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Owned by Sterling

Vagus School

771 members • Free

This group is designed for the discussion of the Vagus Nerve, techniques to stimulate it, and the benefits of doing so.

Ultra School

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Ultra School is a repository for information published by Sterling Cooley, as an online training platform for using Ultrasound.

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360 contributions to Vagus School
New 2026 Research: How The Vagus Nerve Reduces Systemic Inflammation By 68 Percent
The vagus nerve is the body's primary neural regulator of systemic inflammation. Recent 2026 research confirms its central role via the cholinergic anti-inflammatory pathway. The mechanism involves efferent vagal fibers releasing acetylcholine within the spleen. This neurotransmitter binds to α7 nicotinic receptors on macrophages, effectively suppressing NF-κB signaling. This inhibits pro-inflammatory cytokines like TNF-α and IL-6 while preserving essential antibacterial responses. It prevents cytokine storms without inducing broad immunosuppression. Trials in rheumatoid arthritis patients showed a 68% reduction in serum TNF-α. C-reactive protein levels fell by 52%, demonstrating significant clinical efficacy and dose-dependent control. Bioelectronic medicine is redefining immune health. We are entering an era of precise, neural-based control over inflammatory homeostasis. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1605635113 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41584-019-0235-2 https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphys.2021.662588/full https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41737248
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New 2026 Research: How The Vagus Nerve Reduces Systemic Inflammation By 68 Percent
Link to ultra priming MP3 doesn’t work
I am looking at the guidebook, and the link for the MP3 for ultra priming does not work. I tried it on my I-phone and on my laptop. And I have used Google Drive for file sharing before. It says “file not found” when I click on the link.
1 like • 10d
Hey sorry !!! I have the mp3 here now https://www.skool.com/vagus/classroom/7b29343d?md=136b47c8fd76493cac207e27b5e67dd7 I forgot my old Google Drive so some of the links are not working , :(( But this mp3 does work !!
0 likes • 3d
@Anke Bohmer No they are different. Hour of Power is an audio. Ultra Priming is a video - that's completely insane and amazing, they are different. Ultra Priming is one of my masterpieces :)
I am thrilled to be here!
Wow, I as doing so much research on VNS without even considering checking within the Skool app. I glad I did! So far I’ve tried lots of body and breath work. But recently I’ve ventured into the Tens Unit world and I am not quite sure if it’s helpful. It seems like this group is into Ultrasound. I’d love to know more about the device! I’d also love to know if a Tens Unit with an ear clip is just hype?
0 likes • 3d
Cheers ! Welcome - We are open to whatever tools gets the best results, and I've been *in* VNS tech since 2017, and I've tried electrical ear clip systems, and Ultrasound, and have worked with over 1000 individuals (I worked as a full-time VNS coach for many, many years) And yes, Ultrasound is better as of today. That can always change tho ! What I also like about the Ultrasound is a US-1000 is only $54 USD - so it's quite easy to get and to try ! And it's a darn good tool to have on hand. Hope that helps !
The Octopus and the Question of Where Intelligence Lives
Part 1 of a three-part series on distributed biological intelligence. Octopuses have become something of a celebrity in popular neuroscience, and it's easy to see why. They open jars, they recognize individual humans, they squeeze their soft bodies through implausibly small holes, and they do all this with a nervous system that looks nothing like ours. The detail that gets repeated most often is that an octopus has roughly 500 million neurons, but only a small fraction of them are in the head. Most are spread out through the eight arms. That number is real. The central brain is estimated at around 40 to 50 million neurons. The paired optic lobes add something like 130 million on top of that. And the eight arms together house around 350 million — somewhere in the neighborhood of two-thirds of the entire nervous system. Connecting all of it is a surprisingly thin wire: by classic estimates, only about 30,000 nerve fibers run between the central brain and the arm cords. If you're used to the idea that intelligence happens in a brain, full stop, this picture is genuinely disorienting. Where is the octopus actually thinking? The honest answer is that we don't fully know. But we know enough to say that the octopus arm is doing real work. Each arm contains a thick axial nerve cord running its full length, four smaller intramuscular nerve cords alongside it, and a small ganglion at the base of every single sucker. There can be hundreds of suckers per arm. Recent imaging has sharpened the picture considerably. Olson, Schulz and Ragsdale published a striking 2025 paper in Nature Communications showing that the axial nerve cord isn't a uniform tube but is organized into segments, with cell bodies arranged in repeating columns and a topographic map of the suckers built right into the wiring. A 3D molecular atlas published the year before by Winters-Bostwick and colleagues in Current Biology added another layer of detail, identifying multiple distinct neurochemical cell types whose distribution differs from arm base to arm tip.
The Octopus and the Question of Where Intelligence Lives
2 likes • 3d
Your Vagus Nerve Is Not Just a Wire Part 2 of a three-part series on distributed biological intelligence. If you've encountered the vagus nerve at all, it was probably in a wellness context — breathwork, cold plunges, "vagal tone." That framing makes it sound like a single dial you can tune. The reality is messier and, I think, much more interesting. The vagus is the tenth cranial nerve and the longest of them. It exits the skull at the base, runs through the neck, and branches extensively into the heart, the lungs, the larynx, the liver, the pancreas, the spleen, and almost the whole digestive tract. It is the body's main interoceptive cable — the channel through which the brain finds out what's going on inside the rest of you. Two facts about it deserve attention. The first is that the vagus is overwhelmingly a sensory nerve. About four out of every five fibers carry information up to the brain, not commands down to the body. The "80% afferent" figure that gets quoted in textbooks is a little fuzzy — it traces back to a 1957 paper on cats, and recent careful counts in human cervical vagus tissue give numbers in the low 70s — but the headline holds: this nerve is mostly listening. The second fact is more surprising. Until quite recently, the standard estimate for how many fibers a human cervical vagus contains was 100,000 or more. That number is in a lot of review papers. It also appears to be wrong. When researchers count the fibers directly using modern immunohistochemistry, the actual count is something like 25,000 per side, give or take. Tens of thousands. Not a hundred thousand. This matters because the body is sending those tens of thousands of fibers to monitor a vast amount of territory. The gut alone has billions of nerve endings. The lungs and heart have their own dense sensor populations. If you add up everything the vagus is responsible for sensing, you get a compression ratio on the order of a thousand to one. There is far, far more information being generated in the body than there are channels to carry it.
2 likes • 3d
The Gut-Brain Conversation, and Who's Actually Doing the Talking Part 3 of a three-part series on distributed biological intelligence. You've definitely seen the headlines. "Your gut bacteria control your mood." "The microbiome is your second brain." "Probiotics for anxiety." There is something real underneath all this, and there is also a lot of noise, and the difference matters. Let's start with what's actually in your gut. Lining the walls of your digestive tract, from the esophagus all the way down, is a network of neurons called the enteric nervous system. The standard estimate is somewhere between 200 and 600 million neurons — a range that reflects how genuinely hard these counts are to make rather than scientific disagreement about the basic picture. Either way, your gut has its own brain, in the sense that it can run most of the basic machinery of digestion without any input from the actual brain. Cut the vagus and your stomach still empties; the bowel still moves food along. Then there are the bacteria. Trillions of them, organized into a community whose composition shifts with what you eat, when you sleep, what stress you're under, and whether you're taking antibiotics. The microbiome produces an enormous range of chemicals: short-chain fatty acids, neurotransmitter precursors, immune-active compounds, and a variety of other metabolites. Some of these can affect the brain. Here's where the popular framing gets ahead of the evidence. Microbes, by themselves, do not have a nervous system. They don't have synapses or coordination. They can't "decide" anything in any meaningful sense. What they can do is produce chemicals. Whether and how those chemicals affect your brain depends entirely on what the rest of your body does with them. The gut has to detect them. Some kind of structured signal has to be sent. The brain has to receive that signal in a usable form. This is where the vagus and the enteric nervous system come back in. They are the translation layer.
Your Vagus Nerve Just Got A High Tech Genetic Upgrade
We're now injecting therapies directly *into* the Vagus Nerve itself using tiny needles using ULtrasound-guided interaneural procedures - in your neck ! Wild times !!! Imagine your vagus nerve is the ultimate fiber-optic cable connecting your brain to your gut. It’s the busiest "gossip highway" in your body. Science is now sending tiny genetic delivery trucks (AAV9) directly onto that highway during elective neck surgeries. Think of these vectors as high-tech mechanics. They hitch a ride on the nerve's internal tracks—the microtubules—and race toward the master control center. In a recent Phase I trial, researchers injected these couriers with "stabilizing" cargo. Their mission? To fix the infrastructure of how your body feels and reacts. The results? No systemic chaos and no "wrong turns." Just high-precision delivery that stays active for over a year. By rewiring this master regulator, we’re looking at a future where chronic inflammation or epilepsy gets a genetic "tune-up." Your body's internal internet just got a major upgrade. Turns out, the secret to health is just a very small, very smart delivery service. https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT07543991
Your Vagus Nerve Just Got A High Tech Genetic Upgrade
0 likes • 3d
@Tunie Harris No, SGB is putting numbing agents in. The above clinical trial is placing a "stem cell" esque peptide into the Vagus Nerve to help the Microtubules stabilize. It's a whole new type of therapy !
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Sterling Cooley
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Vagus Nerve Stimulation Specialist Admin of Ultra School

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