Transcript

Have you ever tried to trust your gut? Going for your gut feeling may be risky, but it can help us with our intuitive decision making. Thanks to the bidirectional communication between the brain and the gut, besides the central and peripheral nervous system, our bodies also have the enteric nervous system that contains about 100 million neurons from our esophagus to our rectum our guts. Neurons provide a pathway for generating gut sensations, and they transmit the sensory signals to the brain and spinal cord to act upon these sensations. In the gut lining, there are enteroendocrine cells that connect with the afferent neurons called neuropod cells. And these cells are responsible for processing and sending the sensory information from the gut to the brainstem via the vagus nerve that runs from the abdomen to the brain.

This results in the bidirectional communication between the brain and gut, called the brain gut axis. The brain gut axis does not only maintain our digestion, but it can also help our motivation and higher cognitive functions, such as intuitive decision making. Now, why is this so? It is because of interoception, or the ability to sense the body's internal state during our early years, we collect and store a lot of interoceptive information in our prefrontal cortex. These interoceptive signals help us determine what is good or bad in our environment.