Originally published September 7 2005
Second brain may lie hidden in the gut
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
The relatively new field of neurogastroenterology examines links between the brain and the gut. It considers the concept that there is a "second brain" in the gut, known as the enteric nervous system, and that interaction between the two brains can be linked to problems like anxiety or butterflies in the stomach.
At least that is the rationale for the close - sometimes too close - relationship between the human body's two brains, the one at the top of the spinal cord and the hidden but powerful brain in the gut known as the enteric nervous system.
For Dr. Michael Gershon, the author of "The Second Brain" and the chairman of the department of anatomy and cell biology at Columbia University, the connection between the two can be unpleasantly clear.
Ailments like anxiety, depression, irritable bowel syndrome, ulcers and Parkinson's disease manifest symptoms at the brain and the gut level.
Butterflies in the stomach are caused by a surge of stress hormones released by the body in a "fight or flight" situation.
New understandings of the way the second brain works, and the interactions between the two, are helping to treat disorders like constipation, ulcers and Hirschsprung's disease.
The second brain, or little brain, accomplishes all that with the same tools as the big brain, a sophisticated nearly self-contained network of neural circuitry, neurotransmitters and proteins.
By the early '80s, scientists had accepted the idea of the enteric nervous system and the role of neurotransmitters like serotonin in the gut.
In a healthy person, after serotonin is released into the gut and initiates an intestinal reflex, it is whisked out of the bowel by a molecule known as the serotonin transporter, or SERT, found in the cells that line the gut wall.
Another experiment showed that when young rats were separated from their mothers, the layer of cells that line the gut, the same barrier that is strengthened by mast cells during stress, weakened and became more permeable, allowing bacteria from the intestine to pass through the bowel walls and stimulate immune cells.
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