Dr Emeran Mayer: Your Gut Processes Emotion and Regulates Health While You Sleep
Your brain isn't the only organ processing your day while you sleep. Dr. Emeran Mayer explains the circular processing of emotion and memory that goes on between your brain and your digestive system, and how the latter can "dream".
There is so much more going on in your sleep than you think.
Depression, Serotonin, and the Mind-Gut Connection
Neuroscientists now think of the gut as a "second brain"; it independently controls your digestive processes and is in constant conversation with your main brain. What do they talk about? Depression, theorizes Dr Emeran Mayer.
We all feel things in our gut – intuitions that give us subtle physiological alerts, stress and anxiety that unsettle us, bad reactions to food, and conversely feelings of contentment from the right food, or flutters from an exciting experience. But according to Dr Emeran Mayer, what we feel is just a small fraction of what’s going on in a region of our body that is still quite mysterious – even to the experts.
Dr Emeran Mayer is a world-renowned gastroenterologist and neuroscientist with 35 years of experience in the study of clinical and neurobiological aspects of how the digestive system and the nervous system interact in health and disease. His current research focus is on the role of the gut microbiota brain interactions in emotion regulation, chronic visceral pain, and in obesity. His research has been continuously supported by the National Institutes of Health.
Dr Mayer is a professor in the Departments of Medicine, Physiology and Psychiatry at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, executive director of the G Oppenheimer Center for Neurobiology of Stress and Resilience, and co-director of the CURE: Digestive Diseases Research Center at UCLA.
