What is the abdominal brain?

Did you know that there is a ‘brain’ with 100 million neurons wrapped around the intestine?

The enteric nervous system, also known as the abdominal brain, is one part of the autonomous nervous system. The autonomous nervous system enables the heart to beat, blood to flow and our lungs to breathe without us even thinking about it.

The enteric nervous system controls the intestine and enables the food we have eaten to be transformed, without us being aware of it. The entire length of the intestine is surrounded by densely connected nerve cells.

As the intestine is over 5 metres long, this means its ‘brain’ has 100 million neurons.

At the end of the 19th century, two British scientists, called Bayliss and Starling, isolated a section of intestine from the rest of the body. They observed that this piece of intestine could continue working in the presence of nutrients, but that when they blocked the nerve cells, all activity stopped. The cells of the enteric nervous system therefore enable the intestine to function independently.