Last Saturday, we had the privilege of hosting Awakin Call with Emeran Mayer.

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 40 years. His work at UCLA's David Geffen School of Medicine illumines the mysterious connection between the mind and the gut, the body's "second brain" that "contains wisdom.” Mayer explains the gut as a micro-ecosystem comprised of 100 million microbes, outnumbering human cells 10:1, that is influenced by what we eat, drink, think, feel, and inherit and that functions as our most sophisticated information gathering organ. Mayer co-produced the award-winning documentary “In Search of Balance,” exploring a new paradigm of health, science, and medicine. Born in the Bavarian Alps to four generations of German confectionery storeowners, he is a deep student of Buddhism and various mind-body techniques. He married his wife in a monastery in Kathmandu.

Below are some of the nuggets from the call that stood out for me ...

• Intuition allows you to come to insights and decisions without going through the linear, rational process of doing plus or minus lists in making a decision, which is time-consuming. This goes on in the prefrontal cortex area of the brain. The other side is where you can short-circuit this linear process and come to decisions and insights much faster. I’ve always compared this with the difference between an early, simple computational device with a supercomputer.”
• 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.
• The axis between the gut and the brain is the central homeostatic mechanism in the body. Through the brain we perceive all the signals and stimuli through the outside world; through the gut we perceive all the signals and stimuli from our food. Anything that goes on in the brain affects the gut, and vice versa. The trillions of microbes in the gut also produce a whole host of signaling molecules that get sent up to the brain.
• In anxiety, for example, when the brain rings alarm bells or send signals to the gut and constantly evaluates or estimates possible future outcomes for the next second, hour or year, that information feeds the brain but is also associated with emotions. This prediction system is biased in a way, and many assess many future events as potentially threatening or dangerous. This is one of the main mechanisms that creates an anxiety, and anxiety doesn't stay in the brain—it’s transmitted down to the gut and enters this circular process back to the brain. So prediction errors about the threat of future events, which can generate anxiety, feeds forward in a cycle.
• Signaling molecules (neurotransmitters) used by the neurons of the human nervous system to communicate with each other are many of the same molecules that microbes use to communicate, even though the human brain and these microbes are billions of years apart in evolution.
• Neurodegenerative complexes migrate from the gut through the vagus nerve to the brain first—the brainstem—and then other areas. Parkinson's disease, in many cases, starts in the gut and enteric nervous system and affects it.
• The many interactions that go on inside of us between the microbes and our gut include multiple systems: the immune system (70% of our body’s immune system sits in the gut), the biggest part of the nervous system outside of the brain is in our gut, and also the biggest part of the hormonal endocrine system. If you put all these together, this interaction between our microbes and our gut is very complex. So when we keep our gut healthy, we can increase resilience against infections or other stresses.
• To keep the body healthy or to rebalance moods, gut health is paramount. Mayer emphasizes two foundational elements for gut health: (1) a healthy diet and (2) a healthy mind.
• “A healthy diet,” according to Mayer, is one that’s optimal for your microbes. “They love complex carbohydrates (fiber), and they love other plant-based components like polyphenols or antioxidants.” He advises to focus on those, and less on macro-nutrients like proteins and fats (though he also recommends minimizing sugars). Rotating foods, ideally seasonally, which is also good for the environment. Also, adding in fermented foods, which add external microbes to increase diversity in the gut. Many animal studies have shown fermented foods are beneficial for the gut barrier and preventing “leaky gut.”
• For irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) or other gut-brain disorders, Mayer recommends keeping a food diary and eliminate triggering foods for a personalized diet. “You are in charge” and can feel empowered.
• In terms of a healthy mind, “it may not be enough just to do mindfulness. You may need a short course of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT),” which is available online.
• Mayer was influenced by Carl Jung’s teachings on individuation and synchronicity. He also joined a Buddhist Zen center in downtown LA because he was looking for, perhaps unconsciously, a way to bypass “tortuous decision-making processes.” Intuition and synchronicity are dimensions of reality that are not taught, certainly not in Western societies, for us to rely on. But The Celestine Prophecy by James Redford was very formative for Mayer in understanding how “if you develop a consciousness of recognizing the synchronicity,” you realize [synchronicity] isn’t chance, “it’s really something that reflects the interconnectedness of the universe.”
• There is an interconnectedness of everything. We are connected at the micro- and macro- levels. “From the smallest molecules—it’s the same organizing principle—you can scale it up all the way to individuals interacting with each other.” There’s also an interconnectedness of microbes.
• On the smaller scale, there’s keeping our gut healthy for a healthy immune system. But on a larger scale, we can see ecological connections that are weakening our defenses, like the way we keep our animals in industrial agriculture, which is a breeding ground for viruses, and how animals are raised with antibiotics. Another is how we’re encroaching upon habitats of other species in the wild that carry some of organisms and the likelihood increases of some of them “jumping over to humans.” On a positive note, there’s also the microbes in the soil—the soil microbiome. So it’s important where our food comes from and how it was grown.

Lots of gratitude to all the behind-the-scenes volunteers that made this call happen!

--Cynthia

Nuggets from the Transcript

• Gut-based decision-making is based on a vast database of experiences that you have acquired throughout your lifetime from the earliest times on.
• I strongly believe that this access between the brain and the gut and … the gut microbes is the central homeostatic system in our body.
• Anything that goes on in the brain, any emotions, stress, experience, will send signals down to the gut and change pretty much every aspect of its function. And what goes on in the gut is being encoded by hundreds of thousands of sensors and receptors and sensory nerve endings that signal this back to the brain.
• There are two things you can do for keeping the system in balance and homeostasis and increase the resistance against infections or perturbations. One is a healthy diet and the other one is a healthy mind. … Both converge ultimately on this interface between the microbial world and our immune system, the gut barrier. If that barrier is compromised, then the immune system … will start producing inflammatory molecules.
• A healthy diet, in my opinion, is a diet that is optimal for your microbes. … Microbes love complex carbohydrates and fiber.
• You do want to add fermented foods, again for the microbial world, because adding external microbes to the system will increase its diversity, and many animal studies have shown this is beneficial for the gut barrier.
• If you have one of the diseases like IBS, … start out with the same largely plant-based diet, keep a diary, identify items that consistently cause more symptoms, eliminate those items from that largely plant-based diet, and then have a personalized diet.
• Synchronicity is a dimension of reality that we are not taught to rely on, certainly not in Western societies.
• The ascendancy of women in politics and business is part of that paradigm shift [toward interconnectedness] because women look at the world more in terms of interconnectedness.
• Brain signals can do almost the same thing as an unhealthy diet does. They can compromise this barrier, this intestinal barrier that keeps the microbes away from the immune system.
• Those who developed the most severe symptoms and ended up in the ICU, dying from it, or developing the complications of long COVID-persistent symptoms -- the science, the final word on this, is still out, but in my opinion, this has a lot to do with how we program our immune system in the gut, through our diet and lifestyle, and how these immune cells then help us defend against the most serious damage that the virus can do.
• The way we keep our animals in industrial agriculture is a breeding ground for viruses that sooner or later will jump to humans again, as swine flu, for example, has done in the past. And if anything, it's going to get more serious because these conditions in which animals are raised and the antibiotics they're bombarded with are getting worse.
• We are getting closer and closer to habitats of other species in the wild that carry some of these organisms. So by cutting down the rainforest in the Amazon or in Asia, in Indonesia, it brings us closer and closer to animal species that carry these viruses and the likelihood of jumping over to humans gets larger.
• The way that we produce our food is clearly one cause of concern in terms of gut microbial health and immune health. … If you pursue a plant-based diet, make sure you know not only what you eat but also where that food comes from and how it was grown.
• Even though something is programmed at different phases of development, the brain can override some of these things and implement a course correction. It's never too late.
• You may not be able to get back to the optimal condition of your microbial diversity, but you can improve it significantly later in life by changing your diet and lifestyle -- consistently as a lifelong course correction, not on a one-month basis to lose weight.
• I look at the gut not separately from the brain and the mind. It is a brain-gut microbiome system, so you can influence it in different ways. I think it's an illusion propagated by people who want to sell supplements that you can do it just through the gut.
• The combination of mind-targeted therapies with the diet that we know is optimal for the health of the interface between the microbial world and the immune system is the best thing that you can do.
• Women and female patients are generally better at listening to their guts. There are clearly sex differences in how the brain and the gut process information. … Definitely the more receptive patients are women, both in terms of diet but also in terms of understanding what role the mind plays in it.
• Greater sensitivity is actually a very adaptive trait. … If you're a more sensitive person, you have a greater visual acuity, you sense danger earlier. … There are many reasons to assume that being more sensitive is actually a positive thing, as long as you can control it.