The Gut: The Second Brain audio documentary cover
Body & mind 27 min

The Gut: The Second Brain

Ninety percent of your serotonin is in your gut. It can't reach your brain.

The enteric nervous system contains up to 600 million neurons, produces over 90% of the body's serotonin, and is wired to the brainstem by a nerve that carries nine times more information upward than downward. But gut serotonin can't cross the blood-brain barrier. This episode traces what the gut actually does to the brain — from millisecond neural signalling to disease climbing from stomach to skull — and asks whether we got the hierarchy backwards.

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neuroscience gut-brain axis enteric nervous system serotonin vagus nerve neuropod cells microbiome Parkinson's disease SSRIs psychobiotics Diego Bohórquez Michael Gershon alpha-synuclein second brain body and mind

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