A Computational Framework of Mind-Body Unity: Formalizing Embodied Models of Health

Health is not merely a passive read‑out of biology but an active, ongoing prediction made by the brain. Here, we formalize this intuition within the Embodied Models of Health (EMH) framework, which integrates three well-established yet often disconnected forces—beliefs, expectations and attention—into a unified attention‑weighted Bayesian update. In this model, context-evoked mindsets serve as priors over latent health states, while an attention parameter modulates the extent to which incoming sensory information updates those priors. The resulting posterior belief then loops back to physiology through autonomic, endocrine, immune and behavioral pathways, capturing placebo, nocebo and stress phenomena within one tractable equation. We validate the EMH framework through three complementary studies. (i) A controlled laboratory bruise-healing experiment, where participants received identical mild bruises under conditions manipulating perceived elapsed time (slow, normal, or fast desk timer). A causal‑forest analysis shows that the fast‑timer cue accelerates objective healing most among individuals who both expected to heal quickly and paid close attention to subtle changes—precisely the joint prior‑attention pathway predicted by EMH. (ii) A large-scale “synergistic mindsets” field trial ($N \approx 2,500$ students), where re‑estimating the original data with a parsimonious interaction model reveals that a 30‑minute lesson reframing intelligence and stress yields the greatest improvements in stress mindset and academic indicators for students who began with the strongest fixed‑ability beliefs. This finding illustrates how shifting priors alone can redirect downstream physiology and behavior at scale. (iii) An open-label placebo study, where participants received the same placebo rationale but differed in their pre-existing beliefs about placebo effectiveness. Consistent with EMH, the intervention reduced allergic responses in those with strong placebo beliefs but increased them among participants with especially low beliefs, illustrating how identical inputs can produce divergent physiological outcomes depending on prior expectations and attentional weighting.Because each component of the EMH framework is measurable and manipulable, it offers a quantitative blueprint for precision mind‑body interventions that harness beneficial cognitive loops while disrupting harmful ones.