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

The archetypal version of this story appeared successful Quanta Magazine.

It is precocious astatine night. You are unsocial and wandering bare streets successful hunt of your parked car erstwhile you perceive footsteps creeping up from behind. Your bosom pounds, your humor unit skyrockets. Goose bumps look connected your arms, sweat connected your palms. Your tummy knots and your muscles coil, acceptable to sprint oregon fight.

Now ideate the aforesaid scene, but without immoderate of the body’s innate responses to an outer threat. Would you inactive consciousness afraid?

Experiences similar this uncover the choky integration betwixt encephalon and assemblage successful the instauration of mind—the collage of thoughts, perceptions, feelings, and property unsocial to each of us. The capabilities of the encephalon unsocial are astonishing. The ultimate organ gives astir radical a vivid sensory cognition of the world. It tin sphere memories, alteration america to larn and speak, make emotions and consciousness. But those who mightiness effort to sphere their caput by uploading its information into a machine miss a captious point: The assemblage is indispensable to the mind.

How is this important brain-body transportation orchestrated? The reply involves the precise antithetic vagus nerve. The longest nervus successful the body, it wends its mode from the encephalon passim the caput and trunk, issuing commands to our organs and receiving sensations from them. Much of the bewildering scope of functions it regulates, specified arsenic mood, learning, intersexual arousal, and fear, are automatic and run without conscious control. These analyzable responses prosecute a constellation of cerebral circuits that nexus encephalon and body. The vagus nervus is, successful 1 mode of thinking, the conduit of the mind.

Nerves are typically named for the circumstantial functions they perform. Optic nerves transportation signals from the eyes to the encephalon for vision. Auditory nerves behaviour acoustic accusation for hearing. The champion that aboriginal anatomists could bash with this nerve, however, was to telephone it the “vagus,” from the Latin for “wandering.” The wandering nervus was evident to the archetypal anatomists, notably Galen, the Greek polymath who lived until astir the twelvemonth 216. But centuries of survey were required to grasp its analyzable anatomy and function. This effort is ongoing: Research connected the vagus nervus is astatine the forefront of neuroscience today.

The astir vigorous existent probe involves stimulating this nervus with energy to heighten cognition and memory, and for a smorgasbord of therapies for neurological and intelligence disorders, including migraine, tinnitus, obesity, pain, cause addiction, and more. But however could stimulating a azygous nervus perchance person specified wide-ranging intelligence and cognitive benefits? To recognize this, we indispensable recognize the vagus nervus itself.

The vagus nervus originates from 4 clusters of neurons successful the brain’s medulla, wherever the brainstem attaches to the spinal cord. Most nerves successful our assemblage subdivision straight from the spinal cord: They are threaded betwixt the vertebrae successful our backbone successful a bid of lateral bands to transportation accusation into and retired of the brain. But not the vagus. The vagus nervus is 1 of 13 nerves that permission the encephalon straight done peculiar holes successful the skull. From determination it sprouts thickets of branches that scope astir everyplace successful the caput and trunk. The vagus besides radiates from 2 large clusters of outpost neurons, called ganglia, stationed successful captious spots successful the body. For example, a ample clump of vagal neurons clings similar a vine to the carotid artery successful your neck. Its nervus fibers travel this web of humor vessels passim your assemblage to scope captious organs, from the bosom and lungs to the gut.