The Gut–Enteric–Cortical Cascade: Gut Microbiota as an Upstream Boundary Condition of Cortical Criticality in the Near-Critical Regime (RC³) — A Ginzburg–Landau Field-Theoretic Hypothesis

I propose and formalize the Gut–Enteric–Cortical Cascade as a field-theoretic framework connecting gut microbiota composition to cortical criticality in the near-critical regime (RC³). The gut microbiota is formalized as the upstream boundary condition of the enteric field Ψ(x,t), which modulates the cortical field Φ(x,t) via the vagally-mediated cascade: M → μ_eff[M] → Ψ → ⟨Ψ⟩_vagal → λ_eff[Ψ] → Φ where M is functional microbial diversity, μ_eff and λ_eff are the enteric and cortical control parameters respectively, and β is the ENS–cortical coupling coefficient estimated via HF-HRV × PCI covariation. The framework generates 17 falsifiable experimental predictions, a multimodal proxy calibration framework for the coupling coefficients α and β (Table 1), and a novel epidemiological hypothesis linking dietary transition velocity to RC³/ADHD prevalence at population scale. A unified mapping of cascade components, experimental proxies, and predictions is provided in Table 1. Extended material — including the RC³ Modulator Classification Matrix, the RC³-Diet standardized protocol, the institutional landscape analysis, and the exploratory ecological analysis — is available in the Supplementary Material (DOI: [insertar DOI suplemento]). This preprint is part of the CIFT series (Papers I–XII). Related work: Papers I–XI available at https://zenodo.org/search?