Roads, Bridges, and Minds: The Hidden Infrastructure of Healing
After attending the 2025 International Society for Neuroregulation and Research conference in Niagara, NY, I wanted to compose an essay that focuses on the mental health aspect of my upcoming book, The Dream of Matter. While metaphysics and social commentary are fun to write about, I feel like mental health is the bridge that makes the book relevant to every one of us.
This essay is a synthesis of a few chapters from my manuscript.
When I first began studying neuroscience, it was for a selfish reason. My own attention was slipping, scattered under the pressures of Silicon Valley. Long days, relentless streams of data, endless context-switching. I thought if I could tune my brain, maybe I could stay competitive, sharper, and more focused.
But the deeper I went, the stranger it became. I discovered a field few people even know exists: neurotherapy, the art and science of training the brain’s rhythms and circuits directly. It promised something radical—not just coping strategies, not just medications to mute symptoms, but the chance to help the brain unlearn its maladaptive loops and rediscover its natural flexibility.
That word, flexibility, became a touchstone for me. A healthy brain is one that can recruit neurons when needed and let them rest when finished. An unhealthy brain is one that gets stuck—parts overfiring or underfiring, talking too much or too little to each other. Symptoms are not random defects. They are the signatures of a rigid brain.
Maladaptive Neuroplasticity
Brains learn. That is both their glory and their curse. We all know this from experience: habits form quickly, and sometimes the wrong ones stick. Under stress, trauma, or illness, the nervous system adapts by learning survival strategies—hypervigilance, numbing, dissociation. These aren’t mistakes. They’re brilliant adaptations in the moment. But like survival gear worn long after the storm has passed, they become burdensome.
Neurotherapy steps in as a kind of teacher. There are two main modes: neurofeedback, which reflects the brain’s own activity back so it can adjust itself, and neurostimulation, which provides gentle signals the brain can mimic and internalize. In both cases, the nervous system is practicing new rhythms until they feel natural. Over time, it remembers what it had forgotten: how to shift gears, how to rest, how to let go. What might take years of talk therapy—slowly circling insights, waiting for them to filter into physiology—can sometimes change in weeks when we work directly with the circuitry.
But these methods aren’t replacements for therapy; they’re complements. Many of my clients are already working with therapists and come to me for added support with symptom relief. In fact, some arrive because their therapist recommended neurotherapy. Talk therapy helps process meaning and relationship; neurotherapy helps reset the nervous system. Together they reinforce each other.
And because the process is scalable—computers can track signals, algorithms can guide training—it holds potential to transform mental health care at a speed and scale we’ve barely imagined.
The Brain as Mirror, Not Machine
At first, I thought of neurotherapy as rewiring hardware. Circuits, nodes, networks. With my Silicon Valley background, that made sense. But the more time I spent with brain maps, the more I began to feel like I was staring into a mirror. The signals didn’t look like cold machinery. They looked like reflections.
That realization reshaped everything. What if the brain is not the generator of consciousness, but the shadow of something deeper?
Around the same time I was studying neurotherapy, I was also plunging into philosophy. I’d always been drawn to Pythagorean thinking, with its strange insistence that reality is fundamentally mathematical. Not metaphorically, but literally: existence has a logic, and mathematics is its language.
Here’s the important caveat: the details are complex, and they’re far beyond the scope of a single essay. I spend chapters on this in The Dream of Matter. But the gist is simple enough: if reality can be defined mathematically, then the soul is not a metaphor. It’s a real structure, describable in the same language we use for physics and engineering. That doesn’t mean every thought maps 1:1 onto every neuron—far from it. The interface between mind and matter is tangled. What shows up in EEG traces is not the eternal self, but a kind of operational lower self—the aspect of the soul bound to the body, learning, adapting, sometimes malfunctioning.
Even so: astonishing. We can literally glimpse the activity of mind as it appears in matter, and then help it evolve. Neurotherapy, in this light, isn’t just medicine. It’s applied metaphysics. A soul interface.
And if you don’t buy the metaphysical angle, that’s fine too. From a purely materialist perspective, neurotherapy is still profound: a way to rewire maladaptive brain patterns, restore flexibility, and improve lives without drugs or invasive procedures. The beauty is that it works either way.
Mental Health as Infrastructure
Most people think of mental health in personal terms. It’s about happiness, coping, and quality of life. Something you tend to when you’re in crisis. But that view is too small. Mental health is infrastructure.
When the roads and bridges of a city crumble, everything built on them begins to falter—commerce, community, even trust. The same is true for minds. If enough of them slip into depression, distraction, or despair, entire cultures begin to wobble. What looks like political chaos or cruelty often begins with nervous systems carrying unresolved pain. Look closely at the roots of social injustice or violence, and you’re likely to find unhealed trauma.
And in a universe made of minds, the stakes are even higher. Unhealthy minds create unhealthy worlds. Healing a brain is not just private medicine—it’s public architecture. It’s the scaffolding of a future that works.
This is why, in The Dream of Matter, I frame mental health not as an optional pursuit but as the very infrastructure of reality. Without healthy minds, the very project of existence itself falters.
The Alchemy of Healing
Trauma makes this painfully clear. The nervous system adapts to overwhelming experiences by building rigid defenses. Those defenses become prisons. To heal is not to erase the past but to dissolve those rigidities into something more fluid. That is why I sometimes call healing a kind of alchemy. We take the lead of survival strategies and transmute them into the gold of renewed freedom.
Neurotherapy is one of the few tools I’ve seen that accelerates this process at the physiological level. The stories are striking: people who sleep for the first time in years, who find anxiety dropping without medication, who feel a sense of calm not because they’re numbing themselves but because their nervous system has learned to shift into balance.
The refrain I hear most often is: “I feel more like myself.”
I’m not surprised. When we clear the debris that have accumulated, we truly find ourselves underneath.
Everyday Minds
But it isn’t just trauma that shapes us. Everyday complaints—poor attention, low mood, constant anxiety—often reflect the same underlying rigidity. ADHD, for instance, is usually framed as a nuisance or deficit. But what if it’s more than that? What if it’s a spiritual crisis?
Because if we cannot direct our attention, how conscious are we, really? Attention is the currency of awareness. It’s how we choose, how we create, how we become ourselves. To struggle with attention is not only a neurological challenge—it’s a challenge at the heart of being.
Seen this way, neurotherapy is not merely about reducing symptoms. It’s about helping us recover our very capacity for consciousness.
A Structured Nonduality
Healing brings us back to larger questions. Many spiritual traditions speak of oneness—the dissolving of distinctions into pure being. But the truth feels subtler to me. Reality isn’t one undifferentiated mind that fragments; it’s a society of eternal minds, each with its own perspective and contribution.
When we’re at our most scattered it feels like we are islands—cut off, isolated, strangers to ourselves and to one another. Healing, then, is the slow return to relationship: reconciling the parts inside us, and repairing the bridges between us. Wholeness is not the erasure of individuality; it is the harmonizing of difference.
That matters because collective mind can take two very different forms. Left to its own unexamined dynamics it becomes an unconscious mob—reactive, polarized, swept by fear and short-term gain. But it can also become something else: a cooperative hive-mind, conscious and creative, a field of minds that coordinates without crushing individuality. One flattens; the other amplifies.
The purpose of healing is practical, not merely spiritual. It trains us to be better participants in that latter possibility. When our nervous systems are flexible, when our attention is held by choice rather than by habit, we stop feeding the mob and start contributing to the cooperation. We learn the timing and the tone that make harmony possible.
This is where the mathematical picture helps, even if we set aside the details for now. If every soul is a structured entity, the job isn’t to erase difference but to tune it—so signals align rather than clash. The universe isn’t aiming at sameness; it’s aiming at symphony.
That vision runs through The Dream of Matter: nonduality is not flat oneness but structured harmony—the interweaving of many minds into something greater than any alone.
Why This Matters Now
It still amazes me how unknown neurotherapy remains. In a world desperate for better mental health solutions, this work still flies off the radar. At the same time, large pharmaceutical companies are investing less and less into developing new psychiatric drugs. The pipeline is thinning. Which means if we want real progress, approaches like neurotherapy aren’t just interesting—they are essential.
Some practitioners combine neurotherapy with counseling; others, like me, focus on the training itself. Either way, the field is growing, and its promise is extraordinary.
Because when we train the brain, we’re not just tinkering with circuits. We are supporting the evolution of the soul’s reflection. We are giving mind a clearer mirror to see itself through.
The Work Ahead
What begins as symptom relief—better sleep, steadier focus, calmer mood—opens into something more profound. A recognition: the brain is not a sealed machine, and we are not helpless passengers. We are participants in a much larger architecture, tuning instruments in a cosmic orchestra.
The work is still young. And the tools are still obscure. But the potential is huge: to take what was once hidden in philosophy and bring it into practice. To train the brain and, in doing so, support the soul.
That is the hidden work waiting inside these circuits. Not just relief. Not just coping. But transformation.
And that is the story I’m telling in The Dream of Matter: how neuroscience, neurotherapy, and mathematics converge to reveal the soul in motion.