59 Brains

A guest post edited and curated by Molly Weingrod, LSW from Autonomic Compass: Finding Home in Your Nervous System

Your Autonomic Nervous System is the neural architecture of your bodymind connection.

Lots of people call your system a mind-body system, but in the United States, when we say ‘mind’ most people think brain, so that ‘mind-body’ sounds like ‘brain-body’. And this puts the emphasis in the wrong place. The emphasis needs to go on body. So, bodymind.

Most of the actual neural wiring of the Autonomic Nervous System is not in your brain, but in your body. About eighty percent (4 out of 5) of its fibers are sending information from receptors in the body (your skin, your organs, your inward sensing of limbs, etc.) inward to your deeper nervous system and upward to your brain. Modern neuroscience has gotten really fixated on the brain in your head, but your body is jam-packed with brains. Let me say that differently. If the brain that you think of as your brain is neurology that processes information, this information processing system is distributed in the body far more broadly than neuroscience lets on, and way more broadly than most of us realize.

Sympathetic Ganglia chain

A significant amount of this processing happens at neural junctions, which are neural clusters technically called ganglia, which in turn aggregate into plexes. Ganglia are typically clusters of five to ten thousand interneurons that might contain millions to billions of synaptic connections. They are capable of localized decision-making. When they aggregate into a plexus there can be many more neurons and exponentially more connections. There are twenty-three pairs of ganglia running up and down your spine, and there are ten plexes in the body. That makes fifty-six brains outside of the brain in your head.

This does not include the intrinsic brain of the heart, which contains more neural cells than muscle cells. This does not include the enteric brain of the guts, which is the place from which gut feelings originate.

So by my best reckoning the body contains fifty-nine brains, including that in your head. This is probably not true. The number is probably far greater. I say this with some degree of confidence, because orthodox neurology is so deeply wrong about so much of what it tells you about your nervous system. It is so wrong that on holidays what I like to do is ecstatically dance on the dessicated bones of orthodox neuroscience until I pulverize them into powder. (Everyone needs a hobby, right?)