Nervous System Regulation Is Cargo Cult Science

You’ll be surprised to know that I don’t abhor the use of nervous system regulation. It doesn’t trigger me that much.

I think it is good not to police the language too excessively: in the end of the day language is an eternal shape shifter and evolving by co-opting whatever is the flavour du jour, whatever is in the zeitgeist. The language phagocytoses whatever it finds in its way, metabolising it in the process, only for the content to be regurgitated and spit out by the inexorable and never ending language machine of us all, acquiring a different, sometimes elevated and sometimes lowly meaning, sometimes reaching poetic heights and sometimes ending in the gutter. Such is language, such language has always been and there is no point trying to put an iron camisole on it, the language will always prevail.

In fact, I will go as far as saying that this never ending shape shifting is the beauty of the language, one of those artefacts of all cultures that makes our collective genius so apparent.

But wait. Look what I have done there. I said that the language “phagocytes” whatever is on its way - whatever ideas are in the air of time - but somebody could say “Language is not phagocytosing anything, phagocytosis is a biological mechanism of the immune system to get rid of pathogens”. Yes, unless I am using it as a metaphor. I don’t actually think that the language really is metabolising anything at all, in any biological sense. Language is a cultural device.

The other day a client came complaining that he feels his “social battery was always low”. I did not pull him up on that, saying: you don’t actually have a battery in you and battery is a technical term from engineering.

The same goes for other well-accepted idioms that are just part of the language now and we don’t even think twice when hearing somebody using them. Some notable examples of the top of my head include running out of steam, blowing a fuse, emotional bandwidth, a chain reaction and even the very word trigger. Even using stressed out, a stress physiologist could object, is not formally defined in terms of stress physiology. This list could go on. In fact, the language co-opts and phagocytoses in the other direction too, borrowing from the esoteric and the language of fairy tales. We say “let it work its magic”. But we don’t necessarily believe in magic. It is a figure of speech that adds a bit of spice to it all.

So, if I have a client and they happen to flippantly employ the term nervous system regulation, I tend to see it as just a consequence of the zeitgeist on the language. In my mind, it just means emotion regulation in neuroscience bodysuit. I am fine with that.

What I do find more problematic is when clinicians (or people who give formal advice to other people how to improve their mental health) use this term as though to suggest it was some specific clinical piece of advice that is supposed to mean more than a mere metaphor for “calming down” or “regulating your emotions”. In other words when it starts sounding like we are imbuing it with nervous system mystique.

Others have very aptly argued why nervous system regulation does not actually mean anything, when it comes to neuroscience and hence evoking it does not make you neuroscience informed (see for example here and here, and I am apologizing if I am missing some others). This is not what I want to address here.

What I want to address is why it is happening.

A few months ago my co-author shared an observation: talking to psychotherapy authors who want to include neuroscience narratives into their material for therapists - which is something he happens to be doing often - there is a sense of a compulsory inclusion of the '“right” buzzwords used without a specific meaning that points to a neurobiological mechanisms or meaning added in terms of neuroscience insight. Rather, he felt, terms such as nervous system regulation, attunement, co-regulation, neuroplasticity & co. are increasingly being used as sort of devotional incantations rather than referring to real objects and processes in the body that can be described and defined. It’s getting an esoteric twist to it now.

I absolutely concur with this observation and have noticed the same trend in my own habitat of social media.

Furthermore, uttering those words feels as though they are magic formulas that unlock some doors to a secret knowledge. Even, perhaps, a secret code signalling belonging.

Which all brings me to my “why this happens”. I want to tell you about cargo cults.

Cargo cults are an anthropological curiosity.

During WWII, U.S. soldiers used certain Pacific islands populated by native communities as bases, building runways and bringing in goods (cargo) for their troops via planes.

Once the war ended and the troops left, the islanders, not fully understanding the context of the war, the aircraft technology or the source of the supplies, began performing rituals to mimic what the soldiers had been doing, hoping these actions would somehow bring back the planes and the cargo they carried. They carved wooden replicas of the headphones the military personnel had used while guiding airplanes to land. They performed the same landing signals on the runway as a ritual to attract the planes with their precious cargo. They even reproduced aspects of the military drills they had observed while the U.S. soldiers were stationed there.

But, of course, they were missing the crucial piece of the puzzle: the full context and the understanding of underlying mechanisms. As a result, the planes - and the bounty they once carried - never returned.

Now do you see how this applies in the case of the invocations of nervous system regulation, neuroplasticity, attunement or even co-regulation as magic words that conjure up the god of neuroscience making our discourse suddenly more imbued with that scientific might?

I didn’t come up with this specific transposition from the cargo cults in its more litterral form in building military cargo paraphernalia into to more symbolic one - the cargo cult science. I heard about it in a talk by Professor Richard Feynman - the illustrious physicist and Nobel Prize winner - where he compares lax scientific and pseudoscientific practices to a “cargo cult,” calling it Cargo Cult Science. I am merely applying it to the nervous system rhetoric in psychotherapy.

For me, I would define it as follows:

Cargo cult neuroscience use is a ritual inclusion of words and concepts from neuroscience that serve no real purpose and cannot be defined with any meaningful precision but rather serve to invoke a sense of higher power and neuro-mystique. In a nutshell, cargo cult neuroscience is neuroscience cosplay.

Some Cargo Cults still exist today. Literally. I mean as the more physical reproducing of the military paraphernalia and rituals in order to conjure up the appearance of the godly avatars of the past times. As you can see it is well and alive in the West too. They are just less visible to people in the Western-culture as per the “fish in the bowl effect”.

Cargo cult science is science cosplay.

There is plenty of neuroscience stuff that I think has the potential to totally transform therapy. And I really hope that day will come.

However, as of yet, we are mostly in the alchemy stage of neuroscience integration. When I say that I really hint at the pre-scientific developments of European science - when it was alchemy that was the principal route for searching for truth. In a way it was a precursor of science in Western Europe, and if we go off that, having a nervous system alchemy running the show today, might not be necessarily a bad news for tomorrow.

As for what you can do when encountering this kind of use of vague neuroscience terms without obvious meaning and definition, you should feel free to ask for clarification. It is OK to say:

What do you exactly mean by that?

There is absolutely no shame in asking the simple questions. Definitions and the answers to the simple questions are the foundations we build everything else on.

If there is no satisfactory answer to that, don’t be afraid to ask the question again.

As always, thank you for reading 🙏.

Schrödinger's Cat of Psychotherapy

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October 3, 2025

This is a story about what happens when, as therapists, we believe we are using neuroscience-based theories, only to find that they begin to show their unscientific cracks. It is also about the stories we tell ourselves to reconcile the cognitive dissonance that ensues while keeping everyone happy.