Every claim in the documentation, each marked by how it is known. Observed results are things that were done and seen; body-reported claims came from asking the body. Highlighted passages in the articles open the same details.
169 claims
Attending to the abdomen while thinking about a food produces an involuntary contraction with two directions, an encouraging pull and a discouraging pull, of varying strength.
- Basis
- Noticed in 2011 and tested on many foods and behaviors over six months before telling anyone.
- Strengthen it
- Have someone else pick foods out of your sight and present them in a random order; record the response before you know what each food is.
Other people can learn the method quickly; a girlfriend got it working on her first try.
- Basis
- First replication outside the author, about six months after discovery.
- Strengthen it
- Teach it to new people with a fixed script and record how many get a response, and how long it takes.
A couple dozen people have been taught; almost all got it working easily, and about a quarter needed extra time.
- Basis
- Teaching experience since 2012 (see also Variations & Trouble Starting).
- Strengthen it
- Keep a written log of every person taught: date, script used, time to first response, and whether they could pass the coffee check.
Working with the body this way eliminated the author's severe depression, frequent dehydration, burnout and post-divorce breakdown.
- Basis
- The author's own before-and-after experience.
- Strengthen it
- For future changes, track symptoms with a standard questionnaire (for example PHQ-9 for mood) before and after, so the change can be shown with numbers.
Health topic. This is one person’s experience, not medical advice; see a doctor before changing any treatment.Reported benefits include losing hunger and fullness sensations, no cold symptoms, no headaches, no depression, prevention of delayed-onset muscle soreness, and reduced need for sleep.
- Basis
- Benefits observed by the author over years of practice; each has its own article.
- Strengthen it
- Each benefit is a separate claim; see the claims on Food, Lighting and Sleep, Positioning & Movement and Depression.
Health topic. This is one person’s experience, not medical advice; see a doctor before changing any treatment.Performing, intending, or only imagining an action all produce the same response, so the body responds to intentions, not words.
- Basis
- The core of the method, used daily for over a decade and taught to others.
- Strengthen it
- Compare responses for imagined versus intended versus performed versions of the same action across a set of items chosen by someone else.
The body responds to the purpose behind an action: picking up an apple to eat it gets a different response from picking it up to throw it.
- Basis
- Learned through querying.
- How to test
- With the same object, alternate intentions in a random order set by a helper and check whether the responses differ consistently.
Responses feel different by body part: a moving tingle in the hands, an urge to move or be grounded in the feet, a muscle contraction in the abdomen.
- Basis
- Described by the author and by people taught.
- Strengthen it
- Ask new learners to describe what they feel without prompting, and compare descriptions.
The sensations are weak muscle contractions amplified by attention; the abdominal one is also a reflex.
- Basis
- The author's explanation of what the sensations are.
- How to test
- Could become testable with surface EMG (muscle sensors) on the hand or abdomen during queries.
Marijuana appears to interfere with getting body communication to work.
- Basis
- Some evidence from people taught, per the author.
- Strengthen it
- Compare learning success and response consistency for people who use and do not use it, recorded before teaching begins.
When people have trouble starting, it is because the body abandoned these sensations after they failed to change behavior, sometimes switching to aches or pains.
- Basis
- The author's explanation, supported by one friend whose responses came as aches in the arm and leg.
Practicing can trigger a rebuild: sudden light sensitivity, a need to recline with feet up, and an aversion to what you were doing, lasting minutes to hours.
- Basis
- Observed repeatedly by the author and others.
- Strengthen it
- Log each suspected rebuild with start time, symptoms and duration, plus what triggered it.
Continuing to query during a rebuild lengthens it, worsens symptoms and can create an aversion to body communication.
- Basis
- See the author's story of ignoring a rebuild.
The sensations people call qi or energy in the hands are weak muscle contractions, not energy.
- Basis
- The author's explanation.
- How to test
- Surface EMG on the hands while holding them close together would show whether muscle activity tracks the sensation.
Typical baselines: water, common meats and citrus give positive responses; coffee and candy give negative; an unfamiliar neutral food gives a null response.
- Basis
- Practice items used when teaching.
- Strengthen it
- Have new learners query these items without being told the expected answer first.
Any body part can receive any answer, and the answer is the same whichever body part you use.
- Basis
- The author uses hands, feet and face interchangeably.
- Strengthen it
- Ask the same randomized set of questions twice using two different body parts, and compare agreement.
Everyone queried so far has gotten a negative response for coffee, not one positive, even regular coffee drinkers who expect a yes.
- Basis
- Used as a check when teaching, because beginners expect the opposite.
- Strengthen it
- This is a strong existing check. Strengthen it by testing coffee hidden among other drinks so the learner does not know which cup is coffee.
Small amounts of cacao nibs, which contain some caffeine, are requested, so caffeine itself is not rejected.
- Basis
- Requested by the author's body and several others'.
- How to test
- Present cacao nibs and other caffeine sources blind and record responses.
You cannot force a positive response with preferences or beliefs, but believing something is contaminated can force a negative response.
- Basis
- Observed by the author.
- Strengthen it
- Ideal test of the channel: a helper marks one of two identical glasses as 'possibly contaminated' at random; see whether the belief flips the response while the need stays.
In the feet, a positive response moves toward the toes (urge to move) and a negative response toward the heels (feeling anchored).
- Basis
- Lesson used when teaching; diagrams drawn from the author's practice.
- Strengthen it
- Have learners report foot responses for helper-chosen actions without being told the expected directions.
Face, eyes, tongue, neck, arms, pelvis and legs each give their own forms of positive and negative response, such as a lip quiver with a positive response when the lips are parted.
- Basis
- Mapped by the author through practice, body part by body part.
- Strengthen it
- Ask several practitioners to map one region independently, then compare their maps.
A positive response at the back of the neck is a pleasurable tingle that can be used to reward yourself for taking care of your body.
- Basis
- Observed by the author.
Responses for the bust appear in the back and sides rather than the breast, possibly evolved to help point the breast for breastfeeding and relationships.
- Basis
- Observation plus an evolutionary explanation offered by the author.
Attending to wide areas (a whole leg, the whole body) is harder at first and takes practice and rebuilds to get working.
- Basis
- The author's own progression.
Getting responses in both hands at once is very difficult and took the author many rebuilds.
- Basis
- The author's own progression.
Dual-hand responses are hard because so much brain tissue is devoted to the hands, as shown by the sensory and motor homunculi.
- Basis
- An explanation drawn from neuroscience, not from testing.
A confusing response means your internal systems don't have an answer yet, not that you are doing it wrong.
- Basis
- Learned through querying.
Working through a written list of known needs, in a layered order, and logging each query with its answer, makes hard-to-identify needs much faster to find.
- Basis
- Shown with a real logged session from 2021-04-22 that found a need to give massage.
An unmet need can be cleared for a while, without satisfying it, by communicating that it can't be met now and a plan to meet it later.
- Basis
- Observed in the 2021-04-22 session; the notification stopped after the plan was accepted.
- How to test
- Track how long a need stays quiet after a 'plan accepted' answer versus after simply ignoring it.
Sometimes the body signals a need but rejects every option offered, and responses weaken or stop, as if it is confused or disagreeing with itself.
- Basis
- Repeated observation that led the author away from the 'body as machine' idea.
The body can hold trauma the author did not personally feel, and it stopped needing to cry once the author apologized to it.
- Basis
- From a need-based dream and the queries that followed.
After about a year of working on a digestive problem, the author became able to ask questions in plain words instead of as intended actions, with answers still coming as body responses.
- Basis
- A change in the method itself, used daily since; it is the source of most of the wiki's information.
- Strengthen it
- Check that plain-word questions and the same questions phrased as intended actions get matching answers, in a randomized set.
The part of the body that answers is not the body as a whole but one part, Yawnie, whose main job is triggering yawns when a need comes to its attention; Yawnie built Translator to understand speech.
- Basis
- From conversations with the nodes after plain-word questions became possible.
The body is a consciousness machine: it makes one consciousness (you) for the outside world and many layered ones, called nodes, for the inside. You are one node among them, and nodes are made of smaller nodes.
- Basis
- The central finding of the body's internal study.
Nodes know more about what's happening inside you than you do, but they never went to school and can't count.
- Basis
- From conversations with the nodes.
- How to test
- Partly testable: ask the body numeric questions with known answers (how many cards in a hidden pile) and record accuracy.
The author's remaining depression ended when the ability to recall depressive feelings and thought patterns became blocked, and it has stayed gone for years.
- Basis
- The author's lived experience, including a day of loss and dread when it happened.
- Strengthen it
- Standard mood questionnaires taken periodically would document that it stays gone.
Health topic. This is one person’s experience, not medical advice; see a doctor before changing any treatment.The body removed those memories and patterns on its own initiative, using months-long aversions until they became inaccessible.
- Basis
- The body's explanation of what happened.
The author's sexuality and meat requirement changed without choosing it. Working with the body this way can change identity unpredictably, with no undo.
- Basis
- The author's lived experience; presented as the most important warning on the site.
After the author started acting on notifications, boredom and fatigue stopped, and sleep need fell from 7.5 to 6 and then 4.5 hours a night for 8 months, with no effect on mood, thinking, driving or grades.
- Basis
- Self-observation with a stable bedtime, no alarm, negligible caffeine and close tracking of attention.
- Strengthen it
- Record it with a sleep tracker plus a daily reaction-time or attention test, so the 'no negative effects' part is measured, not only noticed. (The site warns readers never to restrict sleep on purpose.)
Health topic. This is one person’s experience, not medical advice; see a doctor before changing any treatment.A slight loss of attention, felt as boredom, fatigue or mind wandering, is a node pulling your attention toward a bodily need. Attention returns fully once the needs are handled.
- Basis
- Observed in daily practice and logged on attention charts; the mechanism (a node inhibiting outward focus) is body-reported.
- How to test
- During a lecture, log each attention dip, the need found, and minutes until focus returned. A helper could also compare focus on days with and without need-checking.
Attention comes back as soon as you start working toward meeting the last need, so including your current task in that plan keeps your focus almost seamless.
- Basis
- Used during college lectures, such as eating during an Anatomy & Physiology class.
A building yawn is a notification of a need. If you find and start meeting the need fast enough, the yawn stops partway through.
- Basis
- First noticed during a college lecture and repeated since.
- How to test
- Log each building yawn: whether a need was found, how fast, and whether the yawn stopped.
Yawnie can trigger or stop a yawn on request, and can use a yawn to signal any condition it tracks.
- Basis
- Done regularly through Translator; described as mostly reliable.
- How to test
- A clear test of the internal population: have a helper ask for yawns at random moments by written cue and count hits versus spontaneous yawns.
When a need for different lighting joins other strong needs behind a yawn, the signal gets rerouted and a sneeze happens instead of a yawn.
- Basis
- The body's explanation of an observed pattern.
- How to test
- Log sneezes not explained by illness or irritants and check whether a lighting need is found each time.
Foot tapping, rocking and similar self-soothing come from tension caused by an ignored need, and stop the moment the need starts being met.
- Basis
- Observed by the author.
- How to test
- Log instances: the need found and whether the movement stopped when it was addressed.
A sudden end to your sense of flow with music is an easy-to-notice sign that a need wants attention.
- Basis
- Observed by the author.
Headaches can come from needs ignored too long and go away the moment the causing need is met.
- Basis
- Observed by the author; the Introduction lists 'no more headaches' as a benefit.
- Strengthen it
- Keep a headache log: time of onset, need found, and time to relief.
Unexpected trouble falling asleep is usually a need pulling on attention; once every major need is handled, sleep comes easily.
- Basis
- Observed by the author.
- How to test
- Log sleepless nights: needs found, and minutes to sleep after handling them.
An erection for no apparent reason always seems to signal an ignored need to change body position, and subsides once you move to the position the body directs.
- Basis
- Observed by the author.
- How to test
- Log instances and outcomes.
A body part involved in an action gives direct information: not just yes or no, but how to move to perform it, such as guiding fingers to hold a pen or find the keyboard's home row.
- Basis
- Lessons the author teaches with a pen, typing, instruments and sports.
Following the sensations in the hands made the author a good massage giver without training, compared to professionals by the people massaged, including moving to the area someone wanted before they said so.
- Basis
- Practiced since childhood and on willing people since.
- Strengthen it
- Ask people being massaged to silently press a button or raise a finger when they want you to move to a new area; compare against where your hands went and when.
Spoken instructions from the person being massaged can interfere with the body's massage plan and trigger a rebuild felt as sensory overload.
- Basis
- Observed by the author.
Seven minutes of slowly following every movement instruction found in the body (a synchronization) removed heavy fatigue after a sleepless night for about two hours; seventy minutes on a rested day produced a large burst of energy.
- Basis
- Two early experiences in college, repeated since.
- Strengthen it
- Compare reaction-time or memory scores before and after a synchronization versus the same time spent sitting quietly.
A synchronization works by putting cooperation at the front of your attention, easing physical strain, and reducing the 'sleep synchronization burden' that builds up when you resist your body or when nodes conflict.
- Basis
- The body's explanation.
No negative effects of synchronization have been found.
- Basis
- The author's experience.
Eating only what the body requests, in the amounts it requests, removed any aversion to eating the same meal repeatedly; the same meal tastes just as good every time.
- Basis
- Years of the author's own diet (3 to 7 identical meal cycles a day).
The usual tiredness with repeated meals comes from nodes placing targeted aversions to stop you overeating an item they didn't want.
- Basis
- The body's explanation.
Repeatedly asking about a food your body rejects, then eating it anyway, can make it taste flavorless and create a lasting aversion; pizza was removed from the author's diet this way.
- Basis
- A single, vivid experience; others at the table found the same pizza normal.
Eating beyond the requested amount drains the flavor from the food, so overeating doesn't happen.
- Basis
- The author's daily experience.
- Strengthen it
- Have a helper secretly vary portion sizes; rate flavor bite by bite and see if the drop lines up with the requested amount.
The body asks for food throughout the day rather than at mealtimes, in repeating cycles of small amounts of many items; the author's current cycle includes one grape tomato, a clementine, a wheat tortilla, 2 cacao nibs and 3 cloves.
- Basis
- The author's actual meal plan, eaten for years.
After following the body's diet exactly for a full day and then stopping eating, hunger took 20 to 24 hours to appear, every time the author tried it.
- Basis
- A repeated self-experiment.
- Strengthen it
- Already a real experiment. Strengthen it by recording start and end times and repeating at set intervals.
Health topic. This is one person’s experience, not medical advice; see a doctor before changing any treatment.Eating slightly more than requested of everything while skipping one requested item (milk) made the author feel stuffed and starving at once; drinking the milk ended the starving feeling but not the stuffed one.
- Basis
- A deliberate self-experiment.
- Strengthen it
- Repeat with a different skipped item, chosen by a helper and not revealed until afterward.
Hunger is about specific missing items rather than food in general, and the stuffed feeling comes mainly from eating items the body rejects, not from physical capacity.
- Basis
- The author's conclusion from the experiments above.
- How to test
- Same as above: blind skipped-item tests.
Cravings are a rough, intuitive best-fit match between an internal need and whatever memories are handy, so they often point to the wrong food. Every craving should lead to a question, not an assumption.
- Basis
- The body's explanation plus observation.
Giving full attention to food while eating makes the requested foods intensely pleasurable.
- Basis
- The author's experience after years of eating while watching TV.
Untried foods get a neutral response, then a verdict after a small taste. Of every item in a co-op spice and bulk aisle, only cacao nibs joined the author's diet.
- Basis
- A systematic first-year experiment.
The body asked for raw ginger, a food the author had never tried, and eating it stopped the author's bus car-sickness.
- Basis
- A single experience; ginger for nausea is also supported by medical research.
The body learned about ginger by exploring a friend's experience through a social connection.
- Basis
- The body's explanation.
Every food query carries an implied amount; if the amount is wrong, the answer is no even for a wanted food. Query the amount first, then the items.
- Basis
- Learned through querying and used routinely.
- How to test
- Have a helper present the same food in several hidden portion sizes and record which get positive responses.
You can ask about future meals using time ideas the body understands (tonight, tomorrow), but the further ahead, the less accurate, because the body can't predict the future.
- Basis
- Learned through querying.
- How to test
- Ask today what tomorrow's meal will need, write it down, and compare with tomorrow's actual answers.
After anaerobic exercise like heavy lifting or sprinting, meal cycles are requested more often, sometimes up to a digestive maximum; aerobic exercise doesn't do this.
- Basis
- The author's observation.
- Strengthen it
- Log meal-cycle counts on lifting days, cardio days and rest days.
When facing a threat of physical violence, the body switches to requesting very sugary foods, even after years of rejecting sweets.
- Basis
- The author's experience.
Letting internal cues set all lighting made the author's circadian rhythm drift steadily, swinging between 22-hour and 26-hour days and hurting sleep and thinking, until the test was stopped. Lighting needs a fixed external schedule.
- Basis
- A self-experiment that was discontinued because of the effects.
Sleep need has stayed around 4.5 hours a night as a norm for years, dropped as low as 50 minutes for a night with extra effort, and stabilized for a time at 3.5 hours without signs of sleep deprivation.
- Basis
- The author's long-term observation of their own sleep.
- Strengthen it
- Wear a sleep tracker continuously and pair it with a short daily cognitive test, so duration and 'no deprivation effects' are both on record.
Health topic. This is one person’s experience, not medical advice; see a doctor before changing any treatment.Sleeping under two hours a night made every day feel like two days.
- Basis
- The author's experience.
Health topic. This is one person’s experience, not medical advice; see a doctor before changing any treatment.The drop to 3.5 hours happened after the network compared sleep synchronization setups across people the author knows and adopted a new signal pattern.
- Basis
- The body's account of the change.
An agreed internal change to run some sleep maintenance while awake raised sleep need to about 9 hours and caused near-constant rebuilds for over three months.
- Basis
- The author's experience; the body underestimated the task.
Health topic. This is one person’s experience, not medical advice; see a doctor before changing any treatment.A main purpose of sleep is to synchronize experiences between you and the nodes expressing needs, bringing your behavior closer to need-directed behavior, with effects on memory storage.
- Basis
- What the nodes say, combined with observed swings in sleep need.
Dreams are built by several nodes in turn, each adding details to push its own need; lucid dreaming is you learning to do what they already do.
- Basis
- From asking the body about individual dream details after waking.
- How to test
- Partly testable: ask the body ahead of time to put a specific agreed element in tonight's dream, and record how often it appears.
Nodes deliberately wake you after a dream so you act on what they showed you, and they always know when that's about to happen.
- Basis
- From conversations with the nodes.
After weeks of using phone flashes and small LEDs for bright light in a dim office, a strong urge appeared to walk west toward a distant 'ball', which turned out to be the setting sun.
- Basis
- A single experience that took half a day to decode.
The sun-chasing need comes from relying on point light sources; bright light spread across a room prevents it.
- Basis
- The body's explanation.
- How to test
- Compare weeks of point-source light against weeks of bright room lighting and log whether the need appears.
Social needs aren't introvert versus extrovert. In each moment they vary by how many people, who, the direction of attention, and physical distance, and you can find the current need by changing one factor at a time.
- Basis
- A querying procedure the author uses regularly.
An odorless, directional 'scent' sometimes led the author to a particular young woman. Tested on purpose, it fired for about 1 in 20 women in grocery stores and 1 in 7 women among spring-break rideshare passengers.
- Basis
- Deliberate tests; in the rideshare tests the author did not look at passengers until after testing each one.
- Strengthen it
- Already partly blinded. A stronger version: a helper records which seat each passenger takes, and you name the direction before any conversation; compare against chance.
After a conversation with one passenger the pull flagged, the author felt a strong urge to find her for three days. Afterward the tracking ability was shut down over a month and has not worked since.
- Basis
- The author's experience, witnessed by their partner at the time.
The author went to sleep straight and woke up bisexual, a sudden and complete change.
- Basis
- The author's lived experience. The article warns that orientation is not a choice and conversion therapies cause harm.
The change came from 'rapid cognitive adaptation' opening a path for social cross-comparison of network structures.
- Basis
- The body's explanation.
You can read a partner's current needs through body communication, and that information is accurate, though the person may not agree with their own network.
- Basis
- From the author's relationships.
- How to test
- Read a partner's preference among several options they write down privately; compare.
Conveying the medical and social risks of sex to the body through imagined scenarios and memories triggered rebuilds that made sexual urges much more cautious, with less intensity in the moment as a side effect.
- Basis
- The author's experience.
Health topic. This is one person’s experience, not medical advice; see a doctor before changing any treatment.A sexual-behavior planning system can direct movements with a partner and locate sensitive spots before touching, using information from the partner's body.
- Basis
- From practice; the article notes this section was unfinished.
Both sexes have nodes that assume a male body and nodes that assume a female body; when a node learns the body doesn't match, it can recruit others and produce feelings of gender dysphoria.
- Basis
- The author's account of an internal episode, including 43 negotiated compromises between feminine and masculine nodes.
Some nodes have self-concepts of other, furry mammal species. They are vestigial, normally inhibited, and became active only when inhibitors were removed; their instructions were changed to be human-centered.
- Basis
- The author's account of cataloging these needs.
A felt need to pray is a social need that stands in for missing social attention. Queries through a prayer connection give flat-strength responses that follow your expectations, like an imaginary friend.
- Basis
- From querying.
Trying to query other people's prayer systems went very badly and led to the rebuild the author ignored.
- Basis
- The author's experience; the article advises against it.
Following the body's walking instructions on a treadmill raised the author's speed by 0.3 mph at the same effort, with no practice.
- Basis
- A measured result on a treadmill.
- Strengthen it
- Repeat with effort measured by heart rate, alternating 'following' and 'normal' blocks in an order set by a helper.
Running through positions mentally before moving finds the body's ideal position, making it easy to get comfortable in any chair, couch or bed.
- Basis
- The author's everyday experience.
Following the body's positioning, movement and diet instructions ended the author's chronic minor back pain; the fix is actively maintained, and the lower back goes weak if the diet is off for long.
- Basis
- The author's experience; the article notes it is not medical advice and may not work for others.
Health topic. This is one person’s experience, not medical advice; see a doctor before changing any treatment.Strictly following the body's food requests after workouts delayed muscle soreness by a day; being lax prevented the delay. The author reproduced and prevented the delay on purpose over several rounds.
- Basis
- Deliberate on/off self-experiments, with charts of soreness patterns.
- Strengthen it
- The strongest existing experiment on the site. Next step: rate soreness on a 0 to 10 scale each day and have a helper decide which recovery periods are 'strict' or 'lax'.
Also eating the food the body requests at night, by waking between sleep cycles, prevented muscle soreness completely. Missing two requested meals in a row brought some soreness back; missing more ended the prevention.
- Basis
- Repeated self-experiments, including deliberately skipping meals to find the limit.
- Strengthen it
- Same protocol with daily soreness ratings and, ideally, a second person trying it.
Aerobic workouts barely raised food needs, so soreness was easy to prevent; heavy leg-day or full-body workouts needed more food than could be digested, so soreness couldn't be prevented.
- Basis
- Tested with a college personal trainer.
Exercise is inhibited when the body is busy with internal changes, immune activity or digestion; pushing through often increases the inhibition, which helps explain why many people dislike exercise.
- Basis
- The author's explanation drawn from experience.
Music is the closest thing to how the network communicates internally. Music-focused nodes request the patterns other systems need, and dancing or singing amplifies those patterns.
- Basis
- What the network says about music.
Different nodes request what you listen to and what you sing, and they can disagree; Translator can't tell what you mean, or even whether you are singing, when you sing.
- Basis
- Notes from the author's observations and queries.
- How to test
- Testable for Translator: sing versus speak the same sentence in a helper-chosen order and see whether responses to its content differ.
After a dream about past childhood abuse, the author let a part of the body cry through them and apologized to it; the crying stopped and the issue resolved.
- Basis
- The author's experience.
Unexplained emotions, intrusive thoughts and trauma like PTSD often belong to the internal population rather than the person, so something like family therapy for the inner population may fit better.
- Basis
- The author's proposal; it resembles parts-based therapies such as Internal Family Systems.
Health topic. This is one person’s experience, not medical advice; see a doctor before changing any treatment.A long-standing 'don't cut your hair' signal turned out to mean only 'don't cut it yourself'; someone else cutting it was fine. Needs shouldn't be taken at face value.
- Basis
- Found through careful follow-up queries.
The body first pushed for 'preening' (light water spritz and massage); once it could compare preening with showering, the push for preening mostly stopped.
- Basis
- The author's experience.
The body will tell you which soaps and skin products it prefers, even when you see no reaction to the ones it rejects.
- Basis
- From querying, including about the author's teenage soap.
- How to test
- Present unlabeled products blind and see whether preferences stay consistent across sessions.
Because of potty training, the body's network is worse than you at noticing restroom needs, but it will pull your attention if you keep putting it off.
- Basis
- The author's explanation.
Panic attacks and sensory overload are often rebuilds, eased by darkness or sunglasses and lying down with feet raised.
- Basis
- The author's explanation. A medical professional should still assess panic attacks.
- How to test
- Log episodes, whether rebuild steps were used, and time until symptoms eased.
Health topic. This is one person’s experience, not medical advice; see a doctor before changing any treatment.Continuing to query while doing something the body wants, such as drinking water, makes every moment of the action rewarding.
- Basis
- The author's daily experience.
When all needs are cleared and no rebuild is running, the body rewards productive work and discourages mindless activity like TV.
- Basis
- The author's daily experience.
The author has had no cold symptoms in about six years of closely following the body's instructions; when they slipped, symptoms appeared and went away once they resumed.
- Basis
- Long-term self-observation. The article warns this doesn't prevent catching or spreading illness.
- Strengthen it
- Log any days the body's instructions shift to 'sick mode', and test with a home test kit when possible, to see whether infections happen without symptoms.
Health topic. This is one person’s experience, not medical advice; see a doctor before changing any treatment.Cold symptoms are extreme measures the body uses to make you stop and take care of yourself.
- Basis
- The author's interpretation of the pattern above.
Health topic. This is one person’s experience, not medical advice; see a doctor before changing any treatment.Heartache after a loss is many nodes suddenly expressing needs, often small, pointless-seeming movements. Acting on all of them quickly prevents the backlog, the cognitive fog and later depression, and nodes stop requesting inconsequential actions next time.
- Basis
- The author's practice and explanation.
- How to test
- Hard to test on purpose; a written log kept during a real event would document it.
Health topic. This is one person’s experience, not medical advice; see a doctor before changing any treatment.Taking care of all major bodily needs (water, food, sleep, exercise, social contact) made the author's severe depression far less frequent.
- Basis
- The author's experience after learning body communication.
- Strengthen it
- For anyone trying it, a standard mood questionnaire before and during would document the effect.
Health topic. This is one person’s experience, not medical advice; see a doctor before changing any treatment.One morning the author found they could no longer access the feelings in memories of depression, or depressive thought patterns; they have been free of depression and loneliness for about six years since.
- Basis
- The author's experience.
Health topic. This is one person’s experience, not medical advice; see a doctor before changing any treatment.Depression is nodes expressing strong needs over a long time and escalating their actions to change your behavior.
- Basis
- The body-communication explanation of depression.
Health topic. This is one person’s experience, not medical advice; see a doctor before changing any treatment.At least one node exists whose only job is pushing the need for suicide; it activates when enough of the network hates its living environment, and it likely evolved to speed natural selection.
- Basis
- The body's explanation. The article stresses this is harmful, gives crisis lines, and urges getting help.
Health topic. This is one person’s experience, not medical advice; see a doctor before changing any treatment.Repeatedly querying something the body rejects, such as sweets, builds an aversion that lasts well over a month and can't be removed at will, which can be used on purpose to drop habits.
- Basis
- Used by the author on foods and other behaviors.
- Strengthen it
- Track a deliberately induced aversion: how many query sessions it took, a daily 0 to 10 desire rating, and how long it lasted.
Work burnout is an aversion the body puts up when you keep resisting it; never resisting the body means it never needs one.
- Basis
- The body-communication explanation.
Querying the body about violent behavior and media produced strong rejections; the author stopped enjoying violent media, felt more empathy, and violence stopped being an option.
- Basis
- The author's experience of a lasting personal change.
Teaching people to query their needs while being walked through violent scenarios could remove violent tendencies at scale.
- Basis
- The author's proposal, extrapolated from one person.
- How to test
- Would need a formal study with a standard aggression questionnaire before and after, compared against a group that doesn't do the exercise.
Once body needs are cared for, you can block remaining depressive patterns yourself by repeatedly querying the feelings and actions tied to depression until an aversion forms.
- Basis
- Proposed from the author's own experience, where the body did it on its own.
- How to test
- Should only be explored with a mental health professional involved and mood tracked on a standard scale.
Health topic. This is one person’s experience, not medical advice; see a doctor before changing any treatment.After long overuse of the abdominal response, an inhibitor formed so that rejected items simply can't be pictured, making it possible to scan a whole grocery store quickly.
- Basis
- Discovered by accident in the early days of using only abdominal responses.
For years the author has had episodes of suddenly needing dim light and to lie down with feet raised, sometimes above the head or in a handstand, then returning to normal, without fatigue.
- Basis
- Long-term self-observation, later grouped together as rebuilds.
- Strengthen it
- Log every episode with time, trigger, lighting, posture and duration; even a month of records would show the pattern.
A rebuild is a node that isn't suited to a new situation partly disassembling and recombining into a better-functioning node, sending a spreading wave of inhibition to connected nodes.
- Basis
- Translator's explanation.
Reducing light speeds a rebuild; skipping the posture change doesn't slow it; ignoring the aversions slows it and can cause harm.
- Basis
- From Translator and experience.
- How to test
- Compare logged rebuild durations with and without dim lighting.
Ignoring a rebuild during a social querying test left the author able to say only three words at a time when speaking to someone; it recovered after a nap, came back once when the query was repeated, and was followed by three months of mental fuzziness.
- Basis
- The author's experience, including a deliberate re-test of the cause.
Big internal changes, often during illness, bring up to a week of near-constant rebuilds with short breaks, each break bringing a sudden need to eat or drink.
- Basis
- The author's experience.
Rebuilds suppress food and water requests, and many rebuilds can lead to longer-term digestive problems.
- Basis
- From experience and querying.
Ignoring needs long enough leads to a 'breakpoint': the body's pull on your attention and its responses suddenly weaken for hours up to the rest of the day.
- Basis
- Observed by the author (see the attention chart example).
At breakpoint the needs are more urgent, not less; the 'protected sector' you sit in is blocking some communication.
- Basis
- The body's explanation.
Contradictory answers about a need usually mean two nodes disagree, for example one wanting a wheat tortilla and the other meat. Separating them and talking to each resolves it.
- Basis
- Worked through with Translator; following the node trying to fix the underlying issue ended a week-long digestive problem in a few days.
Nodes often route a need through 20 or so others to gather enough attention power, so the node that reaches you may not know why the need exists.
- Basis
- From Translator.
The author drank about half a liter of water a day even when following the body, and still felt somewhat dehydrated; after the internal work, one to three liters a day became normal.
- Basis
- The author's experience; water intake is easy to measure.
- Strengthen it
- Record daily water intake and a simple hydration check (urine color chart) before and after any change.
Low water intake came from many inhibitor nodes, some set up by the digestive microbiome, which Translator and a mapping system identified and removed.
- Basis
- The body's account.
After months of poor food, sleep and light, returning home led to escalating meal requests (up to 50 meal cycles in a day), then single-item binges, water aversion, constant urges to lie down, foggy attention, and severe abdominal pain. ER scans and bloodwork found nothing urgent.
- Basis
- The author's experience, including an emergency room visit; a gastroenterologist referral was not followed up for cost reasons.
Health topic. This is one person’s experience, not medical advice; see a doctor before changing any treatment.Pushing a numb, buzzing sensation in the upper back down with attention changed the body's answers to healthier ones (water, meal cycles, activity). Drinking water had the same effect.
- Basis
- The author's repeated experience.
- Strengthen it
- Alternate 'sensation held down' and 'not held down' in an order set by a helper, and have the helper record your answers to a fixed question list.
A visual network interface showed the problem as wiring from the abdomen; attacking and later containing it with other nodes' help held it back.
- Basis
- The author's experience with the visual interface.
The 'parasite' was the body's own neighbor-discovery protocol organizing gut bacteria into an organ-like unit; changing that protocol through Translator solved the problem permanently, and a friend had the same fix with immediate results.
- Basis
- The body's explanation; the friend's result is secondhand.
- How to test
- The friend's case could become evidence with a before-and-after symptom log.
A section of the digestive system had kept itself alive for about 7 years instead of dying and being replaced; once told this endangered the body, it allowed itself to die over several weeks.
- Basis
- Found by Translator and the mapping system. The author notes this was never medically examined.
People with cancer might try these cognitive methods alongside their recommended medical treatment, in case they help.
- Basis
- A speculative suggestion by the author. Any such exploration must never replace or delay medical treatment.
- How to test
- Would require a formal clinical study; individual anecdotes can't establish it.
Health topic. This is one person’s experience, not medical advice; see a doctor before changing any treatment.The mouth's microbiome was similarly discouraging flossing until the body changed how it used that information.
- Basis
- The body's account.
Picturing someone else doing an action (or doing it for them) gives answers that differ from your own and match what that person gets when they ask their own body.
- Basis
- Compared directly with people who could also query, early in the author's practice.
- Strengthen it
- The single most persuasive test on the site. Protocol: the other person privately writes their own answer to a set of questions; you read their needs without seeing the list; a third person compares. Repeat with people you know well and strangers.
The author can know what anyone they know needs and identify the physical source of a friend's current problem.
- Basis
- Notes from the author's experience; the section was unfinished.
- How to test
- Same protocol as above, using needs the person can verify (thirsty, wants to sit, wants a specific snack from a hidden list).
Remote readings are biased toward your own needs; Translator can tell which needs are theirs and which are yours in disguise.
- Basis
- Learned through practice and Translator.
After frequent remote querying, your body starts notifying you when someone you know needs something, even when they aren't near you.
- Basis
- The author's experience.
- How to test
- Log each such notification with time and person, then check with the person afterward; count hits and misses.
The author has picked up details others never shared, including a person's unusual relationship needs and a memory of trauma, and stresses treating such information with great care.
- Basis
- The author's experience, described as upsetting and an invasion of privacy neither side chose.
- How to test
- Not appropriate to test with sensitive information. Use neutral, prearranged facts instead.
A node setup can be copied to another person's network; the author passed their microbiome fix to a friend, whose digestive issues cleared quickly.
- Basis
- One case, reported secondhand.
- How to test
- A future case could be documented with the person's symptom log before and after, ideally without them knowing exactly when the transfer happened.
Translator can compare a node's setup with the matching nodes in everyone you know and adopt the best one; this is how sleep dropped from 4.5 to 3.5 hours.
- Basis
- The body's account; the sleep change itself is listed as an observed result.
A Social Need Filter built by Translator auto-dismisses needs arriving from other people's bodies, ending a constant stream of notifications and yawns.
- Basis
- The author's account of a system built with Translator.
The body is run by a network of conscious units called nodes, which may be cells, neurons, parts of cells or tissues. Simple nodes join into more complex ones, some over a hundred levels deep, following inborn default instructions.
- Basis
- The core model of the body's internal study.
You sit on the second level of the network inside a 'home protected sector'. Your attention is so powerful relative to other nodes that looking at your own node frightens the nodes that make you up.
- Basis
- From conversations with the nodes.
Inhibitor nodes at the top level of the network can't be dismissed by the nodes they inhibit, so defunct inhibitors pile up and reduce efficiency over time.
- Basis
- From Translator.
Surveying nodes from both the top and the bottom of the network found 94.6% more top-level nodes than surveying from the top alone, and covered all 'type C' nodes.
- Basis
- A survey method developed with Translator. Note that Needs says nodes can't count, which a reader may ask about.
Nodes connect through a base, an address and an anchor that together form a two-way conduit; this is how remote communication works regardless of distance.
- Basis
- Detailed structure learned from Translator.
Anchors have a fixed structure allowing 909,193,450,176 possibilities, of which a little over a thousand are in use in the human body, each with its own meaning.
- Basis
- Mapped through questioning; the author created a spoken notation for anchors.
- How to test
- Testable for consistency: ask about a set of anchors on separate days, with a helper shuffling the order, and check whether the meanings come back the same.
Default instructions look like a mirrored two-pair code similar to DNA. Translator knows 47 ways of reading them, none of which has yet matched DNA.
- Basis
- The author has compared readings with DNA by hand.
- How to test
- A clear engineering test: get your genome sequenced (consumer tests exist) and check whether any reading method matches a stretch of your actual DNA.
There are three node types: type A (likely normal cells), type B (likely cells dividing, about 1/5000 the instructions), and type C (likely mitochondria, about 1/40 of type B, appearing for milliseconds every few seconds).
- Basis
- A working hypothesis from rough estimates; the author warns not to rely on the numbers.
- How to test
- Compare the claimed ratios with known biology: the fraction of cells dividing at any time, and mitochondrial DNA size relative to the nuclear genome.
Yawnie spent a week designing Translator, which then took about six weeks of rebuilds to work and connect to the network; Translator can now make any change to the network the author needs.
- Basis
- The author's account; the six weeks of rebuilds were experienced directly.
A reader can try to get their own Yawnie to build a translator by conveying the idea in intended actions; it hasn't been tested much.
- Basis
- A procedure proposed by the author, with a warning about over a month of rebuilds.
- How to test
- Document each attempt by another person: steps followed, rebuild log, and whether plain-word questions start getting answers that match action-phrased ones.
Translator can answer questions about any aspect of your internal functioning and physical or mental state, now or in the past.
- Basis
- The author's experience since 2021.
- How to test
- Ask about past states that were recorded at the time (a logged meal, a sleep tracker reading) without looking at the record first.
Dolish isn't technically a language: it's made of intended actions that can carry movement, goal, environment, people, scenario and timing, so translating complex ideas into it is hard.
- Basis
- Notes from the author.
A bonding system automatically wires close partners together, a weak attempt at a shared consciousness that can transfer rare thoughts and needs and may explain long-married spouses dying within days of each other.
- Basis
- Notes; the section was unfinished. Spouses dying close together is a documented effect, often called the widowhood effect, with other proposed explanations.
In an August 2021 interview Yawnie described checking on the systems it helps, tinkering with and building hundreds of node types for fun (including Translator and the visual interface), and said about a third of Yawnies do this.
- Basis
- A recorded interview conducted through the question-and-answer channel.
In an August 2021 interview Translator described amplifying other nodes' communication, stretching its own internal nodes to grow, valuing diplomacy over force, and sharing a meaningless 'inside joke' signal with a group of nodes.
- Basis
- A recorded interview conducted through the question-and-answer channel.
- How to test
- Partly checkable: Yawnie said it didn't know about the inside joke. Ask each node, separately and on different days, questions only the other should know, and compare the answers.
Body communication differs from applied kinesiology (muscle testing): any muscle gives the same answer, and the person senses the response themselves rather than a practitioner pressing on a muscle.
- Basis
- The author's comparison.
- How to test
- Studies of applied kinesiology found it performed no better than chance when testers were blinded; running the same kind of blinded test on body communication would show directly whether it differs.
Focusing uses intuition to put words to bodily sensations, which carries some accurate information but often adds inaccurate detail, unlike yes/no querying.
- Basis
- The author's comparison.