It is a curious phenomenon that the bodies of nearly all higher animals manifest a shape best described as an asymmetrical hourglass. A head, a relatively larger torso, and separating them, a narrow constriction called the neck. Exceptions, such as the bizarrely intelligent octopus, are few.
In the head lies the brain, the organ that performs cognition and claims to be the seat of both the rational and the emotional. The brain together with the spinal cord constitute the Central Nervous System (CNS), although arguably the spinal cord is shared property with the torso. The CNS receives and processes sensory inputs, performs rapid and complex computations, and sends motor instructions to the body to execute voluntary and involuntary movements. It’s no surprise that many of the sense organs are located on the head itself. And finally, consciousness, that mysterious thing that lets the creature know itself, appears to arise in the brain. All manner of thoughts, at least of the conscious kind, roam the skull. With all these signs pointing towards the primacy of the brain in the management of affairs, the tendency is to take the soft thing inside the skull as being the absolute command center of the creature. This might just be one of the biggest misunderstandings of the human condition.
The body contains heavily ennervated organs such as the gut, stomach, liver and heart, all connected together in an intricate system of nerves. This is the Autonomic Nervous System (ANS), part of the so called Peripheral Nervous System (‘Peripheral’ as opposed to ‘Central’ – the choice of names alone says a lot about our views). A major part of the ANS is the ‘gut brain’, also known as the Enteric Nervous System (ENS). The ENS alone is arguably larger than the CNS, and uses and produces all the same neurotransmitters as the CNS, in greater quantities. More than 90% of the body’s serotonin lies in the gut. The gut brain has a vast surface area to play with, and the resemblance of the folds of the intestine to brain lobes is more than coincidental. An interesting fact about the Vagus nerve, hiding in plain sight but pointing to a certain power imbalance, is that it comprises 80-90% of afferent nerves, i.e, those that convey information of a sensory nature from the ENS towards the CNS. This ‘conveying of sensory information’ may be an euphemism. It may just be another way of saying that the gut commands the brain to do its bidding.
After all, the gut can and does order the brain around. In all animals, the brain acts on its behalf when it orchestrates limbs and sense organs to bring in food to feed the gut. Human brains defer to the gut’s preferences on what to order at the restaurant and what groceries to place in the shopping cart. The gut tells the brain what to reach for from the fridge. The gut, as instinct, tells the brain when a new situation feels right and when it does not. To the brain’s consternation, the gut even governs our interpersonal affairs, as in our choice of mates, who we click with, and who just doesn’t feel right. And of course, the influence of the gut on mood is undeniable, since it mysteriously affects when we feel up or down. What exactly is the brain able to tell the gut to do? The ENS runs its operations nearly independently from the CNS, as evidenced by its nonchalance if the Vagus nerve that connects the two is severed in experiments. The gut continues to run its complex amalgam of activities – digestion, of course, but more importantly the production of energy fuels, immunity chemicals, hormones, and a mysterious bag of neurotransmitters – nearly all by itself. At least in the short run, the gut brain doesn’t need the head brain as much as the other way around. Who is the master and who is the slave here, and does it matter?
An artist’s representation of the embodied brain
A short detour through a thought experiment. Imagine a computer program playing a video being slowed down to the point where one may visualize individual bits flipping 0 and 1 in the silicon. The image on screen would freeze solid, and move at a glacial pace, perhaps a nearly imperceptible change every few million years. The only activity would be in the computer innards. The chip level bit flip-flops would appear haphazard, with no purpose to be discerned from their frenetic activity. Meaning is not yet apparent. It is only when one moves up the chain, to levels where changes are less frequent, that one might see a pattern. With enough patience, a sort of intelligence becomes evident. “Aha, this sub-routine adds numbers as they come in” one might say. At a higher level still, one might discover the parts of the program that render an image or fetch the next frame. Only at the very top, where things are slowest yet access the highest levels of intelligence, can one finally say, “Wow, this is a cat video”.
As is often the case in the universe, the higher up an entity is on an intelligence network, the longer the view of time it takes for its machinations. It must necessarily delegate lower level tasks to faster but ‘simpler’ entities, who act like the subroutines in a computer program. Only after gathering and assimilating the results from subordinate entities can the higher level entity make its own intelligence apparent upon the world. The intelligence thus produced is simply not perceptible or available to the lower level entities, who while not aware of the big picture, still believe themselves to be in charge. Our consciousness appears to be seated in the brain that is inside the skull, which creates the illusion that this organ is the center of cognition and control, when in reality it is just a tiny part of the entire intelligence of the organism. As Nietzsche wrote nearly a century and a half ago, there is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophies.
That the gut brain cannot perform quick calculations such as those needed to catch a ball, sing a song, or eat a sandwich, says nothing about its power over the human entity, and especially over its subordinate brain. The gut controls the processing of food for production of energy, and it is interesting that this food takes a tantalizingly close route past the brain, through the mouth and into the gullet, all this while the brain never gets anything more than a mere whiff, a tease of tastes and flavors. Aside from a tantalizing scent trail, the brain gets nothing at all without the gut’s permission and first rights at the food. This is despite it having done all the hard work of deciding to walk to the kitchen while balancing on two legs, reach for and open a package with great dexterity, and commanding various arm, hand, finger and mouth muscles to reach for, pick up, and chew the contents. Then again, it is the gut that does the equally important work of letting us know when we are hungry, for what exact nutrients, what is safe to eat and how much, and how to extract energy from all the junk that modern humans consume. And that’s just the start.
Feelings are called that because we feel them in the body, and we express them with our body as well. When we are happy, sad, afraid, bold, excited or bored, our body shows it. Where the gut brain really shines is in processing primal emotions such as anxiety, distrust and disgust. When we are sick to the stomach because of how someone treated us, when something is life threatening, when something just doesn’t sit right despite all the logical reasons, the gut brain is hard at work. We process these emotions in the gut because our conscious ego just can’t handle the computation. This is one way in which our body’s wisdom manifests itself in our consciousness. The body does its deep processing and then dumps its final insight into our head all at once, fully-formed and seemingly coming out of nowhere. Such an inexplicable insight is called instinct or intuition. We can’t rationally explain it since we are limited to the brain’s powers. If we have any sense, we listen to it and thus bring it to our consciousness. Anything that does not make it to consciousness adds to our personal unconscious, from where it will continue to haunt us without us having any clue why, until we acknowledge it. Even when we do listen to our body’s insight, more often than not, the self-serving brain claims sole authorship. Cranking away after the intuition has already arrived, the brain rationalizes this way and that, fudges and back-dates the entries in the books, and comes up with a timestamped, brilliantly well-thought out, and totally logical reason for why it and it alone decided what it decided.
As Jack Nicholson yelled out in frustration, and as the body could too to the brain but graciously doesn’t, “You can’t handle the truth!”
Control requires leverage. Perhaps the blood-brain barrier isn’t just a safety thing designed to protect the brain from pathogens and chemicals. Could it be yet another mechanism to keep the quick but fragile brain at neck’s length distance from all the fun and the action, caged and isolated inside the skull? It appears as though in order to ensure that it continues to get a regular supply of sugar (glucose) and drugs (serotonin, dopamine, etcetera), the addict brain must perform all sorts of cheap tricks for its dealer, the gut brain. Odds are, many times these tasks leave the brain feeling conflicted and guilty, but like any addict, it is helpless. If it feels anxious, restless, stressed or fatigued in performing this tasks, that is of no concern to the gut, and as a matter of fact these emotional states may be generated as a way of ensuring compliance. Ah, but maybe this dysfunctional family drama narrative only applies when the relationship between the two brains has degenerated due to a long history of mutual distrust, apathy and lack of communication? How might an alternate healthy relationship between the two manifest, where both sides listen to each other?
Two brains, both operating within one creature. Call this evolution’s trick – some may call it a dirty trick, some may say a brilliant design – of using rewards and punishment to drive behavior and purposeful action. It is the engine of the thing we call motivation, that all living animals evidence. Of course, we don’t need to view this situation as necessarily exploitative or using a master-slave framework. The arrangement could just as well be described as having some elements of cooperation and some elements of competition, like any game. Perhaps the game only appears to be exploitative and no fun at all when viewed from the perspective of a certain control-freak who has forgotten how to play along with a friend. Maybe that’s why we use the word head to denote someone who thinks of themselves – usually in a delusional way – of being exclusively in charge, as in ‘the head of the household’. Then again, perhaps more tellingly, we also use the word heady to describe someone or something that is willful, impetuous, and intoxicated with oneself.
Two brains, one creature. Dirty trick or brilliant design?
Just because our consciousness resides as a tiny aspect of one of the two brains does not grant it the slightest claim to a sole monopoly in making decisions. Of course, upon reading all that it has read thus far, with predictable hubris, the head brain might dismiss all of it as utter nonsense. It is firmly in charge, it is the center of the conscious experience, and the world is exactly as it sees it from its vantage point, and nothing more. It calls the shots. It decides what to do. It is the universe’s most exquisite creation, and will not be a slave to an animal existence. And only mildly perturbed by these stringent claims, slowly cogitating away at the heart of the matter, phlegmatic and secure in its primacy, sits the embodied brain.
If, on the other hand, we seek to be more at peace with ourselves, to lose our maniacal me-versus-the-world stance, and to feel a greater synchrony between us and the rhythms of the universe, all it requires is a simple practice. It starts with closing our eyes and taking a minute to acknowledge the body with its inherent and ancient wisdom, to become aware of the everpresent buzz in our hands and feet, to imagine and sense the churning in our guts, and to feel the magical thuds of our own pulsing heart. It ends with opening our eyes to the realization that our conscious thoughts, as powerful and all-encompassing as they might feel, are mostly an illusion of sorts. They are a delayed, distorted, filtered, and single-tracked sliver of the vast multitudes of cognitive parallel processing that our body and brain perform every millisecond, silently, without feeling the need to boast about it by broadcasting it to ourselves. It might do us well to get the airy intellectual upstairs to climb down from his ivory tower on occasion and listen to the music playing downstairs. We may then declare a cease fire on the conflict within ourselves, and find that while we may have given up a bit of our egotic stance and illusions of control, we have gained a whole lot more wholeness.
