NRSC 4132 Blog

Have you ever experienced a ?gut feeling?? Gut feelings are also known as intuitions. I?m sure you?ve all hear about your mother?s intuition? if not ? I?m sure she?ll tell you ?Mother knows best!? We all know things that weren?t taught to us?but we still know them. For example, best friend says she?s ?okay? but you know she isn?t or your newborn is sick. A gut feeling is a sudden, unexplained judgment where we don?t know the source of origin.

Science has started to research how the stomach and brain are interconnected. ?The concept that the gut and the brain are closely connected, and that this interaction plays an important part not only in gastrointestinal function but also in certain feeling states and in intuitive decision making, is deeply rooted in our language.?(Mayer, 2011)

In the August issue of Nature Review Neuroscience, the article ?Gut feelings: the emerging biology of gut?brain communication,? talks about the foundation of why there are such feelings and the pathways that are taken to create those feelings. ?Recent neurobiological insights into this gut?brain crosstalk have revealed a complex, bidirectional communication system that not only ensures the proper maintenance of gastrointestinal homeostasis and digestion but is likely to have multiple effects on affect, motivation and higher cognitive functions, including intuitive decision making.?(Mayer, 2011) The article discusses the enteric nervous system and the signaling pathways that the gut and brain used to communicate ??The brain communicates to the viscera, including the gastrointestinal tract, through multiple parallel pathways, including the two branches of the autonomic nervous system (ANS), the hypothalamic?pituitary?adrenal (HPA) axis and the sympatho?adrenal axis (modulating the gut-associated lymphoid tissue), and descending monoaminergic pathways (modulating gain of spinal reflexes and dorsal horn excitability). ? (Mayer, 2011) The article then discuss the effect of the stomach to the brain. Most of the consciously perceived information about the stomach is that it?s used for digestion?this isn?t new information. ?However, recent evidence suggests that various forms of subliminal interoceptive inputs from the gut, including those generated by intestinal microbes, may influence memory formation, emotional arousal and affective behaviours.? (Mayer, 2011)

So why do we make decision based off no information but off our ?gut feelings?? Mayer suggests that we have some ?neurological basis? when it comes to our gut-interactions. She suggests that our gut feeling based decision is due to an interoceptive map of gut responses that develops in infancy and continues to develop throughout our stages of life.

The future holds new research on the crosstalk between the stomach and the brain. The primary focus is the mapping associated with the two. ?This includes the remarkable success in mapping the functional neuroanatomy of the ENS, in our understanding of how the brain modulates these ENS circuits and gut functions, and in unraveling the complexity of gut to brain signaling through multiple parallel but interacting communication channels.? (Mayer, 2011) With our current advances in the study of gut feelings we still have many unanswered questions? stay tuned for what science discover next.
To read full article, please visit https://cuvpn.colorado.edu/nrn/journal/v12/n8/full/,DanaInfo=www.nature.com+nrn3071.html