Important to note: fast food and sweets are NOT what make your gut bacteria happy even if you think you are happier by eating them.
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Gut health is important and well worth talking about. Note, though, that the serotonin and dopamine produced there will never cross the blood–brain barrier, so the effects that the gut has on mental health (which are very real) come about differently.
How do drugs work then? Many are structurally similar to serotonin and are pretty effective when ingested (psilocybin, LSD, …).
YSK that this is just plain wrong for serotonin at least. Serotonin can't cross the blood brain barrier.
Most of the neurotransmitters can't. That's like one of the things the blood brain barrier does - keeps the chemicals IN the brain as well.
Im not a neuroscientist nor endocrinologist but i dont think it's as simple as, your gut producing serotonin which travels to your brain and makes you happy.
I just googled this and found a pretty direct rebuttal:
The gut-brain axis is a bidirectional communication network that links the enteric and central nervous systems. This network is not only anatomical, but it extends to include endocrine, humoral, metabolic, and immune routes of communication as well. The autonomic nervous system, hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, and nerves within the gastrointestinal tract, all link the gut and the brain, allowing the brain to influence intestinal activities, including activity of functional immune effector cells; and the gut to influence mood, cognition, and mental health.
pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6469458/
As i said, I dont really know anything about this. However, there seems to be a large body of research supporting this hypothesis.
That's true, the gut and the brain are tightly linked and are in constant communication with each other, an obvious example is hunger for example.
I felt the need to comment this because serotonin and dopamine produced in the gut have completely different functions from the dopamine and serotonin in the brain. On top of that the body keeps those completely separate with the blood brain barrier so it can regulate those different functions individually.
The gut does play a part in tryptophan production and extraction which passes the blood brain barrier and the brain uses to make serotonin so the gut does affect serotonin levels. But that's just "eat healthy, feel good" type of stuff.
I'm just not a fan of oversimplified version of this where people say "90-95% of serotonin is made in the gut, serotonin is the feel good hormone so gut affects happiness". I mean, most people are aware that what you eat affects your mood but saying the gut is responsible for producing the hormones for the brain is just wrong when talking about dopamine and serotonin.
YSK the idea that the "self" or "consciousness" is centered in the brain is called Duality and it's a philosophical position, not a scientific one. It's the same idea that "mind" and "body" are separate things and it's most common iteration is the idea of the "soul".
You probably can't upload yourself to a computer or be preserved in a frozen brain.
Not exactly related, but I think the typical conception of self being centered around the head at all is maybe just because that's where our eyes and ears are. Curious how deaf and blind people conceptualize the physical location of thier consciousness
Wouldn’t the typical conception of self being centered around the head be due to the fact that that’s where all of our memories are stored, bodily signals are sent to instructions to the body are sent from, where emotions are processed, and cognition is generated?
I could be wrong, but I don't think awareness that the brain being "where memories are stored" is innate. I think that's something we are told. If I'm recalling correctly, a surprising amount of what we perceive as cognition is offloaded to other distributed parts of our nervous system, so it's maybe not even quite as true as we think it is.
And even if it were, through informal polling over the years, when pressed, almost everyone I've ever talked to conceptualizes the exact center of thier "self" to be around the bridge of thier nose. Nobody I've talked to described the pinpoint location as being the position of thier frontal lobe.
I'm the fucking furthest thing from an authority, though. If you had to pinpoint the exact "point" of your consciousness, where would you describe it to be? I'm curious how far offset it is from your center of vision.
if i cut my arm off am i still me? how many pieces of me can i remove and still be me? at what point do i remove too much and am no longer myself?
probably the point where i die from removing too much lol but assuming im kept alive somehow for that
What's the philosophical term for thinking that "you" are not in the brain either, but rather riding along the electrochemical signals and formations throughout the brain, and this would include the rest of the body in the sense of feeling and control of it and its feedbacks (which is the point of OP). It's not really duality or a soul, as its dependent on both body and mind to be functioning correctly and intermingled.
So are you saying it's literally impossible even with future technology to put a medically preserved brain in a new body and have that be a person that can do stuff and you could talk to, or just that it wouldn't be the same person or consciousness somehow?
The former seems pretty out there as an idea. There are people whose brains are cut off from the rest of their nervous system and are still alive. The other connection the brain has to the body is the bloodstream, but blood transfusions are a thing and doesn't kill you.
How do you make happy guts?
Avoiding processed food, like that high in sugars. Having probiotics and probiotics, which is things like yoghurts and fermented foods like kimchi, kombucha and sauerkraut.
Happy guts also like exercise to help move things along and most people have too little fibre from fruits vegetables and nuts. So increase fibre and get your 7 a day.
Alcohol is a general irritant and should be limited or avoided. For more complex answers, look into FODMAPs as well, which can be a problem for some people.
So, overall, less stodgy complex carbs, more fresh fruit and veg. Mostly the same as what is better for heart health, but with added probiotics!
“Dietary fiber” is carbohydrates that you can’t digest for food but which your gut bacteria can live on happily. Take psyllium husk capsules or eat foods with lots of dietary fiber.
You want healthy gut flora. So probably probiotic stuff like yogurt (though who knows how many of those bacteria actually make it through the gauntlet of stomach acids).
Antibiotics can do the opposite and really fuck up your gut flora.
Two years ago I started fermenting vegetables from my garden and eating them several times a week. The difference has been striking.
Submerge them in brine for a few weeks. This creates an environment favouring lactic acid bacteria which will create pickling acid from the veggies that prevents mould.
You need to keep them submerged which you can do by putting a freezer bag full of brine on top.
It'll release CO2 so if you don't have airlocks you'll need to seal the jars only loosely or burb them occasionally.
Don’t know about the “striking” part, but fermentation of veg has been done safely for a long time.
Think Kimchi, pickles, Sauerkraut or even things like soy sauce or chocolate. All fermented or have fermentation in the process. I had some fermented pickles this summer from a “picklefest”. They were awesome.
There are plenty of online sources, you’d need to look up what you want to try to make and follow the instructions.
Personally?
Anal sex.
diy fecal transplant
jfc
DEA is used in industrial, agricultural, and consumer products.
“We knew that micropollutants can be incorporated into fatty molecules in the body, but we didn’t know how this occurs or what happens next,” Clardy said. “DEA’s metabolism into an immune signal was completely unexpected.”
The team proposes that DEA could be added to the growing list of biomarkers used to detect some cases of major depressive disorder.
The study also strengthens arguments that major depressive disorder, or a subset of cases, could be considered an autoinflammatory or autoimmune disease and be successfully treated with immune modulator drugs, Clardy said.
Oh yeah? I give my gut all the vodka and fast food it wants, and I'm still not happy! Checkmate, liberals!
My wife had an overgrowth of candida bacteria in her stomach, and it caused irritability and exhaustion. When she starved it out, it was wild. If she had any sugars or yeast she would have almost stroke like symptoms. Like she had just drank a ton of alcohol that hit her all at once. She had 1 bite of ice cream (she had been good for months and wanted to try it), and she literally started slurring her words and getting dizzy. Our stomach colony has way more control over us than we think.
Are you sure she's not diabetic? My sister is Type 1, so she's had diabetes her whole life. Whenever her blood sugar was out of whack, she'd become drunk-like and also have seizures in really bad instances.
Yeah, they tested her for that. It took a long time to diagnose, but once this was found, everything else sorted itself out. Thus was also, like, 5 years ago? Now she's fine due to a mix of killing off the candida through diet, and then her whole gut biome completely changing when she got pregnant. The human body is bizarre and wonderful, and way more complex than we understand.
Did your wife have antibiotics that started her overgrowth of candida?
Yeah, when she was a kid she had something called a Z-pack, I think. We theorize that was what lead to this. Plus poor food quality from her parents. Her mom used to pour the old milk into the new milk to stretch it...basically cultivating a super colony of bacteria, lol.
"Bacteria" is already plural
Honestly your gut is more central to your existence than your brain. There's plenty of organisms out there that are just a tube, and not all of them even have two ends!
Neurotransmitters in the gut cannot reach the brain due to the blood brain barrier (or very limited at best). Reuptake proteins and breakdown enzymes also prevent outside neurotransmitters from interfering. Your gut already produces large amounts of serotonin and it was first identified in the gut. 90% of the serotonin in the body is made in the lining of the stomach where it modulates smooth muscle contractions. About 50% of the dopamine is produced in the gut also.
However, microbes could affect gut behavior and that could effect mood simply by feeling poorly or well. There is also the matter of inflammatory responses and signaling (i.e. cytokines) that could affect one's general sense of health. The small intestine is packed with immune cells that will also react to changes in the gut biome.
Finally there is the vagus nerve, a highway running from the gut, lungs and heart straight to the hindbrain, bypassing the spine. More here. We are still learning about how much this ancient nerve controls and influences. I've even wondered if it is related to dementia and Parkinson's because of its physical proximity to locations such as the substantia nigra (Parkinson's) and areas that show the first signs of dementia, possibly due to influences traveling up the nerve similar to the way rabies viruses travel. People who have had their vagus nerve cut, in an effort to stop severe stomach ulceration, showed a significant drop in Parkinson's. More here, and here.
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