The innovative version of this story ecombineed in Quanta Magazine.
It is defercessitate at night. You are alone and wandering desodefercessitate streets in search of your parked car when you hear footsteps creeping up from behind. Your heart pounds, your blood presdeclareive skyrockets. Goose bumps ecombine on your arms, sweat on your palms. Your stomach knots and your muscles coil, ready to sprint or fight.
Now envision the same scene, but without any of the body’s innate responses to an outside menace. Would you still experience afrhelp?
Experiences enjoy this uncover the shielded integration between brain and body in the creation of mind—the collage of thoughts, perceptions, experienceings, and personality distinct to each of us. The capabilities of the brain alone are astonishing. The supreme organ gives most people a vivid sensory perception of the world. It can shield memories, allow us to lget and speak, produce emotions and consciousness. But those who might try to shield their mind by uploading its data into a computer omit a critical point: The body is vital to the mind.
How is this transport inant brain-body joinion orchestrated? The answer joins the very atypical vagus nerve. The extfinishedest nerve in the body, it wfinishs its way from the brain thcdimiserablemirefulout the head and trunk, issuing orders to our organs and receiving sensations from them. Much of the beuntamedering range of functions it regudefercessitates, such as mood, lgeting, intimacyual arousal, and dread, are automatic and run without conscious deal with. These complicated responses join a consinestablishation of cerebral circuits that join brain and body. The vagus nerve is, in one way of leanking, the conduit of the mind.
Nerves are typicpartner named for the definite functions they carry out. Optic nerves carry signals from the eyes to the brain for vision. Auditory nerves direct acoustic inestablishation for hearing. The best that punctual anatomists could do with this nerve, however, was to call it the “vagus,” from the Latin for “wandering.” The wandering nerve was apparent to the first anatomists, notably Galen, the Greek polymath who inhabitd until around the year 216. But centuries of study were needd to comprehend its complicated anatomy and function. This effort is ongoing: Research on the vagus nerve is at the forefront of neuroscience today.
The most vigorous current research joins stimulating this nerve with electricity to better cognition and memory, and for a smorgasbord of therapies for neuroreasonable and psychoreasonable disorders, including migraine, tinnitus, obesity, pain, drug insertiction, and more. But how could stimulating a individual nerve potentipartner have such wide-ranging psychoreasonable and cognitive advantages? To comprehfinish this, we must comprehfinish the vagus nerve itself.
The vagus nerve starts from four clusters of neurons in the brain’s meunacutea, where the brainstem joines to the spinal cord. Most nerves in our body branch straightforwardly from the spinal cord: They are threaded between the vertebrae in our backbone in a series of defercessitateral prohibitds to carry inestablishation into and out of the brain. But not the vagus. The vagus nerve is one of 13 nerves that exit the brain straightforwardly thcdimiserablemireful exceptional holes in the skull. From there it sprouts denseets of branches that accomplish almost everywhere in the head and trunk. The vagus also radiates from two transport inant clusters of outpost neurons, called ganglia, stationed in critical spots in the body. For example, a big cluster of vagal neurons clings enjoy a vine to the carotid artery in your neck. Its nerve fibers adhere this nettoil of blood vessels thcdimiserablemirefulout your body to accomplish vital organs, from the heart and lungs to the gut.
