Our second brain 🧠

Do you know researchers have found that gut is considered as our second brain and together they perform key role in certain disease and behavioural mechanisms are also controlled by them.

The enteric nervous system can operate on its own without being directed by the central nervous system. It is there to keep your gut working, help absorb nutrients and keep out harmful agents.

The study, led by Professor Nick Spencer at Flinders University, maintains that the ENS in the gut is the 'first brain' and that it evolved long before the brain as we know it, in humans.A deeper understanding of this mass of neural tissue, filled with important neurotransmitters, is revealing that it does much more than merely handle digestion or inflict the occasional nervous pang. The little brain in our innards, in connection with the big one in our skulls, partly determines our mental state and plays key roles in certain diseases throughout the body.

Although its influence is far-reaching, the second brain is not the seat of any conscious thoughts or decision-making.
This multitude of neurons in the enteric nervous system enables us to "feel" the inner world of our gut and its contents. Much of this neural firepower comes to bear in the elaborate daily grind of digestion. Breaking down food, absorbing nutrients, and expelling of waste requires chemical processing, mechanical mixing and rhythmic muscle contractions that move everything on down the line.

Thus equipped with its own reflexes and senses, the second brain can control gut behavior independently of the brain, Gershon says. We likely evolved this intricate web of nerves to perform digestion and excretion "on site," rather than remotely from our brains through the middleman of the spinal cord. "The brain in the head doesn't need to get its hands dirty with the messy business of digestion, which is delegated to the brain in the gut," Gershon says. He and other researchers explain, however, that the second brain's complexity likely cannot be interpreted through this process alone.

So that’s why we should consider our gut feelings because it’s the most important for all and it the most righteous.