Stop talking about your nervous system
Against Neuroreductionism
The age of narcissism is revealed in how we’ve authorised a single bodily system to take centre stage in our understanding of human experience. A culture obsessed with optimisation, but not necessarily character development, accountability or discipline, was always going to look for one system to explain and excuse everything that happens inside it. People use the language of the nervous system because it sounds scientific and makes their experience seem legitimate, important enough to focus on for a moment while giving it an identity. It gives them permission to draw attention to their state and feelings under the cover of physiology, sometimes with the expectation that another person will make adjustments to comfort and validate them. Once it’s about the nervous system, it becomes like a bone fracture that demands intervention, soothing, and something to fix.
The body has become a brand. The nervous system is spoken of as a personality that must be catered to, regulated, and protected.
“My nervous system is activated.”
“My nervous system can’t handle this right now.”
“I’m calming my nervous system.”
The words sound informed because they mimic expertise. Feelings have been replaced with physiological commentary, as though meaning itself required a scientific degree. It’s no longer enough to say I feel tense, on guard, or afraid and instead narrate the physiology based on a single bodily system, as if it were the sage among them all. We now describe the wiring as the experience of the self.
A fixation with identity and evidence has made people dependent on science to verify experiences that they already intuitively know as real. Intuition, once recognised in the