By Miriam Frankel and Matt Warren, Photo: Getty Images, British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), January 22, 2023
Your gut is a bustling and thriving alien colony. They number in their trillions and include thousands of different species. Many of these microorganisms, including bacteria, archaea and eukarya, were here long before humans, have evolved alongside us and now outnumber our own cells many times over. Indeed, as John Cryan, a professor of anatomy and neuroscience at University College Cork, rather strikingly put it in a TEDx talk: "When you go to the bathroom and shed some of these microbes, just think: you are becoming more human."
Collectively, these microbial legions are known as the "microbiota" – and they play a well-established role in maintaining our physical health, from digestion and metabolism to immunity. They also produce vital compounds the human body is incapable of manufacturing on its own.
But what if they also had a hotline to our minds? In our new book, Are You Thinking Clearly? 29 Reasons You Aren't And What To Do About It, we explore the dozens of internal and external factors that affect and manipulate the way we think, from genetics, personality and bias to technology, advertising and language. And it turns out the microbes that call our bodies their home can have a surprising amount of control over our brains.
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