Coherence as a North Star for Health

In my PhD work on nervous system regulation, I noticed a pattern: many different conditions have their roots in autonomic nervous system dysregulation, yet their symptoms often get divided among separate sub-specialties. That is how our healthcare system is built—each specialty focuses on its own lane and may not see the whole picture.

A person resents with different symptoms may be sent to multiple specialists. This is exactly what a close friend of mine has been navigating for years. She feels frustrated that no one specialist seems to really know what’s going on, and at times even victimized due to the time and effort spent with no meaningful improvement.

I am not saying working with specialists is undesirable. Most clinicians care deeply and do their best. The fragmentation is structural, not moral. The system is organized around symptom silos, rather than around the person as a coherent whole.

Standing a little outside that system, while writing a thesis on breathwork, heart rate variability (HRV), and autonomic regulation, I realized that treating symptoms alone is like missing the forest for the trees. When you don’t have a bigger purpose for healing, then treating symptoms is good enough. The idea of coherence as a larger organizing principle is largely absent. Thus there is no sense of needing to restore anything. It’s like not having a north star.

In this piece, I want to highlight a recent article, The Physical Basis of Coherence: A Unified (M‑Φ) Framework for Consciousness. It takes a bold step by treating coherence not just as a metaphor, but as something the authors propose may be physically real and measurable in the brain.

What I Mean by Coherence

By coherence, I do not mean feeling calm or “having it together.”

In physics, coherence describes a fixed, predictable relationship between the phases of waves or quantum states. In the body, coherence can describe rhythms—such as heart, breath, and nervous-system activity—becoming more organized. In everyday life, it may be the felt sense that our thoughts, emotions, and actions are working together rather than pulling us in different directions.

Coherence is a pattern of relationship and coordination. It gives us a language for asking not only, “What symptom is present?” but also, “How well are the parts of this person working together?”

What I Mean by Consciousness

Consciousness can be a slippery word, and in this article, consciousness is used in the neuroscience sense: being awake and aware, and having experience from the inside.

This differs from physicist Amit Goswami’s use of capital‑C Consciousness as the “ground of being”—the fundamental reality from which everything arises. That broader metaphysical question is important to me, but it is not the main focus of this particular framework.

The M‑Φ paper is asking a more specific question: What must the brain be doing physically for conscious experience to be present? Its answer is that conscious experience depends on a sufficiently organized and coherent brain-body system.

To explain this, let’s imagine the brain as a huge band on stage.

The Brain as a Band

Each musician represents a group of neurons or a brain region. The music is conscious experience: thoughts, feelings, perceptions, and the sense of being present. The conductor represents the organizing rhythms, timing signals, and oscillations that help everyone keep the beat.

When the band is coherent, its players are in time and in tune. The music is clear, stable, and recognizable. When coordination breaks down, some players fall out of time, sections drift apart, and the music becomes harder to follow.

On the inside, that may feel like brain fog, scattered attention, emotional overload, trouble focusing, or a general sense of being “off” in one’s mind and body.

The article attempts to make this metaphor more precise.

The authors propose measurable ways to describe coordination in the brain:

• How much of the brain is participating in synchronized activity, which they call coherence density

• How well different regions keep time together, or phase alignment

• How stable the overall pattern remains when disturbed, including stability and adaptive gain

In other words, it’s like measuring how many musicians are playing, whether they are keeping the same beat, and whether the song can remain intact when something disrupts it.

The framework also introduces an informational field called Φ (Phi). In the band analogy, the physical brain and its activity—called M—are the band itself. Phi is something like the acoustic space and sheet music combined: a proposed field of patterns within which the band can perform coherently.

Their central proposal is that conscious experience arises when the physical brain and this informational field become coupled in a stable, coherent way.

The paper applies its theory to Parkinson’s disease as an example. Rather than seeing it only through the lens of a particular chemical or damaged brain region, the authors describe it as involving a loss of coordination: fewer parts of the system may participate effectively, timing between regions may become less reliable, and the overall pattern may be easier to disrupt.

This is a proposed framework—a different lens through which to understand how changes in brain coordination might relate to movement, cognition, and conscious experience.

From Brain Coherence to Whole-Person Coherence

Since none of us are simply a brain on a stage, and we are whole people with brain and heart, breath, autonomic nervous system, gut, immune system, hormones, relationships, lived history, and perhaps subtler dimensions of experience as well, coherence has to mean more than neurons firing together.

This is where my own work on HRV and nervous system regulation comes in.

During slow, regular breathing, HRV often takes on a smoother, wave-like pattern as heart rhythm and respiration become more closely coupled. This can provide a practical window into autonomic regulation: how flexibly the nervous system is responding and recovering in the moment.

In the music metaphor, the brain may be one section of the orchestra, while the heart, breath, and autonomic nervous system are another. Whole-person coherence is the possibility that these sections become more mutually supportive and synchronized, rather than pulling in competing directions.

We may experience this as:

• Greater physiological regulation and flexibility

• Less emotional reactivity and more capacity to respond

• Improved clarity and attention

• A stronger sense of being present, grounded, and aligned

This article is especially interesting to me because while it focuses primarily on the brain and the informational “room” in which the brain is playing, it also it gives coherence a more credible place in health conversations. That is, coherence isn’t only a vague wellness idea, but as a possible organizing principle that can be described, and perhaps measured.

For me, this opens the question that health may also involve forms of organization that are not fully captured by the mainstream organ-based model. It broadens the conceptual base, reminding us to also consider the whole.

This broader view gives us more options for caring for ourselves. Breathwork, intentional movement, meditation, time in nature, and subtle-energy practices need not be dismissed as “soft add-ons.” They may be accessible ways of helping the different aspects of our system re-regulate and work together more effectively.

Why a North Star Matters

A symptom-focused model can leave people coordinating disconnected explanations without an overall picture.

A coherence-oriented lens asks different questions:

• What rhythms or relationships have become disrupted?

• Which parts of the system are no longer communicating well?

• What would help this person become more stable, flexible, and coordinated?

• Which interventions support the whole system, rather than only quieting isolated symptoms?

This does not mean abandoning diagnosis, specialist care, medication, or symptom relief. It means placing them within a wider compass.

The M‑Φ framework is compelling because it proposes that coherence is physically meaningful and potentially measurable, and it frames some disorders in terms of disrupted coordination rather than only isolated malfunction.

For those of us working at the edges of science, nervous-system regulation, and subtle energy, coherence may become a useful shared language. It resonates with lived experience: I feel more together. I feel more in sync. It also connects with observable rhythms such as heart-rate variability and neural activity.

Most importantly, it encourages us to remember the forest.

Coherence is not a replacement for mainstream paradigm. It is a wider organizing principle: a way of asking whether an intervention helps a person become more resilient, better regulated, and more able to function as a whole.

References: The Physical Basis of Coherence: A Unified (M-Φ) Framework for Consciousness

Behind the scenes: This article was developed with the assistance of an AI writing tool. I used AI as a research and editing partner to help organize ideas, clarify scientific language, and shape parts of the draft. The personal experiences, perspective, interpretation, and final decisions about what to include are my own.