Caroline Williams

And is it urgent or less so?

And on that scale, then you'll know what what to do.

And I think just a little bit of time each day will pay dividends, I think.

The gut brain connection has been a lot more discussed than most of interoceptive research.

And there's some really interesting stuff that's coming out of a lab I visited in Tulsa in Oklahoma.

So where they have been using vibrating pills.

So if you think of like a quite a large capsule about the size of a sort of fish oil capsule or something with a little battery inside and a motor.

and they activate this and i actually tried it you sort of swallow it and it feels a little bit like a phone on vibrate and someone just keeps calling and they won't take no for an answer they just keep calling keep calling and so what they're using this for is to try and understand how we differ

in our sensitivity to gut sensations, to do with fullness, to do with pain, to do with bloating, all these things that affect whether we eat or whether we don't eat.

And also gut sensations have a lot of a role to play in emotions and how we feel and disgust and all these kinds of things.

And so by using these kind of...

vibrating capsules and also capturing data from the brain and seeing what the brain is making of all these changes in sensations, whether it's high vibration or low vibration.

The hope is that we can maybe come up with some ways to retrain people who have problems with gut-brain interactions.

So you might be oversensitive to sensations from the gut in terms of IBS or maybe anorexia, or people with binge eating disorder may have

been able to shut down sensations from the gut or don't feel them at all for whatever reason.

And then maybe you can use that as a tool to help people tune back into their stomach in a way that could be really useful as a new tool to rewire the gut brain connection in a much healthier way.