Awakin with Emeran Mayer: The Wisdom of the Gut

Awakin Calls is an initiative of ServiceSpace, a global, all volunteer-run community dedicated to inner change and outer service. In Awakin Calls, we engage in deep conversations with individuals gently shaking the world, and inspiring us to transformative action.

Tapping into the Wisdom of the Gut

Gut-based decision-making—the supercomputer in that case is the vast database of experiences from early life onward, stored somewhere, likely in the brain. Every time you experience something, it’s stored as an emotion and an image. Because the brain and the gut are so closely related, the emotional experience is often colored by some gut feeling (rumblings, “butterflies in the stomach,” for example) that we may not experience consciously.

With a unique combination of researcher, doctor, and Buddhist practitioner, Dr. Emeran Mayer has been leading the movement to “bring the brain back into medicine” for the past 40 years. His work at the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine has illumined the mysterious connection between the mind and the gut, which Mayer understands to be the body's "second brain".  “The gut contains wisdom,”Mayer says, and we’d do well to pay attention to it.

In his best-selling book, The Mind-Gut Connection: How the Astonishing Dialogue Taking Place in Our Bodies Impacts Health, Weight, and Mood, Mayer explains how microbes in the human gut outnumber human cells 10:1. Imagine a world of darkness, nearly void of oxygen, where 100 trillion microbe inhabitants have been learning the art of peaceful coexistence and perfecting the science of wordless communication for billions of years. This is the mysterious ecosystem of the gut. So when the brain sends signals to the gut and the gut sends signals to the brain in a two-way conversation, occurring 24-7 and even when we’re sleeping, this micro-ecosystem—influenced by what we eat, drink, think, feel, and inherit—functions as the most sophisticated information gathering organ in our bodies. It influences our overall health, moods, appetites, and personalities.

At UCLA, Mayer runs the G. Oppenheimer Center for Neurobiology of Stress and Resilience and co-directs the Digestive Diseases Research Center (CURE). He has published more than 370 scientific papers, co-edited 3 scientific books, and received numerous awards, including the 2016 David McLean Award from the American Psychosomatic Society. His current research focuses on the role of brain-gut interactions in Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s, autism, obesity, and inflammatory bowel disease.

In addition to his intellectual pursuits, Mayer is a deep student of Buddhism. He was a member of the UCLA Zen Center for several years, and he and his wife were married by Choekyi Nyima Rinpoche in a Tibetan monastery in Kathmandu. He has also practiced other mind-based strategies like Ericksonian hypnosis.