Continuing on from the previous series that began with Embodying the Nervous System.
In your skull, there is a large organ that we call the brain. For the last hundred years, we have privileged it as the focal point for investigation into human nature and behavior.
Exercise If you close your eyes, and point to where you feel you are in your body, where do you point? Do you have a focal point? Most of us locate ourselves in our head, somewhere behind the eyes.
Much of the neuro-centric cognitive revolution that started with Minsky and Chomsky with the first ENIAC still dominates many of the human sciences. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Melzack’s neuromatrix model of pain, even Pain Reprocessing Therapy — all have this (in my view undue) emphasis on the brain.
Is human consciousness in the brain? We may also ask: Is flight in the wings of the bird?
Yet if you look closely at our nervous system, you’ll see that there are neuronal clusters distributed throughout the body. Human computation is better understood as distributed than centralized.
Graphic generated by Opus 4.6
The gut has 500 million neurons, which is about the same count as a dog’s brain. This is only connected to the brain through roughly 30,000 fibers, most of which lead from gut to head.
The gut has its own sensory apparatus — chemoreceptors in the small intestine to ‘taste’ the digested food, stretch receptors in the stomach wall, and its own advanced immune system.
From the head-brain’s perspective, it’s as though there is a separate intelligent organism, with the complexity of a mammal, living in us, coordinating our digestive behavior. From the whole-being perspective: we often forget that our gut-brain is us.
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