Restoring Human Nature

This is a preorder. Book ships January 19, 2026.

"We realized, as our conversations proceeded, that we were talking about qualities of being, and inter-being. Yet this on-going conversation between us, over the years, has continually been framed through the bottom-up lenses of neuro-development, the mother-infant dyad, co-regulation, neurophysiology, the neurobiology of attachment, autonomic physiology, and Indigenous cosmovisions and lifeways. At some point I suggested that what we were up to was ontological- a study of being. Yet a neuro ontology. And Darcia said, 'I’m with you all the way.' And so we present a neuro ontology of the ancestral future.” - Gabriel

TWO TRANS-DISCIPLINARY PIONEERS OF NEUROSCIENCE AND ANCESTRAL AWARENESS ASSEMBLE A MAP FOR HELPING RESTORE HUMAN NATURE.

Darcia Narvaez, PhD, is an award-winning trans-disciplinary psychology researcher and Professor Emerita of Psychology at the University of Notre Dame. She is the Developer of the Evolved Nest, the author of numerous research papers and the books Neurobiology and the Development of Human Morality, The Kinship Worldview: Indigenous Voices Introduce 28 Precepts for Rebalancing Life on Planet Earth (with Wahinkpe Topa- Four Arrows), and The Evolved Nest: Nature's Way of Raising Children and Creating Connected Communities (with Gay Bradshaw)

Natureza Gabriel is Founder of Hearth Science, and the Developer of Autonomics. A connection phenomenologist and neural cartographer, he is author of The Neurobiology of Connection, Keywords: A Field Guide to the Missing Words, Restorative Practices of Wellbeing, and other books.

Darcia and Gabriel met in 2013, at a lecture Darcia presented in San Francisco to a small group of people trying to understand why, with everything humans know about the climate crisis, we were collectively having such a hard time transforming our behaviors to make them less destructive.

In 2014 Darcia released Neurobiology and the Development of Human Morality, which elegantly up-ended several hundred years of the field of moral reasoning, explaining that morality is not a by-product of logic models, but created bottom-up by the degree to which our early life experiences either create, or fail to create, an embodied experience of 'nestedness' in children.

In 2024 Gabriel released The Neurobiology of Connection, a health-creation manual that re-writes our understanding of in vivo autonomic physiology, focused on helping humans grasp and move the deepest levers that govern our moment-to-moment experience of wellbeing.

Darcia and Gabriel have kept in touch over the years, following one another's work, meeting periodically to learn together and share ideas. Now they come together seeking to blend their respective areas of expertise into a map for helping humans restore the potentialities of our deepest nature.