Nicholas P. Timms
Submitted: April 2026 : Publish: 19th April 2026
Abstract
The developmental trajectory from early childhood to adulthood is characterized by profound cognitive and physiological transformations, historically studied in isolation across cognitive psychology and network biophysics. While cognitive models emphasize “empowerment gain”—the intrinsic motivation to construct accurate causal models by maximizing the mutual information between an agent’s actions and environmental outcomes—the biophysical substrates required to thermodynamically support this massive computational scaling have remained elusive. This paper introduces a novel interdisciplinary framework synthesizing the principles of neural criticality with the analogue gravity dynamics of the gut-brain axis. We propose that the maturing human brain’s progression toward self-organized criticality is fundamentally anchored by the concurrent maturation of the Enteric Nervous System. Within this model, the gastrointestinal tract functions as an effective spacetime metric and a vital thermodynamic sink, safely dissipating the immense metabolic costs associated with rapid causal learning. By framing gastric electrophysiology as a stabilizing topological boundary, we demonstrate that the organism’s pursuit of cognitive empowerment is inextricably linked to the structural integrity of this unified neuro-visceral network. Furthermore, this synthesis provides a precise biophysical etiology for the developmental vulnerabilities of adolescence: the psychiatric distress and dysautonomia frequently observed during this period are reframed as supercritical instabilities arising from a temporary decoupling of the central cognitive manifold from its visceral gravitational anchor. Ultimately, this paradigm establishes that advanced causal reasoning and cognitive empowerment are not merely localized neural computations, but emergent properties of a perfectly calibrated, body-wide thermodynamic and topological system.
