Breaking the Stasis in the Polyvagal Controversy: Two Category Errors, a Missing Variable, and a Measured Boundary

For twenty years, the dispute over Polyvagal Theory (PVT) has turned on whether the profound bradycardia attributed to dorsal vagal shutdown occurs in ordinary human freezing and dissociation. The 2026 Grossman–Porges exchange sharpened that dispute without resolving it. We argue that it cannot be r