Gut-Brain Connection Could Lead To a 'New Sense' (newatlas.com) 91
A new study has revealed a "fast-acting neural circuit allowing gut cells to communicate with the brain in just seconds," reports New Atlas. Diego Bohorquez, senior author of the study, says "these findings are going to be the biological basis of a new sense. One that serves as the entry point for how the brain knows when the stomach is full of food and calories." He says it "brings legitimacy to [the] idea of the 'gut feeling' as a sixth sense." The study has been published in the journal Science. From the report: Remarkable new work from a team of researchers at Duke University has now revealed a previously unknown direct circuit between the gut and the brain that could allow for fast sensory communication that doesn't relay on laborious hormonal signaling. The research began with a big discovery in 2015 revealing that enteroendocrine cells, the cells in our gut thought to be the primary sensory receptor that communicate with the brain, actually contained nerve endings that seemed like they could directly synaptically communicate with vagal neurons and subsequently, the brain.
The new study first revealed that direct, and near instant, communication occurred between the gut and brain. A mouse was administered with a rabies virus that had been engineered with a green fluorescent tag. Tracing the signal of communication as the gut informed the brain of this virus revealed an immediate response in the vagus nerve. In under 100 milliseconds a single signal was seen to travel from the gut to the brainstem. In order to understand this new neural circuit, the team grew enteroendocrine cells in a lab dish alongside vagal nerve neurons. Not only did these two elements rapidly demonstrate communication, but it was discovered that glutamate, a foundational neurotransmitter, modulated the rate of transmission. What this experiment impressively revealed was that enteroendocrine cells don't solely signal to the brain via hormonal triggers, but also can directly communicate via neural synapses.
The new study first revealed that direct, and near instant, communication occurred between the gut and brain. A mouse was administered with a rabies virus that had been engineered with a green fluorescent tag. Tracing the signal of communication as the gut informed the brain of this virus revealed an immediate response in the vagus nerve. In under 100 milliseconds a single signal was seen to travel from the gut to the brainstem. In order to understand this new neural circuit, the team grew enteroendocrine cells in a lab dish alongside vagal nerve neurons. Not only did these two elements rapidly demonstrate communication, but it was discovered that glutamate, a foundational neurotransmitter, modulated the rate of transmission. What this experiment impressively revealed was that enteroendocrine cells don't solely signal to the brain via hormonal triggers, but also can directly communicate via neural synapses.
Movie quote (Score:1, Funny)
Well my gut has shit for brains.
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You've got to love the PR spin they put on this.
The gut communicates with the brain, boring... wait, what if we tie it to the totally unrelated "gut feeling"? Yeah, good idea, that will get us the headlines. O, and mention a sixth sense! Great, that's a front page right there!
While all they really discovered, is that our gut has the capacity to send a message to the brain when some kind of trouble happens inside the gut. They certainly did not discover any capacity of a police detective's gut to determine w
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When I have to shit, my gut has no problem communicating with my brain. Who are these geniuses?
The brain manipulates the body (Score:3)
It also has profound implications regarding the manipulation of appetite by the brain.
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Or the manipulation of appetite by the gut?
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Or the manipulation of appetite by bacteria living in the gut?
Not you, Helicobacter Pylori. Nobody likes you.
Re: The brain manipulates the body (Score:2)
Will people line up for a biohack that makes you seriously nauseous if you eat too much?
Never mind that it's probably what this sensory pathway is for in the first place.
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"Or the manipulation of appetite by the gut?"
Not only that. If you shit your pants, this 'circuit' immediately tells your brain.
The brain doesn't need to manipulate appetite (Score:3)
It generates it in the first place and in theory could modify it anyway it sees fit. The digestive system doesn't understand appetite - it just understands full, processing, empty and poison. Anything more than that is qualia generated by the brain.
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Correct, although appetite is a primitive function in the brain, so it's misleading to suggest the brain can "modify it anyway it sees fit" and we know it can't since we'd have far fewer overweight people. Appetite is a function of the brain itself, the brain doesn't need to manipulate the gut in order to influence it.
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It generates it in the first place and in theory could modify it anyway it sees fit. The digestive system doesn't understand appetite - it just understands full, processing, empty and poison. Anything more than that is qualia generated by the brain.
The vagus nerve is a huge and largely unexplored area of study. We now understand the digestive system to be much more complex and important than simply a system which turns starches, proteins, and sugars into usable matter for the rest of the body. The headline is stupid but there is a lot of new research that vagus nerve communication is 2-way, and fiddling with it can modify the behavior of the brain.
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Fiddling with the optic nerve would modify the behaviour of the brain. That doesn't mean what we describe as vision is done in the eye.
There is some preprocessing (Score:2)
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Preprocessing is not the same as recognition.
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Only if you believe that appetite is something manipulatable by the brain. We know it doesn't work that way and, furthermore, what's being talked about is how things work, not discovering new things we didn't know we could do.
We know that we can't simply manipulate hunger by thinking but, rather, it's the other way around, that hunger manipulates our thinking. This information doesn't have "profound implications" on what we already know doesn't happen, it suggests how something we know happens works.
Gutman (Score:1)
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Oh yes please, an overweight superhero is pretty much all that's missing from the fold.
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I have no idea why I have to think of the Simpsons episode where Homer gets stuck with his lower half in the tank full of radioactive fumes and Bart says "For once, Homer's fat ass has prevented the release of toxic gas".
Has the study been replicated? (Score:5, Insightful)
I want to propagate a meme whereby any time a "new study" is cited, we ask reflexively, "has it been replicated?" Doing so seems to be the only way out of the replication crisis. We, as consumers of pop science, need to demand it.
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What about this new study that found there is no need for replication?
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We need to replicate the idea that we have a new sense, as opposed to a fast-acting hormonal response. One replication of this study could bring more clarity to the subject. Otherwise, in three years, it may fail replication but the gut-brain connection idea could have already gone viral by then, appearing in dumb TED talks, and spawning all sorts of pop psychobabble books.
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What about this new study that found there is no need for replication?
Has it been replicated?
Re: Has the study been replicated? (Score:1)
not surprising (Score:3, Interesting)
the gut being one of the greatest entry points into the body, it should have a fast connection to the brain in case something is not right that a conter-reaction is issues right away.
Re:glutamate, a foundational neurotransmitter (Score:5, Interesting)
This has been settled science for years. That glutamate affects the sensory response of the stomach to the introduction of food is not new.
High levels of glutamate in your food will make you feel full faster, causing you to eat less. You're hungry again 1/2 hour later because glutamate dissipates from the body quickly taking the sense of satiety with it.
This is why almost all chinese restaurants are buffet format. Patrons eat less because of all of the MSG.
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Well... (Score:1)
6th (Score:5, Insightful)
>"He says it "brings legitimacy to [the] idea of the 'gut feeling' as a sixth sense."
More like the 12th or 16th "sense". I wish the whole "5 senses" thing from thousands of years ago would die already. I mean, anyone who doesn't immediately recognize a sense of balance or temperature or body position (or many others) as a "sense" doesn't understand the concept of sensing the world around them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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I wish the whole "5 senses" thing from thousands of years ago would die already.
Yeah how many 6th senses does that make now?
Were I a film school student, I'd make a short featuring of a civilization of people dragging themselves around using walkers and clinging to handrails, with a "superhero" that had a 6th sense... he calls it "balance"... which allows him to do superhuman feats like walking.
Make it funny enough and maybe it would kill the 6th sense meme.
Bulveristic category drift (Score:2)
The method of Bulverism is to "assume that your opponent is wrong, and explain his error."
This is easily accomplished by misconstruing the original frame. Unless you have an intellectual conscience.
The original five senses were all exo-perceptual.
This was back when no other category had been explicated in specific terms (the ancient Greeks were no dummies and surely suspected interior sensation).
Wikipedia doesn't add a "(film)" clause to movie titles, unless the title already has an established mean
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PS: I guess I would have to accept visceral reference-frame cottonmouth (the roller-coaster stomach-in-mouth thing) as a unique exo-perceptive sense outside the original five.
But only since Einstein.
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>"So what other exo-perceptions might we now add to the archaic list? We've already got the skin, eyes, ears, mouth, and nose on the list. That's the majority of the human periphery. Within its pre-existing category, I really don't think the original five was totally off base."
That depends on your meaning of "exo-perceptions". If you just mean sensing things outside of the body (things that other people can also sense that you sense), the colloquial "5 senses" is still very wrong. Temperature is exter
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Spider man (Score:2)
So is the true source of Spiderman's spidey-sense the huntsman spider he stuck up his butt?
No, it does not. (Score:2)
He says it "brings legitimacy to [the] idea of the 'gut feeling' as a sixth sense."
"Gut feeling" and "sixth sense" have nothing to do with physical feelings within the gut. They are more of an intuition type of thing regarding the environment outside the body, not in the abdomen. Geesh.
6th Sense (Score:4, Funny)
Gut 6th sense? I see bread, people.
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Plot twist:
YOU are actually a loaf!
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*SPOILER*
I thought I was aloaf, but it turns out I was brown bread [urbandictionary.com] all along.
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>...it was discovered that glutamate, a foundational neurotransmitter, modulated the rate of transmission.
Possible tie in with MSG headaches? (Wikipedia says double-blind experiments have failed to find a link between MSG and headache's, but I experience the headaches when not expecting them, only to later determine that something I ate a few hours before did in fact contain MSG.)
I think the problems saying MSG aren't linked to headaches is that- quite likely MSG by itself is not responsible for headaches. MSG combined with lots of salt and oil (as is common in Americanised versions of Asian foods) causes headaches. The combination of those three ingredients in high doses is what causes the problem. Way too many people have "Chinese food" reactions for it to be all in the head. I know I always feel crappy after eating Ameicanized Chinese food but I think it's more a combination
TL;DR: (Score:1)
That's great and all, but ... (Score:2)
One that serves as the entry point for how the brain knows when the stomach is full of food and calories.
Your stomach can't be full of calories. That's like saying it's full of ounces, or full of liters. It's a unit of measure.
Excuse me while I go yell at clouds.
We are the computer (Score:2)
It all becomes clear now.
And Douglas Adams was so close.
But it's not the mice controlling our lives, it's the microbes!!
Tilting outcomes in petridishes all over the world, steering our emotions and hunger.
We are being scrutinised i'm telling you, like someone with a microscope studies creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. Oh the irony!
Our gut has a mind immeasurably superior to ours and regard this earth with envious eyes and they slowly and surely are drawing their plans against us!
cue musi
Biggest ever, believe me (Score:1)
I have an Einsteinien gut.
Brave folks (Score:1)
What a missed comedic opportunity.... (Score:1)
This would have played so well into "The Colbert Report" for coverage, it's sad to not have the chance.
Huh? (Score:3)
A new study has revealed a "fast-acting neural circuit allowing gut cells to communicate with the brain in just seconds,"
That's.... not very fast.
Signal for the brain (Score:2)