The Mind-Gut Connection: How the Hidden Conversation Within Our Bodies Impacts Our Mood, Our Choices, and Our Overall Health

by Emeran Mayer

The machine model was useful in medicine for treating some diseases. But when it comes to understanding chronic diseases of the body and the brain, it’s no longer serving us.

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.

your gut microbes are in a prime position to influence your emotions, by generating and modulating signals the gut sends back to the brain. Thus, what starts as an emotion in the brain influences your gut and the signals generated by your microbes, and these signals in turn communicate back to the brain, reinforcing and sometimes even prolonging the emotional state.

Growing up in such a germ-free environment takes a serious toll on the development of your brain.

The sad thing was that despite his doctors’ repeated failure to diagnose him correctly, making the correct diagnosis was actually simple, and his mother, who had no medical training, did it on the Internet.

the gut can handle most of its activities without any interference from the brain, while the brain seems to depend greatly on vital information from the gut.

the bad news is that her brain-gut axis had been programmed for life, but the good news is that humans have a very unique part of the brain, the prefrontal cortex, which gives us the ability to override the function of altered brain circuits and learn new behaviors.