The Finery

How your brain and your body communicate

Neural Pathways

A neural pathway is a chain of connected nerve fibers along which signals travel between your brain and a specific part of your body. Instructions from your brain reach your muscles along motor pathways, and information about touch, temperature, pain, and the position of your limbs returns to your brain along sensory pathways. When signals stop passing through one of the connections along a pathway, the muscle at the end of that pathway may weaken, or the part of your body where that pathway ends may lose some of its feeling, and because your body compensates so readily, you may not notice the change for years. At The Finery in Layton, Utah, Dr. Eric Rawlin, DC, the creator of Neural Pathway Integration, tests for these failed connections and treats them personally.

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Neural pathways are the routes along which your brain and your body exchange signals.

What is a neural pathway?

The nerve fibers that make up a neural pathway run in bundles through your brain and your spinal cord, and they continue through your nerves to the rest of your body. Inside the brain and the spinal cord, a bundle of this kind is called a tract, and many tracts are named for the two places that they connect.

The corticospinal tract, for example, runs from the cortex, which is the outer layer of the brain, to the spinal cord, and the signals behind every voluntary movement of your limbs and your trunk travel along it1 2.

Signals travel along your pathways in two directions. Along a motor pathway, they leave the brain, descend through the spinal cord, and reach your muscles, which contract in response. Along a sensory pathway, they travel the opposite way: signals from your skin and your joints ascend to the brain, where you experience them as touch, temperature, pain, and the sense of where your limbs are1 2.

Because the two kinds of pathway are separate, one can fail while the other continues to work. That is why a person can move a foot with full strength and still be unable to feel the floor beneath it: the motor pathway to the foot is working, and the sensory pathway from the foot is not.

Many of these fibers are coated with myelin, a fatty sheath that allows a signal to travel faster than it could along a bare fiber. Myelin is pale, which is why the tissue that these coated fibers form is known as white matter. You will see the term again further down this page, because the pathways of the spinal cord and the pathways that link one region of the brain to another both consist of white matter1 3.

Restore or Optimize

People seek out Dr. Rawlin for one of two reasons, and you will probably recognize your own reason in one of them. Some people have lost some of their strength, their feeling, their balance, or their mental clarity, and they want it back. Other people feel well, and they want to know whether they could be performing better than they are. At The Finery, the first reason is called Restore and the second reason is called Optimize.

Restore

You have lost an ability that you once had.

Perhaps one of your limbs is weaker than it used to be, or your feet have lost their feeling, or your thinking is not as clear as it once was. You may already have seen several specialists, only to hear that your test results are normal or that “there’s nothing you can do about it.”

A normal result means only that a particular test found no abnormality. It does not tell you whether the signals from your brain are reaching every muscle, and that is the question Dr. Rawlin sets out to answer. In his clinical experience, a muscle can respond weakly even though the muscle itself is undamaged, because the signals that should activate it are not arriving.

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Optimize

Nothing is wrong, yet you suspect that you could perform better.

You feel well, and your physicians have found nothing wrong. Even so, you may have the sense, as more than one client has put it, that you are “leaving something on the table.”

That suspicion is hard to confirm on your own, because your only standard of comparison is the way you function today, and because your body can compensate for a weak muscle so well that you never notice the weakness. So when you tell Dr. Rawlin that nothing is wrong, his question is, “How do you know?” He answers it by watching how you move during the Brain-Body Functional Assessment and then by testing your muscles.

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How a neural pathway stops working, and why you may not notice

A neural pathway stops working when signals no longer pass through one of the connections along it. In Dr. Rawlin’s clinical experience, this can happen after a period of stress, after an injury, or after exposure to toxins. The muscle beyond the failed connection then responds weakly, or it does not respond at all, even though nothing is wrong with the muscle itself.

A tripped circuit breaker in a house is a useful comparison. When a breaker trips, the wiring is intact and the appliance is undamaged, yet no current reaches the appliance until someone resets the breaker. A muscle beyond a failed connection is in the same position: it is capable of working, but it cannot respond fully until the signals reach it again.

A pathway can also keep sending a signal that is no longer needed. If you injure a foot, your brain signals your body to shift some of your weight to the other side, and so you limp while the foot heals. That signal is protective, and it should stop once the tissue has healed. Sometimes it does not stop, and you continue to favor the foot long after the injury itself has healed.

You are unlikely to notice any of this yourself. Many clients say, “I don’t have any pain,” and then shift to the left when they squat. Because the Brain-Body Functional Assessment is recorded on video, you can watch your own movement afterward, and the usual reaction is, “Oh yeah, I do that.”

Researchers have documented a related effect. In a study of people who had sprained one ankle, motor control was altered in the uninjured leg as well as in the injured one, which led the researchers to conclude that the brain had probably reorganized its motor commands4.

In both cases your body compensates, which means that other muscles complete the movement in place of the ones that should be doing the work. Because the movement is still completed, you can keep up your work and your sport without suspecting a problem. Compensating takes more effort, however. In one study, for example, healthy people used more energy when they walked with uneven steps than when they walked evenly5.

Consider a very good golfer whom Dr. Rawlin assessed. Whenever this golfer bent forward to address the ball, the muscles at the front of his thighs stopped responding, so he was swinging with momentum instead of with the full strength of his legs. He was playing well and had no pain, which is why he had never suspected that anything was wrong.

The pathways that you use to move, to feel, to balance, to speak, and to think

Each of these five functions depends on different pathways, so what you notice depends on which connection has failed. For each function below, you will find a short explanation of how the pathway works, followed by the kind of change that may indicate a problem.

Movement

Every movement begins in the motor cortex, the region of the brain that controls movement. From there, signals travel through the spinal cord and the nerves to your muscles2. Because most movements require several muscles to contract at the same moment, a single failed connection can weaken an entire movement.

What you may notice: A familiar movement, such as your golf swing, may have less power than it used to have. You may also notice nothing at all, because other muscles are compensating.

How it is tested: Dr. Rawlin tests one muscle alone and then tests it together with a second muscle that has to work with it.

A profile of a head filled with colored neural pathwaysA runner formed from splashing water

Sensation

You feel the ground under your feet or an object in your hand when sensory signals from your skin and your joints reach the brain2. These signals travel along sensory pathways, which are separate from the motor pathways, and that is why you can lose the feeling in a part of your body while you keep its full strength.

What you may notice: You may be unable to feel the floor under your feet. Clients describe this plainly as “I can’t feel my feet,” and because they cannot feel the floor, many of them have trouble with their balance as well.

Where to read more: If you have been diagnosed with neuropathy, which is damage to the nerves outside the brain and the spinal cord, you can read more on the Conditions We See page.

A circular imaging scanner with a brain scan on its displayA hand holding a tablet that projects a body diagram

Balance

To keep you balanced, your brain combines signals from three sources: your eyes, the vestibular organs of your inner ears, which sense the position and the movement of your head, and the sensors in your muscles and your joints6.

What you may notice: Walking in a straight line or standing on one foot may be harder than it used to be.

How it is tested: You walk heel to toe, first while you watch your feet and then while you look straight ahead, and both walks are recorded on video.

A clinician in profile looking at brain scansFour people stretching side to side

Speech and Language

Speaking and understanding speech depend on regions that, in most people, lie in the left half of the brain, and a white-matter pathway called the arcuate fasciculus connects them. In studies of people who had survived a stroke, damage to this pathway was associated with less fluent speech and with poorer comprehension7.

What you may notice: Your speech may be less fluent than it once was, or you may find other people harder to follow.

A sudden difficulty in speaking is different, because it is a sign of a stroke, and you should call 911 immediately9.

How the pathway is treated: Dr. Rawlin has developed a separate treatment protocol for each of roughly thirty connections along this pathway.

A circular imaging scanner with a brain scan on its displayA profile of a head with a glowing network of neural pathways

Thinking and Memory

White-matter pathways link the regions of your brain to one another3, and thinking involves many of those regions at once. When the white matter at the front of the brain deteriorates, researchers have found, people process information more slowly8.

What you may notice: You may feel that you are “not as sharp” as you used to be, that you forget names, or that you find it harder to concentrate.

Where to read more: These changes are covered in detail on the Cognitive Acuity page.

A profile of a head filled with colored neural pathwaysA laptop and a tablet showing brain scans

How Dr. Rawlin finds a failed connection

You cannot feel a failed connection, and your body compensates for it, so the only way to find one is to test for it. The steps of that testing are outlined here, and the treatment that follows is explained on the NPI page.

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  1. 01

    Dr. Rawlin Conducts Every Test Himself

    You are tested and assessed by the same person who created Neural Pathway Integration and wrote its treatment protocols.

  2. 02

    One Muscle Is Tested Alone, and Then Two Are Tested Together

    A muscle can respond normally on its own and still fail when it has to contract together with another muscle. The golfer described above is an example: his deep gluteal muscles and his calf muscles each responded when they were tested separately, yet he could control neither when both were tested at once, and a golf swing requires both.

  3. 03

    Motor and Sensory Pathways Are Tested Separately

    If you can move a part of your body normally but cannot feel it, the motor pathway to that part is working, so Dr. Rawlin examines the sensory pathway next.

  4. 04

    The Failed Connection Is Located Along the Pathway

    A connection can fail in the white matter of the cerebrum, which is the largest part of the brain; in the brainstem, which joins the cerebrum to the spinal cord; or in the spinal cord itself. Dr. Rawlin determines in which of these three places the connection has failed, because he treats the pathways of the cerebrum differently from the connections of the brainstem and the spinal cord.

  5. 05

    A Brain Scan Is Suggested Only in Some Cases

    If your symptoms may originate in the white matter of the cerebrum, Dr. Rawlin may suggest a specialized brain scan, which is performed by an independent imaging center and is described on the Cognitive Acuity page. In every other case, you do not need a scan.

  6. 06

    Each Test Is Repeated Immediately After Treatment

    As soon as a connection has been treated, you repeat the test that revealed the failure, so that you and Dr. Rawlin can both see at once whether the muscle now responds.

Common questions about neural pathways

What is the difference between a nerve and a neural pathway?

A nerve is a bundle of nerve fibers outside the brain and the spinal cord; the sciatic nerve in your leg is one example. A tract is a similar bundle inside the brain or the spinal cord. A neural pathway usually includes both, since a signal from your brain descends through a tract in the spinal cord and then reaches the muscle through a nerve1 2.

Can a neural pathway recover?

In Dr. Rawlin’s practice, many muscles that responded weakly respond more strongly once the failed connection has been treated, and because each test is repeated immediately, you can see the change for yourself. Researchers who study myelin have separately shown that the adult brain and the adult spinal cord can rebuild myelin that has been lost, although they do so less efficiently as a person ages, and they often fail to do so in a person who has multiple sclerosis10. None of this is a guarantee that a lost ability will return, and Dr. Rawlin can tell you what to expect only after he has assessed you.

Do I need a brain scan?

In most cases, you do not. Dr. Rawlin finds most failed connections by testing your muscles and by watching how you move. He suggests a scan only when your symptoms may originate in the white matter of the cerebrum, and in that case an independent imaging center performs it.

When should I see a physician first?

See a physician first about any neurological symptom that is new or that is getting worse. Call 911 immediately if you suddenly develop numbness or weakness on one side of your body, confusion, difficulty in speaking, trouble with your vision, a loss of balance, or a severe headache with no known cause, because these are signs of a stroke9. Dr. Rawlin’s work does not replace the care of your physicians; he relies on it, and before your visit he reviews the laboratory results and the imaging that they have ordered.

A clinician holding a tablet that projects a body diagram

Discover your Cognitive Acuity

  1. 01

    Explore

    Take the Cognitive Acuity Quiz. It takes about two minutes, it is free, and it requires no login. When you finish, you receive a preliminary rating in several areas of your health, including your sleep and your mental clarity.

  2. 02

    Discuss

    Book a discovery call. A member of The Finery’s team reviews your quiz results with you and tells you whether what you want to regain or improve is something that Dr. Rawlin treats.

  3. 03

    Begin

    If Dr. Rawlin does treat it, you speak with him on a video call, and the team then schedules your visit to The Finery at 124 S Fairfield Rd E, Layton, Utah 84041. The Finery accepts only a few clients each month, and Dr. Rawlin personally treats each of them on every day of the visit.

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Ask Dr. Eric

If you have a question about neural pathways, or if you would like to know whether Dr. Rawlin can help with your situation, you are welcome to submit it here. He reads the questions himself.

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Ask Dr. Eric, founder of The Finery and creator of Neural Pathway Integration

Reviewed by Dr. Eric Rawlin, DC, October 2026.

Sources

  1. National Library of Medicine, StatPearls, “Neuroanatomy, Spinal Cord”
  2. OpenStax, Anatomy & Physiology, Oregon State University edition, section 14.5, “Sensory and Motor Pathways”
  3. National Library of Medicine, MedlinePlus, “White Matter of the Brain”
  4. National Library of Medicine, PubMed Central, “Alteration in Global Motor Strategy Following Lateral Ankle Sprain”
  5. National Library of Medicine, PubMed, “The Metabolic and Mechanical Costs of Step Time Asymmetry in Walking”
  6. National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, “Balance Disorders”
  7. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, Ivanova and colleagues (2021), “Functional Contributions of the Arcuate Fasciculus to Language Processing”
  8. Cerebrum, “Cognitive Skills and the Aging Brain: What to Expect”
  9. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Signs and Symptoms of Stroke”
  10. Cold Spring Harbor Perspectives in Biology, Franklin and Goldman (2015), “Glia Disease and Repair: Remyelination”