Dr. Trisha Pasricha

And so that's also why a lot of times when people are stressed, they feel, yeah, they feel nauseated from their stomach not really moving.

And it might feel like you have this like sudden sinking pit in the bottom of your stomach.

But they also feel like, oh, my God, I have to go to the bathroom.

Why do I have to like right before, you know, you're like going on for some theater performance has happened to me in high school.

I'd be like, why right now do I have to go?

I didn't feel this way 10 minutes ago.

Well, it's that it's that's the that's the reaction.

You got to go and it changes your motility.

And one way that it does that is this hormone.

And a lot of the communication is this main highway between the brain and the gut called the vagus nerve.

The vagus nerve is this long nerve that starts up in your brain and it extends down through not just the gut, but it innervates the heart, it innervates the lungs, all these other major organs.

And that's an important way that the brain can very quickly communicate with the gut.

But by the time we reach the 1990s, it's very interesting shift happened where people start to say, wait a minute, 90% of the signaling from the vagus nerve is not actually going from the brain to the gut.

It's going from the gut up to the brain.

Yes, yes.

We live in this brain-centric world.

And...

Actually, our gut is calling the shots in a very different language than I think we've like sort of experienced or believed for most of our lives.

And the gut, as it turns out, has a brain of its own.

And that's what I think like my main mission as a neurogastroenterologist is to get people to understand is that there is a brain that's living in your gut.