The Gut — Your Second Brain

There is a brain in your skull. You know this one. It writes your to-do lists, replays your embarrassments, decides what to believe. But there is a second brain, and it lives below your ribs, coiled through nine metres of gut. It has its own neurons — roughly half a billion of them — its own reflexes, its own moods. It can act without permission from the brain upstairs. And it is in constant, intimate conversation with everything you think and feel. Most people treat the gut as plumbing. Food in, waste out, the unglamorous middle. That view is not just incomplete; it is the reason so many of us feel low, foggy, anxious and inflamed without e…