THEQuad
A lot to digest
New research shows a closer relationship between our guts and our brains.
W
Duke Department of Medicine
hat with gut feelings and gut ears that turn perception of sounds into electrical signals and so interact directly with instincts, you have heard of the your nervous system. Likewise, cells in your stomach being cast as a second intestines can send information to your brain brain. Diego Bohórquez, assistant professor of medicine in milliseconds. at the Duke School of Medicine, thinks that Gut feeling, indeed. may have the order backward. Bohórquez, who describes himself as a gut“Very simple organisms do not have a brain neuroscientist, recently published a paper on the mechanism by which your gut and brain,” he says, smiling. “But they have a gut.” your brain communicate. The days of talking He has a point. Our relationship with food about feeling full only twenis primary. Organisms have ty minutes after you ate, of to eat to live, and organisms getting sleepy after tryptowere eating for around a billion years before they were phan kicks off a hormonal reaction, are history. Scientists even breathing, much less have long understood that thinking. And, indeed, you the long vagus nerve conare what you eat. “We talk nects the brain with, among about the self,” Bohórquez other things, the intestines, says. “Most of the time we carrying information from talk about the conscious self, the gut to the brain. And but a huge portion of us is in 2015, Bohórquez and inside. We eat three times a INNARDS: Neuroscientist his team discovered sensory day. That is modulating who Bohórquez cells in intestinal lining that we are.” ended in synapses capable of He expressed it succinctly connecting with the nervous system. Called in September when he gave a research seminar at the medical school. “At the core of who neuropods, those cells, like similar cells in we are,” he said, “we are food.” the nose and tongue, end in synapses—nerve Okay, so big deal, right? That’s obviendings—that could connect with the nerous: You eat, you build yourself, you move vous system. along. What used to be food is now you. In his most recent publication, Bohórquez Let’s not even mention your gut biome. But and his team put rabies virus, specially labeled Bohórquez is talking about something far with a fluorescent tag, into the stomachs of more complex and surprising. Information mice. The tag enabled them to watch the virus can get from your gut, it now turns out, in makes its way directly up the vagus nerve and the blink of an eye. There are cells in your into the brain. Petri-dish work demonstrated
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