maaarine: A stable sense of self is rooted in the lungs, heart and gut (Alessandro Monti, Psyche, De

maaarine: A stable sense of self is rooted in the lungs, heart and gut (Alessandro Monti, Psyche, Dec 06 2021)“Think back to a recent episode in which you felt as if you were being true to yourself. How would you describe what you did?Perhaps you would say that you ‘trusted your guts’ or ‘followed your heart’, rather than ‘thinking with your head’.You might also assume that these idioms involving the guts or the heart belong to an outdated folklore – that they are a poetic rather than a scientific expression of what’s happening when we tap into our sense of self.Yet, emerging scientific evidence increasingly suggests that being aware of who you are – being self-conscious – really does depend, not just on processes in your brain, but also on what’s happening deep in your viscera. Consider how, right now, you could be in a very different place, mood or situation than 20 seconds or 20 years ago, yet you feel that in a fundamental sense you are the same person.This is partly because, as William James put it in The Principles of Psychology (1890), you are aware that ‘the same old body’ is always with you, exuding warmth and intimacy.With the exception of dreaming and altered states of mind, all conscious experiences entail this subtle but pervasive feeling of bodily self-consciousness.But where does it come from? (…)Indeed, a remarkable feature of visceral organs is the fact that they go through steady, predictable physiological cycles. Heartbeats, breaths and gut contractions repeat themselves with regularity, keeping the body warm and fed – a physiological equilibrium known as homeostasis. Moreover, each of these cycles involves peripheral nerves – especially the vagus nerve – sending chemical and electrical signals to the central nervous system.As a result, the activity of specific regions of the central nervous system synchronises with cardiac, respiratory and gastric fluctuations.While sensory impressions coming from the external environment vary from moment to moment and fade away, this coupling between brain and viscera is a permanent feature of your physiology.You can close your eyes, cover your ears, hold your nose or seal your mouth, but you cannot cut yourself off from your bowels. (…)Given that gut signals seem both to regulate food intake and to buttress one’s sense of self, poor processing of these signals could explain why individuals living with anorexia or bulimia nervosa display both abnormal eating habits and a fuzzy sense of self, sometimes morphing into self-disgust.If gut signals are exceedingly high, they might anchor the self too heavily to what happens in their stomach and intestine. Conversely, if they are exceedingly low, they might make the self too reliant on external feedback – or just too unstable.The latter case could apply also to people with depersonalisation, whose feeling of being detached from their body and self might be due to the fact that their selfhood is not rooted enough in their viscera (although there is evidence both for and against this claim).Such an impairment could be even more pronounced in Cotard’s delusion, a rare syndrome in which people feel they are ‘empty’, ‘rotting inside’, ‘without internal organs’, or even ‘non-existent’ or ‘dead’.Smart pills tracking the activity of the gut, combined with questionnaires and manipulations of bodily self-consciousness, such as bodily illusions, could thus deepen the current knowledge of these psychological and psychiatric conditions. (…)An important limitation of contemporary psychology and neuroscience is that scholars replaced the old Cartesian dualism – mind versus body ­– with a new dualism: brain versus body.The new dichotomy was even cruder than the old one, and certainly no less rigid.Experimenters refused to take note of whatever happened south of the neck because the scientific picture du jour dismissed what previous ages had carefully noted – the wisdom of the heart, the power of breathing, and the intelligence of the gut.” -- source link

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