Visualization, Intention, Movement, and Learning the Language of Your Own Physiology
The future of personalized health may involve more than knowing our genome, biomarkers, and medical history. It may also involve learning how our own physiology responds to meaning, memory, intention, and imagination – and using objective feedback to become more fluent in the language of our own body.
For years, athletes have used visualization to improve performance. Patients have been encouraged to use imagery, meditation, breathing, and emotional regulation to reduce stress. We know from conventional neuroscience that imagining a movement can engage parts of the same motor system involved in performing it, and research also shows that emotional imagery can produce measurable autonomic responses.
But there is a more personal question that has always interested me: when someone sends a mental instruction to the body, what does that particular body actually understand?
That question became practical in my clinic. I used Aurorus scans before and after carefully chosen visualization exercises and physical movements with professional athletes. The goal was not to prove that visualization ‘worked.’ It was to give the athlete feedback about how his or her own physiology responded to a particular image, instruction, or movement.
What emerged was something I came to think of as learning the language of one’s own body.
“The mind may issue the instruction. The body reveals how it was received.”
The Athlete Who Thinks He Knows What He Is Telling His Body
Elite athletes are trained to pay attention to extremely small distinctions: the angle of a foot, the timing of a breath, the fraction of a second between seeing and reacting. Yet the internal language used during visualization is often treated as though it were universal. A coach may say, ‘See yourself moving faster,’ ‘visualize the perfect swing,’ or ‘imagine being completely relaxed.’
But two athletes can hear the same instruction and create very different internal experiences. One person’s image of power may be accompanied by calm, coordinated activation. Another person’s image of power may be inseparable from tension, pressure, fear of failure, or muscular bracing.
In the clinic, we could establish a baseline Aurorus scan, have the athlete perform a specific visualization, and scan again. We could then change the imagery, wording, breathing pattern, or physical movement and repeat the process. The value was not a generic score telling the athlete whether the exercise was ‘good’ or ‘bad.’ The value was comparison: this is how your measured whole-body pattern changed when you used this particular mental instruction.
The athlete could begin experimenting. Which visualization produced the response he or she intended? Which one created an unexpected pattern? Did imagining a movement produce a response that resembled the response after physically performing it? Could the athlete learn to enter a desired state more reliably by changing the language, image, or sensation used during rehearsal?
That is a very different use of biofeedback. It is not simply teaching someone to lower a number. It is helping an individual build a personalized physiological vocabulary.
Mental Imagery Is Not “Only in the Mind”
There is a strong conventional scientific foundation for taking mental imagery seriously. Motor imagery has been studied extensively in neuroscience and sports science. Visual and kinesthetic imagery recruit overlapping neural networks, and mental rehearsal can influence motor learning and performance. Studies of motor imagery also report autonomic correlates, demonstrating that imagined movement can be accompanied by changes outside the brain itself.
Emotional imagery provides another example. Vividly imagining or recalling emotionally charged events can alter heart rate, skin conductance, startle responses, and other measures of physiological arousal. The important point is not that imagination is equivalent to physical action. It is that an imagined event can become a biological event in the sense that the organism responds to it.
That observation opens a much richer question for personalized health and performance: if mental imagery has physiological consequences, can we teach people to recognize which forms of imagery produce which responses in their own bodies?
The Best Day and the Worst Day
Some of the most memorable demonstrations in my clinic did not involve athletes at all. I worked with people facing cancer and other significant health challenges. Again, the purpose was never to suggest that visualization could treat their disease. The exercise was about awareness and action.
After obtaining a baseline scan, I would sometimes ask an individual to vividly revisit the best day of his or her life. I wanted the person to go there mentally – to remember the place, the people, the sensations, the emotion, the meaning of that moment. We would then repeat the Aurorus measurement while the individual held onto those visualizations.
Lastly, the person would be asked to recall the worst day of his or her life. Sometimes this was the day of diagnosis, and the feeling of overwhelm. With the same care and guidance towards the same degree of mental engagement, we would then do another Aurorus scan.
Seeing the resulting whole-body images never failed to be extraordinarily impactful. The abstract statement that ‘thoughts and emotions affect the body’ became personal became real. The individual was no longer being asked to accept a general wellness concept. He or she could see that different states of mind were accompanied by different measured patterns in his or her own physiology. The power of the mind became a real and present thing.
For someone living with a serious illness, that distinction matters. It does not imply that a person caused the illness through thought, nor that positive thinking can cure it. It means that mental state is one of the variables that participates in physiology – and therefore one of the variables over which a person may be able to develop greater skill and awareness.
From Biofeedback to a Personal Physiological Dictionary
This work led me to a concept that I believe deserves much more exploration: a personal physiological dictionary.
Instead of assuming that the same visualization, meditation, breathing pattern, affirmation, or mental image produces the same response in everyone, we could measure the individual repeatedly and begin mapping his or her characteristic responses.
- What does confidence look like in my physiology?
- What does fear or anticipatory stress look like?
- What happens when I visualize a successful movement?
- What happens when I physically perform that movement?
- What mental image produces calm without loss of readiness?
- What happens when I recall joy, gratitude, grief, anger, or threat?
- How quickly does my physiology recover after an emotionally charged state?
- Can I learn to reproduce a desired state intentionally?
This shifts the focus from population averages to individualized learning. The aim is not to tell a person what he or she should feel. It is to help that person recognize the relationship between conscious experience and measurable bodily response.
Michael Levin and Biology as Information Processing
Michael Levin’s work provides a fascinating biological context for this discussion, while also requiring scientific restraint. Levin’s laboratory studies bioelectric signaling in development, regeneration, and morphogenesis: the ways in which voltage gradients, ion flows, and bioelectric networks participate in how cells and tissues coordinate large-scale anatomical outcomes.
His work challenges the idea that meaningful biological information processing is confined to the brain. Cells throughout the body maintain electrical states and participate in networks that influence collective behavior. In Levin’s experimental systems, bioelectrical patterning is one component of the information architecture through which living tissues organize themselves.
This does not mean that Levin’s research proves that visualization changes a human ‘biofield,’ nor should Aurorus claim that it does. The connection is more interesting when stated carefully: living systems process information at multiple levels, and bioelectricity is one of the physical languages used in that process.
That leaves an open translational question. When conscious experience changes – when a person imagines, intends, remembers, anticipates, or mentally rehearses – how far through the organism does the resulting change propagate, and what aspects of that response can be measured? Aurorus offers one possible way to investigate that question at the level of whole-person physiology.
Federico Faggin: Information, Meaning, and Conscious Experience
Federico Faggin approaches the problem from a very different direction. After helping create foundational semiconductor and microprocessor technologies, he turned his attention to the nature of consciousness and information. In work discussed through Essentia Foundation and elsewhere, Faggin has proposed a theoretical framework in which consciousness is fundamental rather than merely an emergent product of classical computation.
That proposal is not established biological fact, and it should be presented as a theoretical position. But Faggin raises a distinction that is highly relevant to the work described here: the difference between information and meaning.
A computer can process symbols without experiencing what those symbols mean. Human beings do not merely process instructions; we interpret them through memory, emotion, expectation, identity, sensory experience, and prior learning.
That distinction becomes vivid in an athlete. The instruction ‘be powerful’ may be linguistically identical for two people, but its embodied meaning can be completely different. One athlete may associate power with ease and fluidity. Another may associate it with force, struggle, and muscular tension. If their physiological responses differ, the relevant variable may not simply be the words. It may be what those words mean to each individual.
Aurorus does not resolve Faggin’s theory of consciousness. It can, however, help bring one adjacent question into the measurable domain: when meaning changes for the individual, does the body’s physiological response change with it?
Consciousness Research Without Choosing a Metaphysics
Organizations such as Essentia Foundation bring together thinkers who challenge conventional assumptions about consciousness, including differing views about whether consciousness is produced by the brain, emerges from complex organization, or is more fundamental to reality. These are profound questions, and there is no need for Aurorus to choose among them in order to contribute something useful. A measurement platform can remain philosophically agnostic.
When conscious experience changes, what measurable changes occur in the body?
That question is narrower, testable, and potentially valuable regardless of one’s theory of consciousness. If repeated measurements demonstrate consistent within-person changes associated with particular imagery, emotional states, intentions, or movements, those findings become data. Competing theories can then attempt to explain the data.
This is the same discipline Aurorus can bring to subtle-energy research: measure first, remain agnostic about the desired outcome, and let reproducible evidence determine what deserves deeper investigation.
A New Research Program Hidden Inside an Old Clinical Observation
The experiences from my clinic suggest several research designs that could now be tested much more rigorously.
Athletic visualization and movement
An athlete could undergo repeated measurements under randomized conditions: neutral imagery, visual imagery of a movement, kinesthetic imagery of the same movement, actual physical execution, and recovery. Aurorus could be collected alongside conventional measures such as heart rate variability, respiration, EMG, EEG, or motion-performance data.
Researchers could then ask whether different forms of imagery create distinguishable physiological signatures, whether those signatures are reproducible within an individual, and whether the visualization that best approximates aspects of the physical-performance state is associated with better execution or learning.
Emotional autobiographical imagery
A second protocol could compare neutral, positive, and negative autobiographical imagery under standardized conditions. Again, Aurorus would not stand alone. It could be collected together with heart rate, HRV, skin conductance, respiration, cortisol, and validated subjective measures. The objective would be to determine whether Aurorus captures additional information about the whole-body response and recovery trajectory.
Learning and self-regulation
The most intriguing longitudinal question may be whether feedback itself changes capability. If an individual can see which visualization or mental strategy produces the desired physiological pattern, can that person learn to reproduce the state more efficiently over time? In athletes, that could be studied against performance. In rehabilitation, against movement recovery. In stress-management research, against autonomic regulation and validated outcomes.
Seeing the Conversation
The mind-body relationship is often discussed as though it were either obvious or mysterious. In reality, much of it is measurable already: neural activation, autonomic changes, endocrine responses, muscle activation, respiratory shifts, and changes in behavior. Yet the individual’s lived experience of those changes is rarely integrated into a single visual feedback process.
That is where I believe Aurorus can contribute something unusual.
The technology can be used not only to ask whether disease is present or whether an intervention creates change, but to help explore how an individual responds to thought, intention, emotional memory, visualization, and movement. The measurement does not tell us what consciousness is. It does not prove a metaphysical theory. And it does not turn positive thinking into medicine.
It does something more disciplined: it makes aspects of the body’s response available for observation.
Perhaps the most important question is not whether the mind affects the body. We already know that it does. The more interesting question is whether we can teach an individual to recognize the particular language through which their own mind and body communicate.
Aurorus offers a possibility of what historically has been difficult to achieve: making aspects of that conversation visible – and giving the individual a new way to learn from it.
Selected Scientific Context
- Levin Lab. Bioelectricity and spatial information resources; peer-reviewed publications on bioelectric regulation of morphogenesis. drmichaellevin.org
- Filgueiras A, et al. The neural basis of kinesthetic and visual imagery in sports: an ALE meta-analysis. Brain Imaging and Behavior. 2018.
- Collet C, et al. Autonomic nervous system correlates in movement observation and motor imagery. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. 2013;7:415.
- Ji JL, et al. Emotional Mental Imagery as Simulation of Reality: Fear and Beyond. Behaviour Research and Therapy. 2016;83:24-37.
- Wicken M, et al. The critical role of mental imagery in human emotion: insights from fear-based imagery and aphantasia. Proceedings of the Royal Society B. 2021.
- Essentia Foundation. Discussions with Federico Faggin on consciousness, quantum information, meaning, and physical reality. essentiafoundation.org
Regulatory note: Aurorus is a non-invasive electrophysiological measurement platform. It was granted FDA De Novo classification (DEN150004) as a Class I non-invasive electrophysiological measurement device. It is not cleared for diagnostic purposes. Nothing in this article claims that any therapy, modality, or practice diagnoses, treats, cures, or prevents any disease.
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Nancy Rizzo Prior to developing the science and technology for Aurorus, Nancy spent 13 years at Mayo Clinic Scottsdale as a board certified radiological therapeutic physicist and cochaired the Complementary and Alternative Medicine program. Nancy is board certified as a Radiological Therapeutic Physicist by the American Board of Radiology (DABR) and holds a Ph D. in Energy Medicine with an emphasis on Biophysics from Holos University.
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