What? Yes, two brains and lots of networks !
Bringing neuroscience and psychology to everyday life...
Our body and brain is full of amazing networks that are dynamic and complex. How we perceive the world is influenced by our external senses (such as sight, taste, touch etc) and internal senses (feeding back information such as heart rate, feeling thirsty, hungry or pain / tension in the muscles) constantly interacting with our personal life catalogue. That catalogue contains past, present conscious and subconscious information interacting with our biology and environment to keep us alive and well.
But let’s delve even deeper and introduce what has been termed by Dr. Michael D. Gershon (affectionately known as the father of neurogastroenterology) a second brain within our gut. There are between 200 to 600 million neurons in the human gut. To put that in context our gut alone has the same level of intelligence as a cat or a dog. Obviously its stand out role is to run the ‘digestion show’ including gathering information from the trillions of bacteria and microbes that are housed in the gut. But it may be contributing a lot more.
Here’s how:
The vagus nerve is the main pathway communicating information both ways from the gut to the brain and vice versa very quickly. The vagus nerve also calls the shots for our stress response monitoring dynamic changes in regard to our physical and psychological safety. This may explain why stress and anxiety are often connected to problems with digestion or the bowel.
Our second brain doesn’t produce conscious thought but it is further evidence that our body is not a passive bystander to our sense of self because it is indirectly contributing to our conscious experience. Remember the time your gut reaction was dismissed by your conscious thought and you regretted it ? Well learning to listen and trust what your body and emotions are communicating is an essential tool for befriending your nervous system. This in turn can contribute to better physical and mental health and wellbeing.
Us humans work best by not only respecting and understanding our internal networks but also the external networks within the natural world because it is all inextricably linked.
