What Lies Inside

What lies behind you and what lies in front of you, pales in comparison to what lies inside of you.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Did you know your stomach is home to the body’s “second brain?” From the health section of the John Hopkins Medicine website comes an article about “The Brain-Gut Connection ” that gives an overview of the enteric nervous system (NES). “The ENS is two thin layers of more than 100 million nerve cells lining your gastrointestinal tract from esophagus to rectum.” It won’t help you with maths or compose that email reply to your boss that describes why his idea is stupid, though it may help temper your mood with that email response. “Researchers are finding evidence that irritation in the gastrointestinal system may send signals to the central nervous system (CNS) that trigger mood changes.”

About the author

Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803 – April 27, 1882), who went by his middle name Waldo, was an American essayist, lecturer, philosopher, abolitionist, and poet who led the transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. He was seen as a champion of individualism and a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society, and his ideology was disseminated through dozens of published essays and more than 1,500 public lectures across the United States.