Nicholas P. Timms
Submitted: April 2026 : Publish: 3rd April 2026
Abstract
The developmental transition from adolescence to adulthood entails profound shifts in neurocomputational dynamics, specifically the progression of the cerebral cortex toward a state of self-organized criticality. Concurrently, peripheral autonomic systems, particularly the gastrointestinal tract, undergo functional maturation. This paper presents a novel theoretical synthesis bridging the emergence of frequency-specific cortical criticality with an analogue gravity model of gastric electrophysiology. Within this framework, the prefrontal cortex achieves an optimal excitatory-inhibitory balance during adulthood, enabling high-fidelity, top-down vagal modulation. This matured vagal tone acts as a dynamic homeostatic tuner for the stomach wall, which functions as an effective biological spacetime metric propagating the gastric slow wave. During the supercritical instability of adolescence, or in instances of developmental pathology, erratic vagal signals degrade this acoustic metric. This degradation prompts the localized collapse of wave propagation into pathological analogue event horizons, clinically manifesting as conduction blocks and severe dysmotility such as gastroparesis. Furthermore, this model elucidates how these visceral spacetime collapses transmit afferent distress signals that abnormally hyper-couple with frontoparietal networks, driving profound psychiatric distress. Finally, it highlights vagus nerve stimulation as a bidirectional electroceutical intervention capable of simultaneously restoring neural criticality and repairing the gastric metric topology. Ultimately, this criticality-spacetime control model redefines neuro-visceral maturation as the biological calibration of a unified, complex gravitational system.
