What information is available?
Signals from inside your body, outside your body, your relationships, your environment, and your current state.
A body of work about becoming
You are already adapting.
Every day, your body senses, interprets, acts, and adapts. What happens repeatedly becomes part of the person who enters the next moment.
Bioplasticity is the name I use for learning how to participate more deliberately in that process.
sensing · interpretation · action · adaptation
SENSE
INTERPRET
ACT
ADAPT
YOU
NOW
every pass changes the next oneNOW
The first realization
You are practicing the person you are becoming.
Your body does not wait for you to announce that you are ready to change. It is learning all day.
What you pay attention to. What you ignore. How you breathe. How you move. What you repeat. What you avoid. What you expect. The environments you spend time in. The people you spend time around.
All of it becomes part of the conditions shaping what comes next.
You are going to adapt anyway. Bioplasticity asks what happens when you learn to participate.
A little history
I have been doing this work for a long time.
These are people talking about earlier versions of my coaching work, before I had the word Bioplasticity for the larger map.
You’ll see TheTongue.com throughout this video. That was the name of my coaching practice when these conversations were recorded.
A working definition
Bioplasticity is the trainable relationship between sensing, interpretation, action, and adaptation.
These processes overlap constantly. Action changes what you sense. Interpretation changes what feels available to do. Adaptation changes the organism that enters the next moment.
What does your system make of it?
Attention, prediction, memory, context, expectation, and meaning all participate in what the signal becomes for you.
What happens next?
Movement, breath, speech, attention, approach, avoidance, play, habit, and changes you make to the environment around you.
What does repetition train?
What becomes easier, harder, more sensitive, more automatic, more familiar, or newly available because of what keeps happening.
Every adaptation changes the self that enters the next moment.
A familiar doorway
You have probably heard of neuroplasticity.
Neuroplasticity describes the nervous system’s capacity to change with experience.
Bioplasticity zooms the lens out. The nervous system lives inside a body that senses, moves, predicts, recovers, learns, relates, and acts in an environment.
Neural change is part of the story. So are sensory learning, motor learning, attention, conditioning, habit, sleep, recovery, social experience, and the repeated actions through which a person becomes more practiced at being a particular version of themselves.
Bioplasticity is the practice of participating in that change.
What can be trained
What you can perceive determines what you can work with.
Perception is an aggregate. Many streams of information are being sampled, combined, weighted, and interpreted at the same time.
What is happening around me?
Vision, hearing, smell, taste, touch, pressure, vibration, surface temperature, and the sensory texture of the environment.
What is happening within me?
Interoception includes signals related to heartbeat, breathing, visceral state, hunger, fullness, internal temperature, effort, and other homeostatic conditions.
Where is my body, and what is it doing?
Proprioception, vestibular information, balance, orientation, body schema, force, load, and the felt experience of movement.
How does information become experience?
Attention, prediction, memory, state, timing, social cues, prior learning, and current goals shape what incoming signals mean to you.
More resolution gives you more information. More information gives you more possible moves.
Signal, percept, meaning
Distinction creates freedom.
A lot of human experience gets collapsed into enormous categories: “I feel bad.” “I’m stressed.” “I’m tired.” “My body hurts.” “I can’t focus.” “I don’t feel like myself.”
Inside each of those experiences may be many distinguishable signals. Breath. Pressure. Heat. effort. body position. movement. heartbeat. balance. vision. sound. fatigue. expectation. attention. memory. social context. fear. anticipation.
01SIGNAL
Something is happening.
02PERCEPT
Your system organizes what it senses.
03MEANING
You make sense of what the experience means here and now.
Those steps can happen so quickly that they feel like one event. Training helps us notice more of what happened between them.
“He didn't fix anything. He just made it impossible to keep pretending I didn't already know.”
Anonymous client
Active sensing
Your body does not merely receive reality. It samples it.
Your eyes move. Your head turns. You shift your weight. You reach, sniff, listen, touch, move closer, step away, change posture, change breathing, ask a question, and alter the environment.
Every action changes the information available next.
Acting is also a way of sensing.
The working map
72 nodes. Nine constellations. Infinite routes.
Bioplasticity has a map underneath it: seventy-two primary nodes grouped into nine constellations. Each node can be explored on its own, through its subnodes, or as part of a route connecting several parts of the map.
They connect because your body does the same thing. Breath affects state. State affects attention. Attention affects what you perceive. What you perceive affects interpretation. Interpretation changes action. Action changes the next thing you sense.
The map is nodal rather than sequential. Enter wherever the question is alive.
SENSE
→
INTERPRET
→
ACT
→
ADAPT
One route through the map. The full current registry is below.
01Sensory InterfacesHow information first enters through organism-environment boundaries.8 nodes
- 01Vision
- 02Hearing
- 03Touch
- 04Thermoception
- 05Olfaction
- 06Gustation
- 07Proprioception
- 08Vestibular Sensing
02Internal Sensing & HomeostasisHow the organism senses, organizes, and responds to its internal condition.8 nodes
- 09Interoceptive Integration
- 10Respiratory Sensing
- 11Cardiovascular / Baroreception
- 12Visceral Sensing
- 13Hunger & Satiety
- 14Thirst / Osmoreception
- 15Nociception
- 16Pain
03Body, Space & OrientationHow the organism constructs a body, locates it, and understands what it can do here.8 nodes
- 17Kinesthesia
- 18Balance
- 19Body Schema
- 20Body Ownership
- 21Spatial Orientation
- 22Effort
- 23Agency
- 24Affordance
04Attention & Perceptual ConstructionHow many streams of information become the particular world you experience.8 nodes
- 25Attention
- 26Salience
- 27Multisensory Integration
- 28Prediction
- 29Expectation
- 30Sensory Discrimination
- 31Pattern Recognition
- 32Time Perception
05Interpretation & MeaningHow sensations and percepts become significance, story, and a model of self.8 nodes
- 33Memory
- 34Emotion
- 35Valence
- 36Context
- 37Threat & Safety Appraisal
- 38Meaning
- 39Narrative
- 40Self-Model
06Action & ExpressionHow the organism acts on the world and changes what becomes available to sense next.8 nodes
- 41Active Sensing
- 42Movement
- 43Posture
- 44Breath Regulation
- 45Gaze
- 46Voice
- 47Approach & Avoidance
- 48Environmental Shaping
07Learning & PlasticityHow experience, repetition, error, and feedback become changed capacity.8 nodes
- 49Neuroplasticity
- 50Repetition & Practice
- 51Error / Prediction Error
- 52Feedback
- 53Habituation
- 54Sensitization
- 55Conditioning & Reinforcement
- 56Skill Acquisition & Transfer
08State, Recovery & Biological TimeHow state and nested biological rhythms change sensing, learning, performance, and recovery.8 nodes
- 57Arousal
- 58Fatigue
- 59Sleep
- 60Circadian Rhythms
- 61Ultradian Rhythms
- 62Infradian Rhythms
- 63Recovery
- 64Stress & Load
09Relational & Cultural FieldHow human beings sense, regulate, learn, and adapt with other human beings.8 nodes
- 65Social Perception
- 66Joint Attention
- 67Co-Regulation
- 68Synchrony
- 69Boundaries
- 70Modeling & Imitation
- 71Play
- 72Culture & Belonging
Each node can open into subnodes and be explored through different training lenses such as detection, discrimination, resolution, calibration, flexibility, tolerance, range, and recovery. The same node can lead somewhere different each time we return to it.
“No deadline or rule. My choice.”
a writer, in fellowship
The living map
I follow what is alive in the question.
A question about breath may lead into state. Pain may lead into attention. Play may lead into learning. Sleep may lead into timing, recovery, or the way perception changes under load.
Those are different entrances into the same system.
How I use it
Notice. Experiment. Integrate.
Find more resolution.
Slow down enough to distinguish signals, context, interpretation, state, and the assumptions that may have collapsed into one experience.
Change one variable.
Shift breath, movement, attention, timing, language, environment, or another part of the loop and notice what becomes available next.
See what carries.
The useful question is what changed, what repeated, what became easier to notice, and what the next pass through the loop makes possible.
The map gives me places to look. The person in front of me tells me where to begin.
“Real live research in the moment.”
a writer, in fellowship
Why relationship matters
Other people help you see your own instrument.
Give ten people the same perceptual experiment and you may get ten different reports.
Someone notices breathing first. Someone notices pressure in their feet. Someone notices vision narrowing. Someone notices emotion. Someone feels almost nothing.
That variation is useful. Conversation makes hidden assumptions visible and gives us another nervous system to compare against. Working with another person can reveal distinctions that are easy to miss from inside your own experience.
“This is fun. It is helping me to think differently and more clear.”
a writer, in fellowship
Why Ryan
I have been circling this question for most of my adult life.
How does a human being become more capable of participating in their own experience?
My work has moved through hypnosis, coaching, breath, attention, interoception, sound, voice, movement, physiology, play, performance, perception, and the strange ways people change when they begin noticing more.
Ryan Today is what Ryan Yesterday decided.
I took that name in 1999 as a thought experiment about becoming. Yesterday's decisions become part of today's reality. Today's choices shape the vantage point tomorrow inherits.
Bioplasticity is the container I finally have for that body of work.
Private work
Sometimes the map becomes useful in a conversation.
Bioplasticity informs much of my private coaching and creative work. It gives us a shared way to look at sensing, state, attention, interpretation, action, repetition, and the adaptations already underway.
- Make finer distinctions about what you are actually experiencing
- Test assumptions through small, observable experiments
- Work with attention, state, movement, breath, language, and environment
- Notice what repetition is training over time
- Build a clearer evidence trail for what helps, what does not, and what changes next
I work privately with a small number of people at a time.
Work with Ryan
Bring me the thing you are actually working with.
Come with the problem, transition, experiment, idea, or half-formed question. We can figure out together what kind of work would be useful.
You do not need to choose a node before we begin.
Start a conversationQuestions
A few useful distinctions.
Is Bioplasticity a course?
Bioplasticity is a body of work and a working map. I may teach from it, write from it, use it in private work, or follow a single node because it becomes useful in a particular question.
Do I need a background in physiology or neuroscience?
No. I use technical vocabulary when it helps us make useful distinctions. The point is better observation, better questions, and lived experiments you can actually notice.
Where do I start?
Start where something is already alive. Breath, pain, attention, sleep, play, movement, a repeated pattern, a difficult transition, or a question you keep returning to can all be valid entrances.
Is Bioplasticity therapy or medical care?
Bioplasticity is educational and experiential work. I do not diagnose or treat medical or mental health conditions. Clinical concerns belong with an appropriate licensed professional.
How does Bioplasticity show up in your private work?
As a lens, a vocabulary, and a map. Sometimes we stay with one small distinction. Sometimes a question moves across several nodes. The work follows the person and the evidence that appears while we work.
One last thing
You are going to adapt anyway.
Your experiences will train something. Your habits will train something. Your attention will train something. Your actions will train something.
Tomorrow begins with the organism those repetitions helped create.
Learn the instrument.Notice more.Practice deliberately.See what changes.
Begin with the person who showed up today.