15 ms·
Some gut bacteria appear to communicate with the brain
- goatlover 4y agoThere's a hundred million neurons in our guts. It makes me think arguments about being brains in a vat, and treating the brain as a biological computer with inputs form the senses misses the fact that the brain is part of the nervous system extending throughout the body, and not some isolated system. An envatted brain isolated from the body is likely not going to function properly. The brain can only properly be understand as being part of a whole organism.
- tines 4y agoThe "brain in a vat" concept only really makes sense if you are willing to draw a distinction between the conscious part and other parts of the body, i.e. if you are willing to admit that some parts of the world are mechanistic (the external world, the function of our eyes, sense of smell, etc) and some parts (including the brain) are not. If you are willing to admit that, then the brain-in-a-vat scenario says that you can emulate all these mechanical parts and feed the brain fake information, and the brain can't tell the difference. An envatted brain can be isolated from the body because it only knows the information at its own boundaries, i.e. at the boundary of the mechanistic and the non-mechanistic. If the point of your post is to say that the boundary is larger than that of the brain itself, but extends to the nervous system, gut bacteria, etc. then I think one could counter that all those things are relatively easily replaced by simulations and therefore don't need to be part of the brain in the vat to make the thought experiment work. A person can lose arms and legs and intestines and still be perfectly conscious. If you say that the brain itself could be replaced by a simulation and not lose any qualities, then the brain-in-a-vat thought experiment doesn't really mean anything for you because there would be nothing special about a brain anyway, and the scenario is vacuous.
- onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago> A person can lose arms and legs and intestines and still be perfectly conscious. You can also lose parts of your brain and be totally fine! I'm not sure this proves as much as you think, though I do tend to agree.
- tines 4y ago> parts key word :)
- mcculley 4y agoAlso, hormones have an enormous effect on the brain. The speculation I have read about immortality through brain vat tech does not address that such brains might not have any reason to want to live.
- vr46 4y agoI certainly feel like my brain is in charge when I wake up, long enough to get my clothes on and out of the house on the school run and back, at which point my stomach resumes control for the rest of the day.
- alexpotato 4y agoSo this has a potential evolutionary aspect to it. In caveman days you had to wake up, triage the current environment for threats(weather, animals etc) and then once that was done you would go out and try to find food. It makes sense that your stomach would take a back seat till the above had been taken care of. It would then trigger the hunger feeling to motivate you to focus on food.
- neonate 4y agohttp://web.archive.org/web/20230124132159/https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230120-how-gut-bacteria-are-controlling-your-brain http://web.archive.org/web/20230124132159/https://www.bbc.co... https://archive.ph/Z5vh0 https://archive.ph/Z5vh0
- yosito 4y agoIn the last three years, something related to my gut-brain connection got fucked. I'm not sure if it was some kind of post-viral inflammation causing stress, or stress of isolation causing inflammation. But it's definitely a two way street and mine got completely stuck in a feedback loop. The mainstream medical system failed to help me. Eventually some functional medicine doctors managed to help me improve via diet, supplements, herbal remedies and probiotics. Through (risky) experimentation and happenstance I found even more relief with some traditional medicines (pure Greek mastiha sap, kambo and Ayahuasca) and anti-malarial pills I had taken for unrelated reasons. Unfortunately the mainstream medical system has been completely unable to investigate or explain what is going on with my body, but anecdotally, the theory that there is a two way street between gut bacteria and the brain completely aligns with my experience. I'm feeling better now, though my stomach still feels sensitive and I can no longer tolerate gluten.
- lofaszvanitt 4y agodo abs exercises every even day that work your lower, middle and upper abdomen. do these until you can't anymore, each part. It increases blood flow to your gut and speeds up the recovery process.
- valarauko 4y agoWhat's the issues you've been facing, and why do you think it's a gut-brain issue?
- yosito 4y agoConstipation, headaches, stress, bloating, anxiety, depression, fatigue, weight loss, hair loss, rashes. I don't know what the cause was, but the gut-brain theory fits all of my experience and treatments aimed at improving my gut bacteria helped the most, and there has definitely been a strong connection between how my gut is feeling and how my mind is feeling.
- valarauko 4y agoIf you're experiencing an improvement, great. It seems reasonable that your gut issues (if nothing else) could be improved by addressing the gut biome. Since you've had some luck with traditional medicines, I can share my $0.02 about the traditional system I'm somewhat familiar with. In traditional Indian folk medicine, the focus for practically everything seems to revolve around improving gut health. It's a common belief that tongue health is a reflection of gut health, so for example a coated tongue suggests a sluggish digestive system, and the physician will seek to address that before anything else. A lot of treatments also include required dietary changes (like avoiding certain vegetables).
- stuckinhell 4y agoThis is a little scary, doesn't that mean they can hack you and cause issues from brain fog to mental illness.
- echelon 4y agoIf we thought lead in the water was bad, just wait for the news of all the dietary and microbiota damage we've been doing to ourselves. Obviously this could also become a population-level attack vector.
- GalenErso 4y agoI'm getting TLOU vibes.... ....I've enjoyed the first two episodes.
- thinkingemote 4y agoand hack the other way around, to clear heads and positive wholesome thinking
- comboy 4y agoThere are more bacteria cells in your body than your cells. We are hack on a hack on a hack on a hack.
- chiefalchemist 4y agoLucky for us the bacteria are willing to host us.
- nextaccountic 4y agoYes but bacteria cells are generally tiny. We have our own bacteria-like "cells" inside our own cells (mitochondria) and maybe it helps to even out the numbers?
- htag 4y agoA nationstate could hack a competing nationstate by spiking food exports with brain fog causing microbes.
- basch 4y agoI have to wonder what the prevalence of psychedelics and antidepressants has done at a population level to change us. A Multidisciplinary Hypothesis about Serotonergic Psychedelics. Is it Possible that a Portion of Brain Serotonin Comes From the Gut? https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36137971/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36137971/ Seeking the Psilocybiome: Psychedelics meet the microbiota-gut-brain axis https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1697260022000576 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S169726002... Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors and the Gut Microbiome: Significance of the Gut Microbiome in Relation to Mechanism of Action, Treatment Response, Side Effects, and Tachyphylaxis https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2021.682868/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2021.6828...
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jassyr 4y agoCan't speak at the population level, but on a personal, anecdotal level I very reluctantly started taking an SSRI a few years ago and my life is substantially better. YMMV.
- basch 4y agoBut did they change: How you poop? How well your food is digested? What nutrients you absorb from your food?
- petesergeant 4y agoMe too. Seems to be much more effective for people with GAD rather than depression tho, purely on HN anecdata
- ohyoutravel 4y agoI read a book about all this recently called I Contain Multitudes. The thesis was that the gut biome controlled a lot, and given the evidence presented I thought it was compelling (as a layman) though not actionable. Based on that one piece of information I am not surprised by the OP.
- lumb63 4y agoI started I Contain Multitudes and ended up reading 10% Human instead. It’s more human-centric. Fascinating either way. I suspect we are starting to see the first glimmers of a vast space of microbiome interactions.
- ohyoutravel 4y agoIt’s really interesting, and for me personally unfortunate that it seems to be a “crunchy” topic that’s regularly the domain of crystal healers and anti vaxxers and people who blame their maladies on “toxins in the body” because the science behind a microbiome growing from the food we eat and how we evolved seems pretty sound.
- lumb63 4y agoI share this sentiment. It seems that anything which has not yet been formally proven by academia is “not real” in the public eye and therefore all believers are cranks. We still have major gaps in our understanding of our bodies and our medicine, so to me it is ironic that the institutional science scoffs at things like the microbiome that we do not yet fully understand.
- xvilka 4y ago> major gaps in our understanding of our bodies True. But it doesn't cancel the fact that most preachers of detoxication and such are cranks.
- zwilliamson 4y agoGood book! Ed Yong is a great author. It really made me question our modern medicine approach to use antibiotics which is essentially scorched earth tactics on our gut biome. I hope some cool medical science comes out of it. Like having medicines tailored to your gut biome makeup and balance. The section in the book about fecal matter transplants (FMTs) and how they work blew my mind. (Edit typo)
- thinkingemote 4y agoI get gut pain sometimes, on a semi regular basis. The day before the pain hits I have mild-euphoria, clear thinking, positive outlook, lots of energy, more social and extravert. It's not normal. Something is going on with the brain and my gut. It's possible that it's endorphins being released to stop any pain ... but this is about 24 hours before the crippling cramps start, and it's more a mood shift than pain killing. Before this great 24 hour, I'm normal baseline okay state.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- sva_ 4y ago> The day before the pain hits I have mild-euphoria, clear thinking, positive outlook, lots of energy, more social and extravert. It's not normal. Some might say that you got it backwards and this would be preferably your "normal". First thing I'd do would probably be to document in detail what you're eating on those days and if any pattern emerges. Try eliminating things, if there is any pattern. Sounds a lot like lactose intolerance to me. I used to have it, but managed to get rid off it.
- fragmede 4y agohow'd you get rid of it?
- sva_ 4y agoI know people would probably call bullshit on this, and I probably wouldn't believe it myself if I hadn't experienced it myself. My symptoms of lactose intolerance were basically that I'd get stomach cramps, and later diarrhea, within about 2 hours of consuming milk products, even after just eating small amounts of them (such as milk-chocolate). I was, to that time, using lactase-supplements whenever I consumed something containing lactose. What I did for a while was intermittent fasting (restricting caloric intake to a 6-8 hour window each day.) I did this unrelated to my lactose intolerace, because I hadn't considered that it might be 'curable'. After doing this for a month or so, I somehow forgot taking my lactase supplement for a while (I didn't even notice until some time later.), and curiously I did not get those lactose-intolerance symptoms anymore. I'm not an expert on these things by any matter, but from my amateur-readings of the literature there are two forms of lactose intolerance: the first, and most common, is a genetic one where your stomach just doesn't produce enough (or any) lactase anymore, starting at a certain age. The second one is more controversial, but might be related to bacteria living in the gut, which populate on the stomach lining and prevent the gut from releasing lactase; and it - to me - seems like my calorie restricted diet has starved those bacteria out. So I can't say for certain if the month of intermittent fasting resolved the issue of lactose intolerance for me (since n=1), but it sure seems so because I hadn't made any other major changes to my diet then (except perhaps that I reduced carbs, in particular refined sugars.)
- keyP 4y agoAyurveda posited a form of gut-brain axis thousands of years ago (and is a core basis for its dietary aspects), interesting to see more scientific research delving into the details.
- MacsHeadroom 4y agoAyurveda posits that palm reading is legitimate medicine. The notion that gut health impacts mental wellbeing is obvious. The specifics of it are less so.
- keyP 4y agoNot sure what your point is here. I'm suggesting that dietary aspects were designed around the aspect of a gut-brain axis and praising that more research is going into the details. Similar to how we're seeing more research in the field of meditation and its impact on brain structure. Source on Ayurveda posits that palm reading is legitimate medicine?
- yesenadam 4y agohttps://www.google.com/search?q=ayurvedic+palm+reading https://www.google.com/search?q=ayurvedic+palm+reading
- keyP 4y agoWhat does that have to do with medicine?
- yesenadam 4y agoApologies. Presumably those thousands of clinics etc in the search results "posit that palm reading is legitimate medicine". I had to guess what your question meant exactly - as is, it's not grammatical english, and is ambiguous in at least two ways. I should've asked you to clarify instead, or just not tried to answer.
- jimwhite42 4y agoHumans need a lot of nutrients for brain operation, so it makes sense that we would have a sophisticated system for working with the gut flora and fauna to support them so that they can help us digest food effectively. If this is the case, in a sense we then we invite the gut inhabitants, and ask them what they want so they can help us. I think it's reaching a bit to describe this as 'gut bacteria control the brain'.
- ChildOfChaos 4y agoTim Spector seems like a good source on this stuff, I listened to some podcasts of his and he's doing some work here in the UK with Zoe, where they test you and figure out a nuturion plan for you based on your gut bacteria and what is best for you personally.
- TedDoesntTalk 4y agoI can’t find his podcasts. What’s the title?
- ChildOfChaos 4y agoSearch his name on youtube and you will find some good content, he also has some books. But the podcast I watched, was here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66hWntvp0_4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66hWntvp0_4
- CommanderData 4y agoThere's also the Bone-Brain-Gut connection and Bone Gut connection. Bones are complex structures made of various proteins and studies have shown some microbiome as harmful to Bones or lack of diversity. There was an experiment in mice that showed some mice devoid of any gut bacteria had better bone density than the other experiment group. This is interesting and might suggest some bacteria can cause bone issues.
- rosywoozlechan 4y agoI believe it for anecdodal reasons. Since a few years ago I started eating vegetables and whole foods and greek yogurt, cottage cheese, my cravings for what foods I want to eat and what foods I like have changed so much. I can't stand the foods I used to love, and I love always having veggies now in my food. I'm always joking with my partner that my gut bacteria have mindcontrolled me and that I'm a zombie for my gut microbiome.
- jadbox 4y agoI just want to echo this and also speak from experience. I've learned to know my cravings- for protein, vegis, simple (ideally mono) fats, and so on. Sometimes I just think to myself.. I need an avocado and a little salt to solve this particular inner craving. When we have a healthy balanced diet, I find my cravings more closely align with what our bodies naturally require, no more or less.
- teaearlgraycold 4y agoI like to call this "palette inertia" - the opposite of palette fatigue.
- mtqwerty 4y agoI did a project during undergrad looking at the connection between the microbiome and food cravings. Mostly anecdotal evidence from what I could find but the theory makes sense conceptually. Stay with me.. The microbes that live in the gut can influence the way we feel in a bunch of positive and negative ways (could give sources but just google it). Microbes are just little machines programmed by evolution. They're designed to optimally survive in a specific environment and get better at it over time. Most of the microbes in the gut have been with us for a long time so they've done some evolving. Microbes don't actively think but their behavior and metabolism are still optimized by evolution. They can react to avoid being killed, to eat and to reproduce all without "thinking". Each microbe also has a pretty specific diet. The microbes that enjoy greek yogurt don't often like chicken nuggets. Microbes that could influence their host to consume food the microbes liked would be more fit to survive. Same thing for influencing their host to consume less food they dislike (or a competing microbe likes). Influencing the host sounds complicated but it could be as simple as increasing the concentration of a byproduct when food concentrations of the environment are low. That byproduct could make the host tired or give them a stomachache or whatever else. With the brain connection, the possible range of these effects is broad. If this trait was developed at anytime, it most likely got passed down to present day microbes.
- rdevsrex 4y ago"so we have evolved with these 'friends with benefits'." I'll never think of my gut bacteria in the same way again.
- glasss 4y agoHate to be cynical but every time something like this comes up I can't help but thinking "You're telling me the leg bone's connected to the hip bone?"
- joeconway 4y agoFor the folks that take probiotics: how did you decide what to take?
- petesergeant 4y agoI’m taking L Reuteri mostly because I enjoy making yoghurt from it myself, and it tastes good. Also it’s anti H Pylori (the bacteria that causes ulcers), and I started taking it when I was worried I might be developing one https://examine.com/supplements/lactobacillus-reuteri/ https://examine.com/supplements/lactobacillus-reuteri/
- TedDoesntTalk 4y agoYou can buy this in the US as a product called BioGaia Gastrus. Chewable pills.
- petesergeant 4y agoYes! I use those for my starter
- TedDoesntTalk 4y agoSo the organisms aren’t half-dead after all, if your yogurt is a success. I always wonder how they can survive in a pill, on a shelf, for a year (expiration date is easily one year but I finish them in 30 days… but no idea date of manufacture so we can’t know how “old” the organisms are.
- jrgoff 4y agoI got lucky and the first kind I used worked well for me (I think it was suggested by my girlfriend at the time as a good brand, she had done a bunch of research about that kind of thing). I later tried several different others and they didn't seem to benefit me as much though some of them were at least somewhat beneficial. My impression is that there isn't a very good way currently of knowing ahead of time what if any probiotics might work well for any particular person.
- ThinkBeat 4y agoNews or articles about this keep coming out recently. but they all seem to be limited to "we think", "might" and the great potential it may have. Since we do not know much about how the brain works to begin with I guess that is as close as we can get. I say we dont know much about how the brain works as a I take medication for depression. The way that works most often is that you are given a pill that may work. You take it for between 2 - 26 weeks, depending on results. (some may have a fast negative effect) and then you tell your doc if you feel better. (Sometimes complicated surveys) if it didn't work, you get to do it over again. and again and again. until you find something that works, give up or die. then sometimes it stops working. One place I know does a cool, I forget the proper name. They take a "video" of how your brain is "working" (at an extremely low resolution). then they compare what they find to knowledge about what parts of the brain should be active, not active etc. From this they hope to establish a delta between "normal" and you. Then you get to take pills and you come back (after some times) they do the whole thing over again, to see if you are now closer to "normal" or not. The goal then being to find a chemical that brings you as close to normal as can be. It is highly appealing in that it would offer -some- scientific basis for evaluating the drugs aside from "How do you feel". If it -actually works- I have no idea. It was far too expensive for me, and to qualify you have to not have taken any medication already. (that would mess up the "virgin" recording). An interesting research project would be recording tens of thousands of people who self-reported no depression in the hope that some would develop clinical depression and comparisons could be made. If we now mix in gut bacteria into the equation, I can imagine you somehow "insert" new gut bacteria into a person and then you wait for some time and tell the doc if it worked or not. If not you can get a different psychobiotics and enter the loop. Add in regular medication for depression the number of possible permutation would become huge. (I like to include this link to a Standford lecture on the difference between "being sad" and clinical depression https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOAgplgTxfc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOAgplgTxfc)
- jiocrag 4y agoHighly recommend this radiolab episode, which covers much of the content of this article including the Beaumont origin story and rat experiments in fascinating detail. https://radiolab.org/episodes/197112-guts https://radiolab.org/episodes/197112-guts
- efitz 4y agoArchive link: https://archive.ph/Z5vh0 https://archive.ph/Z5vh0
- raincom 4y agoEven for weight loss, some gut bacterial peptide helps. This is like semaglutide. See https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-61112-0 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-61112-0
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- narpaldhillon 4y agoThere is an interesting book on the related topic - "This Is Your Brain on Food"[0]. If you like to try changes in the diet then there are a lot of suggestions in the book. But you might find the book to be quite verbose and repetitive. [0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/49088685-this-is-your-brain-on-food https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/49088685-this-is-your-br...
- barrenko 4y agoMaking my own kefir for 6 months did something to me I still can't quantify, like working out e.g.
- upsidesinclude 4y agoBBC and NHS wildly behind the curve as usual. https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/wellness-and-prevention/the-brain-gut-connection https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/wellness-and-preventi... This is, in fact, old hat
- pistol_pete 4y agoOur gut biomes and the gut-brain axis are pretty mind-blowing in the way they facilitate our behaviors and general mental/physical health. It's amazing how much we haven't figured out yet too...especially with neural pathways. Today's world of commercialized food (a few major foods/culprits in particular) throws inflammation at us in spades, and eating well has honestly made a huge difference in my life -- the most noticeable parts by far being cognition, energy, and mood. Every time I deviate from clean cooking and eating mainly whole foods, it's painfully obvious since my microbiome loves the new, healthier norm. I would highly recommend this podcast (neuroscientist Andrew Huberman) if anyone wants to learn more about improving their gut health and the science and research that we know so far. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15R2pMqU2ok&t=4500s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15R2pMqU2ok&t=4500s
- whoomp12342 4y agowhat a wonderful resource. He has no reason for me to be skeptical but I have a hard time believing anything on youtube
- chatterhead 4y agoSo then where are we with parasites cause homosexuality? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mG7DbMQ_gM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mG7DbMQ_gM Censor, downvote and otherwise dismiss without any intellectual pursuit. If that's what you did then it's an identity for you and evidence to the contrary won't matter. If we are discussing gut/brain connection in one way why not in others?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- IYasha 4y agosigh took them decades to realise. clap-clap For me it's a common knowledge and I use it quite often.
- otikik 4y agoPair programming with my gut bacteria today
- MagicMoonlight 4y agoIt is possible for a bacteria to evolve to release neurotransmitters etc. There is a nervous system in the digestive system that is connected to the brain. Therefore it is possible for a bacteria to evolve to influence the brain. If it was possible for a bacteria to evolve to control their host then they would do so. Therefore, they have done so.
- dTal 4y agoNo doubt this is a reasonable inference chain that was dreamed up many decades ago. But science doesn't stop at inference chains. Now, armed with this hypothesis, we have to go and actually look. Which bacteria? How do they influence the brain? What evolutionary pressures exactly? Reading the article, it looks like we have answers to many of these questions.