Heribert Watzke: The Brain In Your Gut
October 24, 2010
Following on from a previous post entitled “Psychology Beyond The Brain“, my aim here is to further dissociate the strong, almost surreal, connection that many of us humans have with the notion that our brains are at the centre of our psychological drives… No point falling into a “Milgram Experiment” doze/stupor i.e. do and think as the man in the white lab coat says… Here, while doing our best to understand exactly what we are, we need to think outside of the box and use everything that has been scientifically proven, OR either shown to be fact, and build the picture, from the ground up, free from the confines of ‘normalised’ thinking.
So… In this somewhat patchy, but non the less fascinating TED talk, Heribert Watzke – a food scientist – shows us something quite bizarre… That we all have functioning neurones in our intestines… Yes… That’s right… Neurones in our intestines. About a hundred million of them, to be exact… Obviously it’s nothing like what the brain has i.e. 100 billion neurones that are all connected at about 100 trillion points… But still, we have these thinking cells in our gut too… !?
So what the hell are they for??? I remember when I used to think that we only thought from the brain… Many moons ago… But, as is shown here, Watzke tells us about the “hidden brain” in our gut and the surprising things it makes us feel…
To see where I sourced this talk from, please click here.
Or to find out more about where Heribert Watzke works i.e. at the Nestlé Research Center, please click here.
absolutely fascinating! I like TED talks, but I’d missed this one-thanks!
i look forward to looking at the vid
but
i am surprised that you are amazed by this
science is constantly throwing up things we know
providing evidence for our cultural knowledge
the complexity of the body system will continue to be a rich seam of discovery by science
but instead of giving credit to the hundreds of individuals who have somehow divined its complexity without the technology we have access to
seems a misplaced credit
stealing the thunder in some way…
[...] can only call, an intuitive patterning, or sense of reasoning… One that came from my heart and gut as much as it did my head, all the while filling up the pages of this website with these ‘raw’ [...]