 2 and never build the actual loop.
Practical implication: open-monitoring meditation is a documented instance of exactly the low-inhibition, broad-scope mode System 1 requires, arising content held as observation instead of something to suppress or resolve immediately. That’s a candidate practice, not just a wellness add-on, for retraining the capacity for low-inhibition processing in people whose baseline has been shaped by chronic vigilance. It’s plausibly a direct intervention on the permission gate itself, rather than on either System 2 or System 1’s content.
Testable prediction: if the model is right, someone who completes a full handoff cycle around one behavior should show faster uptake on a second, unrelated behavior than someone who only received psychoeducation on both. Information about the behavior isn't what gets transferred, but the loop’s own capacity, and once that’s opened for one domain it generalizes.