An Informational Theory of Health: From Compartmentalized Mind-Body Research to a Cross-Scale Framework Integrating Bioelectrics, Sleep Science, Social Neuroscience, and Aesthetic Experience

Six independent research programs - bioelectrics, psychoneuroimmunology, sleep science, social neuroscience, awe and aesthetic research, and interoception - have each demonstrated that higher-order informational states exert measurable, mechanistically specific influence on lower-order physiological processes. Despite their empirical convergence, these fields operate in theoretical isolation, and the term "mind-body connection" describes only one of the active channels. No unified framework has explained why the channels differ mechanistically, what they share, or how their effects are bounded. We propose a theoretical framework - Health as Informational Coherence - grounded in the principle of cross-scale information compression: for effective transfer of information between systems of different organizational complexity, the more complex system must reduce its output to the channel capacity of the receiving system, preserving direction while relinquishing content. Health is defined as the coherence of parts with the metapattern of the whole; disease as the loss of that coherence; practice as the restoration of conditions under which coherence self-reinstates. From nine empirically derived principles spanning the six research fields, we show that four structurally distinct directions of transfer emerge: downward (consciousness → tissue), with somatic specificity as compression format; inward (consciousness → its own nocturnal reorganization), with release of hierarchical constraint; upward (transpersonal patterns → consciousness), with receptive opening; and outward (consciousness ↔ consciousness), with rhythmic entrainment. The heterogeneity of outcomes in mindfulness-based intervention meta-analyses is shown to follow directly from the conflation of these four directions within undifferentiated protocols. Nine practice dimensions are derived with dual justification: inductively, from the mapping of empirically identified physiological channels onto directional types; and deductively, from the structure of four fundamental polarities (Integration ↔ Differentiation, Stability ↔ Transformation, Determinism ↔ Stochasticity, Locality ↔ Non-locality), which are identified independently in the clinical data and in the Information Coherence Hypothesis (ICH). The convergence of these two independent derivation paths constitutes a completeness criterion unavailable to purely empirical taxonomies. Telomere biology provides independent molecular validation: practices operating through distinct channels - emotional regulation, sleep, social connection, purpose in life - converge on common markers of biological age, a cross-channel convergence predicted by the framework but not by any single-field model. Six falsifiable predictions are formulated, including format-specificity predictions (somatic imagery > verbal affirmation for tissue-level outcomes), direction-matching predictions (direction-matched practice > undifferentiated mindfulness), and a multiplicativity hypothesis for future multi-arm trials (comprehensive multi-direction protocol > additive combination of single-direction protocols). Explicit scope boundaries distinguish the framework from pseudoscience.