Gut Brain Axis Quotes

Thoughts are just a different kind of bacteria, colonizing you. I thought about the gut-brain information axis. Maybe you're already gone. The prisoners run the jail now. Not a person so much as a swarm. Not a bee, but the hive.

A growing number of studies have made a link between animal behavior and the trillions of bacteria and fungi that live in their guts, many of which produce chemicals that influence animal nervous systems. The interaction between gut microbes and brains—the “microbiome-gut-brain axis”—is far-reaching enough to have birthed a new field: neuromicrobiology.

Indian System of Medicine is not just traditional Ayurveda, unani, or yoga but also a vast field of ancient oral and family medicine traditions. Especially nadi based gut-brain axis modulation medicines are most effective for terminal illness.

The team also worked out how the microbes were affecting the brain. Their main suspect was the vagus nerve. It's a long branching nerve that carries signals between the brain and visceral organs like the gut-a physical embodiment of the gut-brain axis. The team severed it, and found that the mind-altering JB-1 lost all its influence.

The gut is also the largest storage facility for serotonin in our body. Ninety-five percent of the body’s serotonin is stored in these warehouses. Serotonin is a signaling molecule that plays a crucial role within the gut-brain axis: It is not only essential for normal intestinal functions, such as the coordinated contractions that move food through our digestive system, but it also plays a crucial role in such vital functions as sleep, appetite, pain sensitivity, mood, and overall well-being.

One type of sourdough bacteria, Lactobacillus reuteri, has remarkable health functions. It has been shown to improve immunity and suppress tumor development.46 L. reuteri also reduces weight gain and can speed wound healing. The bacteria also activates the gut-brain axis by stimulating the brain to release the social hormone oxytocin.47 Scientists at the University of Alberta in Canada working with colleagues from Huazhong Agricultural University and Hubei University of Technology in China studied this bacteria in commercial sourdough bread starter.

There are anatomical, enzymatic, and hormonal connections between the brain and the gastrointestinal tract.

Only one percent of your genes are human, and those genes are fairly stable, but your microbial genes—the other 99 percent—are in constant flux. Measured by your genes, you’re a different creature each and every morning.

It may be a shock to the ego, but you are not alone in your body, and your microbiota is right now making plans for your future. By manipulating your cravings and mood, it gains control over your behavior.

If microbes are controlling the brain, then microbes are controlling everything.

When everything is running smoothly, you pay no attention to your gut. Like your heart or your liver, it’s best if these things are on autopilot. Your conscious mind is too busy looking for your keys to be trusted with running these critical organs.

Microbes can mutate every 20 minutes, while humans try to counterpunch with genetic evolutionary updates every 10,000 years or so. They are genetic dynamos, running circles around us.

People under chronic stress often change their eating habits, and many of them overeat. Psychological stress elevates circulating ghrelin, which stimulates a preference for calorie-rich “comfort” foods. These foods activate reward circuits, increasing dopamine and reducing stress-induced anxiety and depression. In our laboratory, we found that a high-fat diet protects against the deleterious effects of chronic stress. This blunting effect of a high-fat diet on stress is likely mediated by the HPA axis. At some point this can move behavior from impulsive to compulsive. Like an addiction, you can become tolerant to comfort food, and no longer get the same dopamine reward. That can increase your anxiety and depression, which can lead to additional overeating. This in turn can lead to obesity, which further contributes to anxiety and depression.110

The community of microbes living in your gut—your so-called microbiota—is like another organ of your body. It’s a seething alien living inside of you, fermenting your food and jealously protecting you against interlopers. It’s a pretty unusual organ by any measure, but even more so in that its composition changes with every meal.

Microbes surround us and suffuse us. We are seriously outnumbered. A single bacterium, given enough to eat, could multiply until its brethren reached the mass of the Earth in just two days. That’s a big clue to their superpower: They are excellent at reproduction.

Millions of years ago, bacteria and animals struck up a deal. In return for a moist bed and a warm buffet, beneficial bacteria took up the job of defending us against the madly proliferating pathogens in the world. It takes a germ to fight a germ.

Pulsed lasers produce incredibly short bursts of electromagnetic energy. For example, a pulsed femtosecond laser produces a flash of light that lasts for femtoseconds to a picosecond (a picosecond is one trillionth of a second, a femtosecond is one thousandth of a picosecond), instantly followed by another (and so on). These lasers brought about the possibility of exciting fluorophores with two photons of only half the necessary energy, but they need to arrive almost simultaneously to generate the ejection of a photon. Infrared pulsed lasers penetrate living tissue more effectively, with the advantage that fluorescence is achieved from much deeper in the tissue than normal fluorescence, where the depth of penetration is limited by multiple light scattering events. Multiphoton microscopy (mainly two photon in practice, but also feasible as three or more photons) allows imaging from as deep as a millimetre (one thousand micrometres), an improvement of several hundred micrometres over fluorescence confocal microscopy. A second advantage of two photon excitation is that it forms as a single spot in the axial plane (z axis) without the ‘hourglass’ spread of out of focus light (the point spread function) that happens with single photon excitation. This is because the actual two photon excitation will only occur at the highest concentration of photons, which is limited to the focal plane itself. Because there is no out of focus light, there is no need for a confocal pinhole, allowing more signal to reach the detector. Combined with the increased depth of penetration, and reduced light induced damage (phototoxicity) to living tissue, two photon microscopy has added a new dimension to the imaging of living tissue in whole animals. At the surface of a living brain, remarkable images of the paths of whole neurons over several hundred micrometres can be reconstructed as a 3D z section from an image stack imaged through a thinned area of the skull in an experimental animal. Endoscopes have been developed which incorporate a miniaturized two photon microscope, allowing deep imaging of intestinal epithelium, with potential to provide new information on intestinal diseases, as most of the cellular lining throughout our gut is thin enough to be imaged in this way. So far a whole range of conditions including virtually all the cancers of the digestive tract as well as inflammatory bowel disease have been investigated, reducing the need for biopsies and providing new insights as to the nature of these conditions.

mood changes, and our mood changes when we feel hungry. Psychiatric problems and digestive problems often go hand in hand. Biologists speak of a “gut–brain axis” – a two-way line of communication between the gut and the brain.

Scientists call this little brain the enteric nervous system (ENS). And it’s not so little. The ENS is two thin layers of more than 100 million nerve cells lining your gastrointestinal tract from esophagus to rectum. Science is only beginning to understand the brain-gut axis and how it affects our brains, our moods, and our behavior. You may hear it referred to as the “brain-gut connection.” In the last decade, we’ve discovered that the gut has an outsize effect on the way our brains function.