The Vagus Nerve’s Crucial Role in Creating the Human Sense of Mind

It is late at night. You are alone and wandering empty streets in search of your parked car when you hear footsteps creeping up from behind. Your heart pounds, your blood pressure skyrockets. Goose bumps appear on your arms, sweat on your palms. Your stomach knots and your muscles coil, ready to sprint or fight.

Now imagine the same scene, but without any of the body’s innate responses to an external threat. Would you still feel afraid?

Experiences like this reveal the tight integration between brain and body in the creation of mind—the collage of thoughts, perceptions, feelings, and personality unique to each of us. The capabilities of the brain alone are astonishing. The supreme organ gives most people a vivid sensory perception of the world. It can preserve memories, enable us to learn and speak, generate emotions and consciousness. But those who might attempt to preserve their mind by uploading its data into a computer miss a critical point: The body is essential to the mind.

How is this crucial brain-body connection orchestrated? The answer involves the very unusual vagus nerve. The longest nerve in the body, it wends its way from the brain throughout the head and trunk, issuing commands to our organs and receiving sensations from them. Much of the bewildering range of functions it regulates, such as mood, learning, sexual arousal, and fear, are automatic and operate without conscious control. These complex responses engage a constellation of cerebral circuits that link brain and body. The vagus nerve is, in one way of thinking, the conduit of the mind.

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