This is why the reductionist argument of "your brain is reducible to a computer with inputs/outputs like any other, all we have to do is reimplement it" of AGI proponents always fell flat to me.
It's now becoming clear that we can't just take the brain in isolation, treating the spinal nerve like a PCI-E lane - the gut has to come with it. And if the gut comes with it, all the other organs (skin top of the list) probably do as well.
Now to model a human brain, you need to model an entire human, along with all the complexity of the microbiota, interactions of the organs with the environment... it all just falls apart.
Neuroscientist here: There is no such thing as a mind-body duality. Your body is your mind and your mind is your body. Full stop.
We are still in the very infancy of the study of the mind body and brain. We're finally uncovering some of the most basic tools that will serve us for millennia to come. Imagine trying to understand a 2022 Ford F-150 with only a 7/16ths wrench and a flat-head screwdriver: You can get pretty far, but you're not getting anywhere near the cylinders. It's going to take along time to even get the tools to understand the brain.
For example: We don't even have all the basic circuit components that the brain has. We have resistors, capacitors, and inductors. All things that the electrical systems of the brain have analogs to (very very roughly, I am simplifying a lot here). But we're missing the memristor. We know the brain has a memristor, it's the synapse, but we don't really have ones to play around with and use as tools. Yes, you can model these things in software. But then you miss out on most of the ugly reality that is hard/wetware; and that's where all the magic happens.
But that's just the electrical parts of the nervous system. Most of what is happening is in the electrically dark chemistry. Heck, we can't even agree on what percentage of the brain is glia. Is it 50%, is it 90%? Whose paper should you trust? We don't even have a good census of what is in the damn thing!
But of course you can't take the brain in isolation. The inputs and effects on it are still nearly completely unknown to us. And that's not hyperbole either. We really are mostly in the dark as to what effects the brain. Just look at temperature. We know that the rate of firing of neurons goes as T ^ 4. Yes, that's the hypercube of temperature. Even the slightest change in temperature has massive changes to firing rates. How in God's name do any of us function on a hot or cold day!? We haven't the foggiest idea.
So again, we're in the absolute infancy of our study of the brain. Fortunately, most of us HNers are going to live to see a lot of progress in this science. It's an exciting time to be alive.
>The acquisition of donor personality characteristics by recipients following heart transplantation is hypothesized to occur via the transfer of cellular memory
>There have been perplexing reports of organ transplant receivers claiming that they seem to have inherited the memory, experiences and emotions of their deceased donors, and which are causing quirky changes in their personality."
This post was in response to one describing decapitated worms growing new heads with their old memories intact, as well as old studies where planarians were trained to navigate a simple maze, then fed to other planarians who were then also able to navigate the maze. Fascinating stuff!
> Your body is your mind and your mind is your body. Full stop.
This is completely unwarranted judging from the rest of your post ("in the very infancy", "nearly completely unknown", "mostly in the dark", "haven't the foggiest idea"; although I appreciate the frankness).
If people made bold statements like "There is no such thing as X" in any other field at a similar stage of development, their claims would be rightly dismissed as pseudoscience. ("There is no such thing as a graviton. Full stop.")
Your claim is not a finding of your field of expertise, or any other branch of science. It's metaphysical belief. You're entitled to it. It's a widely shared belief. It might be a belief with a lot going for it. Metaphysical claims are fun! They can be discussed! But I wish people wouldn't confuse them with scientific knowledge.
I gather that there are two (somewhat related) definitions of mind-body duality:
1. mental phenomena are not physical
2. the mind and body are distinct and separable
Neither of these claims are supported by modern science in any meaningful way. It is perfectly reasonable to say that mind-body duality has been disproven by science, insofar as it is reasonable to say anything has been disproven by science. Just because neuroscience is still in its infancy doesn't mean there can be no established foundations of the discipline. These foundations may turn out to be wrong or incomplete, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't talk about them.
Would you say there’s a gut/body duality then? Or a fascia/body duality? Understanding of the gut and fascia are also in their infancy. We barely knew anything about the gut microbiome until a decade or two ago. Up until about a decade and a half ago, when doctors dissected cadavers, they simply threw out the fascia. Now we know it’s got more nerve endings than the eyes.
We’re in the infancy of understanding the human body, period. But why does that imply a mind/body duality? One thing that’s clear is that everything is interconnected, and I think that much is clear from the comment.
The whole idea of a mind/body duality is a historical artifact. If someone wants to argue that there is a duality, then I think the onus is on them to prove it exists, not the other way around.
I took it as them dispelling the notion of metaphysical nonsense, not unlike how space and time are talked about as spacetime.
Not that it matters all that much. Every single test ever performed looking for a mind absent a body has conclusively, and unquestioningly failed. There are even large bounties available for showing a single successful test which have yet to be claimed.
So let's say that you cut off a person's arm. and then you cut off their other one. and their legs too. and then you take out organs that they definitely don't need to live, exactly when do they stop being human? What are they then?
I don't totally disagree with your notion that the body is the mind, but I'm struggling to determine what a MVH (Minimum viable human) is.
"your brain is reducible to a computer with inputs/outputs like any other, all we have to do is reimplement it"
It still is though, you will reach human intelligence by just modeling the brain. The problem is that you probably won't reach an emotionally stable human since you'll be missing all the emotional/hormonal signaling that comes from the rest of the body, but we can emulate that without having to model the full complexity of the gut.
> you will reach human intelligence by just modeling the brain
I'm not so sure. I mean obviously this is very complicated and we still know very little of the brain.
Just one example (from what I understand) you can't really separate intelligence from emotions. There are researchers in emotions that explain our whole system of affect/feeling/emotion/mood/etc. as a very effective abstraction of all the inputs from our whole body (both direct inputs, cognitive processes and stored data). So without a working system of emotions I don't think you will have a working brain at all.
You won't have a working human brain emulation, but that doesn't preclude some other form of general intelligence with different emotional drivers being developed.
The poster spoke of human intelligence, not general intelligence. I was trying to say that emotions are not just simple drivers they are structurally important pieces that we use to represent the world and that we use in all our cognition. I don't think the human intelligence easily can be separated from emotions since our whole system is built around it.
An older but still popular view of the human mind separate the brain and body as two parts. And we also like to separate emotions and intelligence. From my amateur understanding that does not correspond to modern neuroscience, it is all a very integrated system. We usually like clear and separate categories instead of fuzzy complicated integrated systems.
> I'm not so sure. I mean obviously this is very complicated and we still know very little of the brain.
At least, there are people who have lost most of their gut due to disease or trauma, and their human intelligence is still working unharmed. You may say it is needed for development of the brain, but it does not seem to be needed for function once at least partially developed.
> The good news is, it makes replacing humans - trait for trait - far more more complicated.
I wouldn't take much comfort in that. You can probably reach something that resembles a human by just providing an alternative set of signals. We already do this with the reward mechanism during training and that is proving very effective.
Agree, most work seems to treat the brain as the sole locus of neurological activity when the brain is one piece of a system.
To give a parallel, your high blood pressure may not be due to your heart, as it may be responding to a system of factors. Vasodilation and vasoconstriction of blood vessels have a direct impact. Your kidney health, an organ outside of your circulatory system can trigger high blood pressure. O2 and CO2 levels in the blood can trigger a response.
Looking at the brain in a vacuum will only get us so far.
The person you are replying to is questioning whether a conceptual distinction can really be drawn between cognition and emotion. To say that "you will reach human intelligence [but not emotional stability] by just modeling the brain" assumes what is being questioned.
The argument stays the same though. Your body is reducible to an input/output mechanism.
In terms of complexity, since we haven't solved brain yet, it doesn't matter that much that there's also other parts of the body involved, as we don't even know the exact complexity of the brain, but the argument stays the same.
In theory we are input/output mechanism, possible to emulate if there's enough capacity.
But in addition AGI wouldn't require many traits that humans have since it doesn't need the same evolutionary survival mechanisms. It only needs part of it.
I don't get it. I can see the human body as a system that comprises many input/output mechanisms. (And of course it's possible to emulate such a system given enough compute.) But how can you reduce it to a single "input/output mechanism"? Can you give an example input/output pair for this mechanism?
Isn't it like saying the human body is a PC which has inputs (ports) and outputs (display, sounds) and the brain is like a CPU which has its own inputs and outputs? and you can always go further i.e the transistors have their own inputs and outputs
If that's what is meant by 'an input/output mechanism' then it seems like a pointless observation. It's just saying "you can do things to it, and you can observe things about it", which is true of pretty much anything.
The problem is we don't know all the inputs, and there is much hidden state that we can't observe. So it isn't very useful to try and model a human after how a computer works.
In my opinion, a living creature is more than just an input and output mechanism. If I were to think up one way to define consciousness, it would be that it provides output even in the absence of inputs.
I assume that it would “matter” to you if somebody shot up a class of kindergarteners at your local elementary school. That’s what I mean by “matter.”
Maybe you are right and we’re all just selfish and driven by our own desire to survive, but why does it matter to you if you survive if you are just an input/output mechanism? My computer doesn’t care if it gets crushed to bits (I assume).
Yes, it matters because it's evolutionary bias to protect the young, because historically the trait of protecting youth was more likely to keep those genes spreading.
It matters to me because I have inherent bias to want to survive because that's what was successful through evolution. I'm aware that I have it, but it still exists.
Why does GPT keep generating tokens after a token, should it matter to it whether it would keep responding?
> In theory we are input/output mechanism, possible to emulate if there's enough capacity.
People used to think that the universe was a deterministic clock-work mechanism, possible to model in theory down to atomic interactions. Now we have things like black holes to nowhere and correlations without causation. So this theory seems at best, a tentative first approximation that doesn't warrant the kind of confidence you declare it with.
Yes you are probably right, but generally I don't get why AGI needs to be 100% mimicking every aspect of human, just better/faster. Like proverbial skynet can have extreme excellence in one/few aspect of general intelligence but can be muted to almost 0 on everything else, say emotions, yet still be falling into AGI behavior and could take over the world. It doesn't need to simulate gut interactions to get there.
And I think for such an entity we may be closer to emerging than we like, especially if it can traverse whole internet including this comment and make summaries out of it out of reach to mere mortals.
> And I think for such an entity we may be closer to emerging than we like
Why are people talking about it as if it was a bad thing? If I listen to people everyone seems to be dissatisfied with their life as of now, due to work, politics, society and everything else. If AGI was to arrive it would potentially remove those frustrations, right.
> If AGI was to arrive it would potentially remove those frustrations, right.
We don’t really know what happens next. There are optimistic outcomes that AGI could enable, but this tech is ultimately being built and distributed by humans currently deeply beholden to the system that everyone seems dissatisfied with.
AGI is not some savior that bursts onto the scene and magically fixes problems. There’s a lot of very messy human work ahead of us if we ever hope to integrate it with society in a way that actually removes those frustrations. And this is not a guaranteed outcome.
We are already facing an AI apocalypse with the primitive tech we have now. AGI will only be worse for humanity.
Our current AI tech is built by and for giant corporations and governments (many of which are dystopian). AI will simply accelerate the vast divide between the haves and the have-nots.
AI is being used to increase profits of corporations, with no concern for the rest of us. AI will allow the elites to rule with fewer messy humans in the loop, who may disobey orders or have sympathy for their fellow humans. AI will blur the distinction between truth and lies, enabling dystopian regimes undreamt of by writers like Orwell. AI will provide a vast toolset for criminals as well.
We humans are often pretty bad, as agent Smith put 'we are a disease, a virus' if you have purely rational view without any emotions (including being human too and making it personal for example).
If you look at the news, horrible trumps positive big time, any day. It may not reflect actual truth on the ground, but AGI scanning internet knows nothing about reality on the street and everything about trending topics and Fox news headlines.
I guarantee you you can't have an objective viewpoint on mankind from just watching internet go and the one you get will be more negative than reality.
With such conclusions, and capability to collapse our society in a millisecond (it doesn't have to be nukes, it can be subtle subversion of financial and societal system for example), you really want a completely unknown and un-understandable entity to judge all of us?
Also see the "somatic marker hypothesis"[1][2] by neuroscientist, Antonio Damasio. It's about how various internal body "markers" deeply influence decision-making. I first read it in his 1991 book, Descarte's Error.
Quoting from here[1]:
"Somatic markers" are feelings in the body that are associated with emotions, such as the association of rapid heartbeat with anxiety or of nausea with disgust. According to the hypothesis, somatic markers strongly influence subsequent decision-making. Within the brain, somatic markers are thought to be processed in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) and the amygdala. [...]"
Although, experimental evidence is not as yet as robust as it needs to be. See the "Experimental evidence" and "Criticism" sections here[1].
I don't see why this changes anything. There are some, sort-of intelligent networks of cells in the gut that help in digestion and other processes. Doesn't change the fact that consciousness resides in the brain.
Did you read the article?
The gut "brain" can just perform it's own functionality independent of the brain. If anything the article raises the concept that organs can function without being regulated by the brain, which would mean the brains purpose is less to regulate the body and is specifically just for performing computations (and doing whatever consciousness is).
If I am doing math my skin is not being leveraged to help out.
There's also a strange satisfaction when skipping one or two meals. Even though you feel craving food for a little while, there's a feeling of being light, lean and sharp, even mentally.
This just isn't the case for me. I don't wake up when I skip breakfast, and if I don't eat throughout the day, I invariably end up exhausted by 3pm only to wake right up 45 minutes after dinner. I don't doubt your experience, but I certainly don't share it.
facetiousness aside, it's really cool to have others return on experience. Even though I kinda made a blanket statement originally, I wasn't trying to enforce my opinion, it was more of a regular result I tried to share.
Try fasting for a day or 2, after reading up on it. It will reset the 'need to eat' training. Humans eating more than once or t2ice a day os a rather recent phenomenon.
Caveat; fasting functions differently for women and men. Women may actually damage their hormones if they aren’t careful fasting in a way that doesn’t happen with men.
1. Food intake varies for me, but generally I don’t eat until noon, or sometimes even until 6pm. I generally don’t force this; I’m hungry right now, I’ll often eat right now.
2. (1) has been the case for years, both when exercising regularly and when not. Right now I happen to be exercising regularly. On Saturday I woke up feeling good, so I drank some water and got on the rowing machine to do a half marathon. That was with no food since the evening before, and no water during — it took 1:45, which is a moderate pace for me. After that I still wasn’t very hungry.
That is for certain! Some of my best days are often just one large early dinner, and nothing all day except lot of fluids and sleeping on six or seven hours. There's something synergetic about not sleeping way too much and not eating that awakens the inner "animal" and keeps the mind alert.
I think so. "Alert" is probably the proper idea, when you're hungry but cannot eat, your brain will seek satisfaction elsewhere, and all this mental energy can be channeled into another activity (a bit like how people get very very active for a few days when they stop smoking cigarettes)
I have a theory that our natural state is “hungry”. We haven’t evolved past a time where getting enough food to be “full” would be a pretty rare occurrence. Everyone’s obsession with being perfectly comfortable at all times is why such an incredible amount of people die of obesity and its comorbitities every year in America.
Yeah I think so too. We were not made for comfort (especially not that amount, not that often), there needs to be a cycle between getting satisfaction and waiting/working for it.
It all hinges on how we define comfort. A comfy villager 500 years ago, with fruits and meat nearby was probably never really hungry, but, I'd argue:
- never the amount of processed calories at hand
- had to consume these calories on a regular basis.. no vehicles, no powered tools except the occasional mill, most things required walking of lifting
Obesity in the US didn’t really start taking off until the 1970s. There are plenty of people still alive from the before times. I believe that studies have been done, and people aren’t generally less active now than they were then.
On reddit there was post where a group of gastroenterologists answering questions. One comment from the doctors was, paraphrasing: "let your stomach growl it's needed for the health of your gut".
I have a high metabolism but a low desire to eat sometimes. I force myself to eat three meals a day. Could be a mental problem I don't know. But my point here was that I feel the complete opposite to this.
I do and I do get stuff like OP, overeating for weightlifters that aren't professionals is stupid really long term strategy, you just expose your body to much more toxins in food and degrade whole body faster (without even going into supplements part).
Ie today I skipped breakfast since I was too busy with work and kids, no ill effect mentally. But if for example my wife would do the same, her sugar levels would drop low and she would be easily irritable, and generally would suffer quite a bit.
Good point. I've been working out more often. Lifting weights, calisthenics. It definitely does help me get in three meals a day more often, but not consistently.
I have a high powered blender. I try to get the fiber and the probiotics at the same time. Fruits and vegetables have probiotics inside the flesh, not just on the skin. The science is less clear on supplements. [1]
What’s the point of eating collagen when you’re already eating protein powder? Why do you think your gut would process it differently from any other protein?
Collagen is made out of mainly 3 amino acids:(hydroxy)proline, lysine, and glycine. So in theory collagen powder is giving you very high levels of those specific amino acids which would help promote collagen formation. I can’t say I’m familiar with the literature and if there is any data behind that - but thats your reason
I've tried collagen powder before, because it's very easy to take since it easily dissolves in drinks (and I think actually improves them), and I think it made my hair and nails grow faster but didn't do much else.
As mentioned by the other buy, something like whey powder or meat will have a very different amino acid profile compared to collagen. Like fatty acids and carbohydrates, amino acids get lumped together as a group, but they all have very different effects in the body (including competition).
Most people don't need to care, but amino acid balance can sometimes be a significant factor to health issues because of all the interactions involved, especially if intake has been tilted by a particular way of eating. It's reasonable to balance out whey protein with collagen.
Honestly the topic is so convoluted that with my current grasp of if, I can't currently make a useful or broadly applicable statement beyond "some people find collagen or glycine supplementation beneficial for their X". Individual trial and error basically, much like neurotransmitter affecting medication.
Be sure to check the timeframes involved. Creatine is a naturally produced in your body, and you also get some from diet. Your body reaches saturation at a rate that varies by person. Some people will see near to 0 benefit from creatine as their body is already producing a near maximal amount of it. But even for those with low creatine levels, a brief loading phase (of ~25g a day for a week) and then 5g a day maintenance will generally see them at peak levels.
There's probably minimal risk of meaningful damage going overboard for a healthy person, but large doses can cause stomach issues for some people, and it seems unlikely to provide benefit beyond going beyond complete saturation. It looks like, of the studies you showed, the only one where they went for a large dosing for a long period of time was when experimenting with it on children with traumatic brain injuries. That's probably because the risk:reward skewed heavily towards reward there.
The 0 one is a meta study. It goes deeper into Huntington's 30g, Parkinson’s, elderly with cognitive decline, and supplementing for help with memory related tasks. I didn’t dive deep into all either because I saw what applied to me and decided to see the results.
I think dividing the dosages throughout the day would help offset the stomach issues some and there have been 5 year long studies showing creatine doesn’t have any major risks with 5-7% people experiencing GI issues during loading phases.
For those that don't know, if you aren't used to creatine then taking more than a few grams has a good possibility of giving you the shits (or sometimes even strong abdominal discomfort). This will (mostly) go away fairly quickly and varies drastically from person to person, but you've been warned. Best to take it on a weekend or something, and slowly build up to your max dose.
The effect is pronounced if taken with only water, all at once.
Instead you can take it throughout the day be adding it to your water bottle. Taking it with meals also typically subdues the effect.
The effect I suppose is comparable to something like magnesium citrate. I suspect they are doing similar things osmotically.
You don't need more than 3-5g per day (about 15mg per pound of body-weight) to see the maximal effects. There is a loading period where you take 2-4 weeks to saturate, many take an increased dose to get there faster but if you're going to be doing this consistently, after a month of daily usage 3-5g is all you need.
I was able to cease taking a gut motility drug (prucalopride) which I also had to combine with a fiber supplement to get manageable bowel movements (which is to say: no bloating, cramping and other non-specific pain most weeks).
I still have issues from time to time, but I'm now also off the fiber supplements entirely as well (some dietary changes probably helped there as well - I cut out almost all sugar).
To explain the change: I had weeks where I'd have to take 2-3 movicol satchets a day to try and alleviate the pain: after about 3 months.
Ruteri is a patented strain that secretes a protein which helps other good bacteria colonies your gut. That plus a more complete probiotic plus another product Candex can really help your gut biome. Candex is enzymes that dissolve yeasts, which have become a big gut health issue over the last 80 years. Two major brands of probiotics are primadophilus, who have ones with Reuteri and another Jarro-dophilus, which is a collection claimed to reduce putrative bacteria. Finally the ancient Japanese super food Miso prepared at temperatures which keep it alive help colonize with a biome that digests all vegetable protein nearly fully.
Probiotics are fiber or long sugars which yeasts can't digest. The big issue nowadays is yeasts and leaky gut. The herbicide Roundup is suspected as a cause of leaky gut syndrome. Avoiding non organic wheat and non organic oats can help while you heal. Going to spelt bread or at least organic can help the gut heal. Using other grains like rice and others can help. Unless diagnosed as gluten intolerant or actually having Celiac disease skip the gluten free breads just avoid non organic wheat & non organic oats while you heal. Once your gut heals you can slowly relax those restrictions.
Sorry half personal experience and other half from nutrition business journal. Final tip, be careful with bagged salad mix especially at restaurants. Redleaf lettuce is high in nutrients but yeasts love that. Next time you're near that stuff look closely at any breaks in the leaves, if you see dark especially black avoid. The dietary suggestions from my earlier comment helped me recover from painful hives from boarder line lupus. Totally recovered and still eat white bread sometimes, but more spelt bread, rice and pasta.
I think probiotic foods (i.e. insoluble fiber) are about as good as probiotic ones if you're already good and looking to stay on track. Start slow though, shocking the system with fiber can be problematic.
I am in no way an expert and only have experiments on myself to go off, but I've been experimenting on this particular question for a decade or so my anecdata might be thicker than average.
Probiotics to recover from antibiotics, prebiotics to maintain.
Article is about cells in the gut that we barely knew anything about, due to stomach acid and bile making it hard to identify their genetic material. Some researchers are making progress in this area and it's amazing.
Metagenomic sequencing: The field exploded after technologies and techniques were developed for using next-gen sequencing to characterize entire populations/communities of living things, first with 16S rRNA sequences, then with full genomes. The cost to do this has also gone down many, many, many orders of magnitude in the last decade or two (just search "sequencing cost graph" on google).
There's been way too many papers. Here [1] is a link to Google Scholar for 'brain gut' which turns up a zillion results. Basically, your gut biome and brain are heavily linked. As a bonus, here's [2] a search for 'glyphosate gut microbiota.' Advances in biotech/consumables and dramatic unforeseen consequences seem completely inseparable.
They are not wrong, I can attest that there have been a ton of breakthroughs and new developments. I don't know what else you're looking for here? Are you expecting them to list every single breakthrough here for you?
I’ve recently moved to a meat heavy diet, and that pretty much fixed my ibs completely. I still get flare ups if I eat too many oranges or bananas, but eating meat on every meal is absolutely essential.
I'm the opposite, leaving out red meat made my gut feel a lot better. I do still eat the occasional beef burger, but mostly it's either vegan or fish/chicken.
This is the thing that's tripping up health professionals about gut health, people's guts are really different and there's no official accepted way of testing what kind of diet works for who.
Except for long-term experimentation and elimination and that's not "scientific", so we don't do that. Doctors just want to prescribe a pill that' fits everyone[0] and call it a day.
[0] everyone they bothered to test it on, so mostly white western males
Dr. Condor, in Stefan Zweig's novel "Beware of Pity":
"""
Don’t you know the medical tricks we play? When we don’t know what to do ourselves, we play for time, we keep patients occupied with chatter and little activities so that they won’t notice how baffled we are. Luckily for us, an invalid’s own nature is usually our ally.
Of course she feels better!
Any kind of treatment, eating lemons or drinking milk, cold-water treatment or hot-water treatment, will bring about an initial change in the organism and provide a stimulus that the ever-optimistic patient takes for improvement. That kind of auto-suggestion is our best assistant; it even helps the biggest fools among us doctors.
But there’s a snag—as soon as the charm of novelty has worn off, reaction will set in, and then you have to switch your approach in a hurry, pretend there’s a new treatment, and so we doctors manipulate our approach in really severe cases until perhaps the real, right method of treatment is found.
"""
> This is the thing that's tripping up health professionals about gut health, people's guts are really different and there's no official accepted way of testing what kind of diet works for who.
The more I've learned about my personal response to various health interventions, the more I've come to believe that a "human being" as a research subject for many medical interventions is very ill-defined simply because there is too much variation between individuals. The research subject should really be a single human individual. Poorly working medical treatments to many weird, complicated, chronic illnesses should really be replaced by an algorithm that allows a person to find the correct treatment or lifestyle adjustments themselves.
If you haven't read Invisible Women[0] yet, you should. Don't be intimidated by the page count, a good 50% of the book is just listing sources of _everything_.
The tl;dr is that women, for example, have been excluded from all kinds of medical, scientific and safety studies just because it's too hard to include them. Them having periods and hormones and all that stuff that makes science HARD. It's easier just to test on men =)
Quitting drinking for three years fixed mine, an unexpected side effect. Going keto also taught me that wheat gives me heart burn, which again, wasn’t an expected side effect. I drink and eat small amounts of wheat now without issue.
Having been skeptical, I think I would recommend elimination diets to people just to see if there’s an unexpected benefit to cutting an unexpected item
I don’t really remember, sorry, I just sort of realized after a while that the issues I’d had went away. During that period I drank a lot of Heineken Blue, yep. I’ve since started drinking again too and been fine (in my gut, at least)
Oranges and bananas are out for me too, because of histamine intolerance, which correlates heavily with gut issues. Sharing to help others since I wish I had known sooner!
Got any suggested reads on this? I have annoying sporadic rhinitis flare ups and I've always suspected a link with food. Would love to see if there's a way to determine what foods may be an issue!
A generally recommended elimination diet is the FODMAP diet (originally out of studies by the Australian Monash University).
It's primarily for IBS and identification of trigger foods, but the elimination and reintroduction steps may well help you with identifying your triggers.
Oh definitely. I did (and am still refining) a full elimination diet to get good clean data. I cut salicylates, amines (e.g histAMINE), and glutamates. Fedup.com.au is a clunky decades old resource, but the content is no-bs and so valuable.
I have rhinitis flare ups too - I’m not sure I’ve pinpointed exactly what flares mine up, but I most suspect guar gum / xanthan gum. Either as a trigger, or just causing thickening of mucus, which spirals into blocked noses and sinus infection issues and further rhinitis.
What really helps me is lymphatic drainage massage. There’s videos on YouTube showing you how to gently directionally massage the drainage channels to keep your sinuses clear.
I sometimes eat meat (chicken) and feel really good, but I alternate with rice and fruits. Fruits require exercise outdoor, that's where they work well, fruits indoor all day is not good from my xp
So this is really cool. I've been super interested in this one gene mutation called LRRK2 which has a really bizarre link to details in contentious debates over history (too long to include in this comment).
The gene mutation is connected to both Crohn's disease and Parkinson's.
So after seeing this article about how glial issues are connected to Crohn's, my immediate thought was - well, what about Parkinson's?
And indeed, it looks like the LRRK2 mutation contributes to Parkinson's by screwing up the glial cells:
One of the cool discoveries in Anthropic's approach to introspection by functional grouping of neural network nodes was that there was a series of nodes dedicated to firing when it was looking at a DNA sequence.
There was something about the vegus nerve being influenced by gut microbiota so it's also the parasympathetic not just the enteric nervous system but this is all hard to study I subscribed to u-Boime for a couple of years until that imploded spectacularly and the few snapshots I had are not enough of a sample size this whole field is so data poor and uncertain.
Then there's something about Heart Rate Variability (HRV), the vagus nerve, parasympathetic nervous system, and gut biome all being connected. I can measure one of those relatively easily with a chest strap.
It seems like the only thing we do know at this point is that we don't know anything. This is an interesting TEDx talk from Eran Segal "What is the best diet for humans?": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0z03xkwFbw4
My current conjecture / conspiracy theory / understanding includes:
* Bacteria near the roots of plants generate electricity.
* Plants grow faster in electrified soil.
* Electrical brain stimulation can enhance brain function.
* There are processes and interactions happening in our gut that we really don't understand yet.
* Many ubiquitous things in our environment wreak havoc on our gut biomes (e.g. chlorine, emulsifiers).
* There may be more to establishing and maintaining a healthy gut biome than simply consuming foods rich in pre/probiotics. The right kind of exercise and stress may play essential role in keeping it all humming along.
The vagus nerve is the weirdest thing. Had to dig into it a bit to figure out my acid reflux.
Basically if I eat stuff that doesn't digest well, my stomach bloats and causes a mild hiatal hernia, which in turn presses on the vagus nerve that travels right next to it.
This causes the _exact_ same symptoms as a panic attack. Cold hands and feet, the feeling of an increased heart rate etc. Not super fun when you have a history of actual panic attacks.
Then I take some medicine to forcibly relax the esophageal sphincter on top of the stomach and within 10-15 minutes I can literally feel the warmth getting back to my limbs just because of the decreased vagus nerve pressure...
> Basically if I eat stuff that doesn't digest well, my stomach bloats and causes a mild hiatal hernia, which in turn presses on the vagus nerve that travels right next to it.
What do you base this claim on?
I have been diagnosed with the reflux disease an a medium sized hiatal hernia. I survive with the proton pump inhibitors, but I have to take them constantly. As far as I know, a hiatal hernia can't be healed and it contributes to the acid reflux rather than the acid reflux causing it.
Thus: "mild hiatal hernia". It doesn't full on push the stomach through the diaphragm like a proper hernia.
For understandable reasons I can't physically see what's happening in there, but the best guess I have so far is that extreme bloating pushes the stomach further into the diaphragm causing the "mild hernia" that goes away when the bloating goes away - which it can't because the whole stomach is blocked. If I end up in that situation I can't burp for example, during my worst times I was completely unable to burp for a good six months. Carbonated drinks caused physical pain.
This combined with the fact that my initial bout of reflux went away when I went in for a gastroscopy. My theory is that the camera they shoved into my stomach pushed in whatever was stuck and "fixed" it.
Nowadays I survive by avoiding any situations where I become extremely satiated and bloated at the same time.
The very few times I get severe symptoms I use Metamizole to forcibly relax the internal muscles and the symptoms go away.
"Gastrocardiac syndrome" might be considered outdated in the medical world (not sure what they mean by that), but it's been a real thing for me. I started getting clued up on the vagus nerve because of frequent weird heartbeats (which turned out to be PVCs and PACs that my cardiologist diagnosed after I bought my own portable ECG thingy to catch them), especially when I bent over or lay on my side. After finding out I had a hiatal hernia and starting on omeprazole, those odd heartbeats dropped a ton, like by 90%.
Hi - this sounds exactly like what my GF is figthing with bloating, really cold hands and feet and anxiety attacks. She used to have a severe reflux issue.
Can I ask you, what medicine do you take to relax the esophageal sphincter?
When it comes to food, have you found a pattern in what to avoid or do just stick to some basic kinds to avoid?
Metamizole[0] is the one I take, it's _really_ sketchy and actually banned in some. Looks like it's banned for human use in the US :D
But hey, it works and I usually need like 0,5-1 tablets a year so I'm not personally worried about any adverse effects.
As for foods, during the worst reflux times I ate pretty much just unseasoned chicken and rice and drank only water just to let my stomach and esophagus time to heal a bit from the constant acidic assault.
Then it was a matter of slowly adding stuff I ate regularly one at a time and see which cause issues. Weirdly I could eat spicy Indian food and it actually helped my symptoms :D
Because of the elimination diet I dropped red meat from my diet. So no beef or pork, those seem to be the worst ones as far as digestion goes. I have a theory that my stomach acids aren't strong enough to digest red meat and it just sits there slowly dissolving instead of moving on like it should -> acid reflux and bloated stomach -> boom, vagus nerve angry.
Currently I'm feeling a lot better than 10-15 years ago and I can have the odd hot dog, some bacon and pepperoni on my pizza, but I stay away from steaks, briskets and all that - and if I _have_ to eat red meat in quantities, I don't eat much for the rest of the day, just to give it time to digest.
The usual reflux suspects are wheat, sugar, coffee and milk. Those went out too in the beginning, but nowadays I can have them in moderation and the result is just bloating unless I overdo it.
Breaking down food requires coordination across dozens of cell types and many tissues — from muscle cells and immune cells to blood and lymphatic vessels. Heading this effort is the gut’s very own network of nerve cells, known as the enteric nervous system...
One of the things being studied is the involuntary contractions that move food through the gut.
A lot of the comments here are about "the second brain" framing as if we think in our gut, which doesn't appear to be what this research is about at all.
You are what you eat and gut health certainly impacts your brain. "A sound mind in a sound body."
But that's not really what this article seems to be about.
I'd say that there is some information processing happening in the gut, but I'd also say (in agreement with you) that these other comments border on irrelevant and are for the most part nonsense.
I really don't understand why it has taken health research this long to focus on the digestive system. Obviously, it's all hindsight - but the system that controls processing the entirety of our nutrients seems like it would clearly be a lot more important than it has been treated.
I don't think it has rather they have forgotten in the past looking at your shit was a very common way to diagnose your illness. At least that is the case in all old medical systems from Asia.
Gut health is absolutely linked to mental health. Besides actual scientific research that backs this up, I didn’t really get my mental health under control until I took care of my gut issues like IBS and stuff. Also avoiding certain foods, not gluten obviously that’s a crock of shit, but things that obviously don’t work with my body like cream sauces or whatever
Celiac disease [1] is a real and potential serious autoimmune disorder. Whether non-celiac gluten intolerance is a real thing is another question, though there's some evidence for it.
It's not that rare anymore. And while it's true that there's a ton of low-quality evidence for non-celiac gluten sensitivity, I think it's become clear that there's something important there (and more research is needed, as if that needed saying).
Non-celiac gluten sensitivity is not believed to be fictional-- rather, experts disagree about the details of what it is, how it works, how it is identified, how we should classify different presentations, etc. So yes, the science is shaky, but there is plenty of evidence that it's "a thing"... or "some things".
My kid got diagnosed with celiac and it's hereditary so me and my SO had to get tested. I didn't have it, they do. Undiagnosed for decades.
Switched to gluten-free diet and they feel SO much better now. But the thing is that humans are really adaptive, you don't know what "good" feels if you've been feeling bad all your life - that's your normal level.
I suspect there may be something else going on, at least for some people. My girlfriend has digestive issues when she eats wheat, but rye and barley don’t seem to bother her. So I assume it’s not gluten specifically, but eating gluten free resolves the problem.
Plenty of evidence for gluten intolerances in non-celiac autoimmune diseases. Not conclusive, but I find it frustrating that there’s a growing number of people who dismiss gluten intolerance as a myth when we barely understand most autoimmune diseases as it is. It’s far more complicated and nuanced than people want to make it out to be, but it’s increasingly treated like homeopathy or worse. Patients with diseases like this that find an improvement in quality of life after a dietary restriction is implemented deserve our respect.
It's hard to know if it's the gluten restriction that's improving quality of life. Processed foods are often glutenous in addition to being over-sterilized, seed oil laden cattle feed. If you're cutting out gluten, you're mostly forced to cut out "food" from our wonderful conglomerates.
Modern grains are really weird, especially when combined with industrial leavening agents.
I get _really_ bloated if I eat "industrial" wheat bread. Like beach balloon levels of ridiculously bloated.
Sourdough wheat bread: pretty much zero issues. Same with rye bread with no other leavening agents than yeast.
I think this is part of the reason why people feel better when they leave out gluten, it's not the gluten per se but all the other stuff that usually comes with glutinous grains.
I didn’t really get my mental health under control until I took care of my gut issues like IBS and stuff.
Honestly, if you had some chronic, untreated issues with your ankle and foot - something that plagued you daily - it would be hard to take care of your mental health too. Same if you had lupus, for example. Having something wrong with you - especially something chronic - always makes it hard to take care of your mental health. It makes sense that when you don't have the stress of pain and the other things that go with it, you find the mental energy to work on the brain.
Yours just happened to be in the gut, which makes it seem like these articles might be talking about you.
I like to say "the gut is the first brain". There's a reason we perform "gut checks" and "go with our gut" -- it's the first instinct, while the second is the rational systems overlaid on the initial reaction that serve to verify or correct them. Compare with Kahnemann's System 1 and System 2.
I agree. Rationality is invariably a rationalization of gut and emotion and such. A wrapper of symbols so we can think and talk about it. And justify our conclusions.
We do not have "gut checks" and "going with our guts" because of some ancient wisdom about physiology that only left remnant traces as idioms in English.
Also, Kahnemann talked about conscious and unconscious thought, not about "gut thought" and "brain thought." You can teach yourself to behave in certain ways, to just react. That doesn't mean you have a smarter stomach than the next person!
Just to pursue this thread: the Online Etymology Dictionary says
> The notion of the intestines as a seat of emotions is ancient (see bowel) and probably explains expressions such as gut reaction (1963), gut feeling (by 1970), and compare guts. Gut check attested by 1976.
where "guts" says:
> The idea of the bowels as the seat of the spirit goes back to at least mid-14c. (compare bowel).
and "bowel" says:
> The transferred sense of "the viscera as the seat of emotions" is from late 14c.; especially "inner parts as the seat of pity or kindness," hence "tenderness, compassion." Greek splankhnon (from the same PIE root as spleen) was a word for the principal internal organs, which also were felt in ancient times to be the seat of various emotions. Greek poets, from Aeschylus down, regarded the bowels as the seat of the more violent passions such as anger and love, but by the Hebrews they were seen as the seat of tender affections, especially kindness, benevolence, and compassion. Splankhnon was used in Septuagint to translate a Hebrew word, and from thence early Bibles in English rendered it in its literal sense as bowels, which thus acquired in English a secondary meaning of "pity, compassion" (late 14c.). But in later editions the word often was translated as heart.
It feels like you're just being contrarian without actually putting in the effort to understand. To imply that somatic experience has no influence whatsoever on worldview and by extension on language seems like a very radical position to take given all we know and continue to learn about psychology and neuroscience. I don't think layering on "smarts" onto this discussion is warranted either.
Kahnemann's framework maps neatly onto this idea if you consider the seat of unconscious thought not to be localized in the brain (i.e. that all neurons think to some extent), and the seat of conscious thought to be in the prefrontal cortex and its tight interconnections with other brain regions via the default mode network.
Really exciting findings. Especially given that just last year there were similar threads here where many completely rejected the idea that the gut is a second brain. We live in a very exciting time for science. Especially given we have some initial tools for understanding our guts.
That's why the sitting position is not great, you shouldn't sit on your 2nd brain door! Seriously squatting, kneeling (like Japanese people) has immense benefits for digestion, aside from what you eat too obviously (as natural things as possible)
This should be taken into account when researching the health effects of coffee. I can drink about as much tea as fits into my stomach without too many mental effects, but coffee (or lack thereof) has strong effects. Just caffeine cannot explain this.
I started getting panic attacks about 10 years ago and narrowed it down to coffee, so I went from 2-3 cups per day, to 1 cup before noon only and that helped.
Then my life got a lot harder and panic attacks came back, so I'm on strictly decaf for the last 3 years. No more panic. Noticeably less anxiety. It's so directly related for me that sometimes I'm on vacation and have regular coffee. After 2-3 days of relaxing my decaf-only rule, I feel it coming.
Evolutionarily, I would assert this is our first brain, and the cerebral brain is the jumped-up newcomer. It started as a glorified video card peripheral and motion tracker/planner, and developed delusions of grandeur.
I took antibiotics more than 2 years ago and after about 4 days I was a wreck. I was anxiety riddled for a bit over a year. Thankfully, I feel normal again! But yea, scary stuff.
Try putting some iogurt after soap for 2 minutes just before the final cleansing in the shower. You might, like me, start thinking beyond the second brain idea. It is all connected.
Indian culture places very strict restrictions about food.
1. No outside food. For even until a decade ago, eating out was considered a last resort. The idea is that one must be aware of what exactly goes into ones food, and that usually meant home cooked food.
2. There are a variety of foods and flavors in India, that are recommended for various circumstances and contexts. Pregnant women had a well defined diet regimen.
3. Certain foods were not allowed in summers and certain foods were not allowed in winters.
4. For Yogis, the dietary restrictions are even stricter. No spices, less salt, limited sugar, limited meals, etc.
5. Fresh food was always prioritised. Food cooked more than 4 hours ago was considered poison.
6. Fasting is recommended in winter months and even once or twice weekly.
Indian cuisine and cultural norms are very complex, but well defined.
A balanced diet with all tastes, us always insisted. Up until a few decades ago, most items were made with ghee, rather than vegetable oil. And that ghee was also homemade.
> Food cooked more than 4 hours ago was considered poison.
tbf, a random dish left under Indian room temperature for hours probably is actually unsafe. Mumbai right now is 32C/90F according to Google, which is about the worst temperature to leave food in.
There is a reason why salads aren't a thing in warmer countries. The same reason applies to people only drinking tea, not cold water. If it's not cooked, it might be actually dangerous.
I don't know, but they seem to often marinade chickens, then steam well, then hang dry, and/or keep hot.
Temperature-growth chart for food pathogens is said to show a bell curve peaking at ~35C/95F. Keeping well-flavored food hot(>122F) works to similar effects as refrigerating, just not energy efficient nor good for maintaining flavors.
If we dig deeper into the norms, some foods were allowed to be taken even after 24 hours (Tamrind Rice, My grandmother always said Tamrind rice tastes better after a day, and it was ok to consume, but would raise a fit if I ate rice that was cooked in the morning).
Some foods were allowed to be taken upto 8-10 hours after cooking.
Microorganisms are harder to grow or sustain below 20C/70F, above 50C/120F, and/or in dry, and/or soaked in salt/sugar/acid/base. Your grandma is spot on about unflavored rice from morning. Not 100% sure about Tamarind rice after a whole day, but that make some sense too(I'd Tupperware and refrigerate immediately or at least reheat occasionally).
I'm saying it didn't appear in the last ten years. And eating fresh food is pretty much a tropical standard, except for preserved items (pickles etc). It changed only with refrigeration.
In Hatha Yoga, there is a great emphasis placed on cleaning one's gut and entire digestive tract from mouth to anus. This is in addition to maintaining a proper diet. The cleaning techniques are rather unique and are known as Shatkarmas - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shatkarma. In addition, Mula Bandha and Uddiyana Bandha are also relevant here - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandha_(yoga)
It's now becoming clear that we can't just take the brain in isolation, treating the spinal nerve like a PCI-E lane - the gut has to come with it. And if the gut comes with it, all the other organs (skin top of the list) probably do as well.
Now to model a human brain, you need to model an entire human, along with all the complexity of the microbiota, interactions of the organs with the environment... it all just falls apart.