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One Heart One Mind

Episode 14: A Tour of the Human Brain(s)

One Heart One Mind

Thomas McConkie

Meditation, Spirituality, Mindfulness, Contemplation, Psychology, Buddhism, Development, Thomasmcconkie, Religion & Spirituality

5632 Ratings

🗓️ 4 October 2018

⏱️ 20 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

If you are under the impression that the human body has precisely one brain, you are not alone. Modern Western culture has been studiously ignoring our other two brains for hundreds of years. Take a tour through your many brains in this episode and reacquaint yourself with all you forgot you knew!

Transcript

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0:00.0

Hello and welcome to another episode of Mindfulness Plus. I'm your host Thomas McConkey. Thank you for downloading us today. Okay, interesting show. I want to share a passage from a book written by Frederick Luloo called Reinventing Organizations. This is a book about how human beings get together in groups and perform tasks and how consciousness

0:42.7

affects that work.

0:45.4

If you're into consciousness and you know who you are, this is a good book for you.

0:51.1

But actually, the passage I'm going to read has less to do with how humans organize themselves

0:56.6

and more to do with the human brains. That's right, human brains. I will read. Lelu starts by asking the

1:06.4

reader, how many brains do you think human beings have? I'll give you a moment for this. You think you know it?

1:17.9

You know it's a trick question. It can't be one. Otherwise, I wouldn't have asked. Okay,

1:22.4

Frederick Lelieu writes, our current knowledge is that we have three brains. There is, of course, the massive brain

1:28.8

in our head, then there is a small brain in our heart and another in our gut. The last two are

1:35.8

comparatively much smaller, but they are fully autonomous nervous systems nevertheless. So he's

1:43.1

defining a brain as a fully autonomous nervous system and saying

1:46.6

we have three, count them, three brains. He goes on to write, here's where it gets interesting.

1:52.8

The brain and the heart and the one in the gut were discovered only recently. Even though from a

1:57.8

technological point of view, they could have been identified long ago.

2:01.6

All it takes to see them is a corpse, a knife, and a basic microscope.

2:06.6

Actually, the brain and the gut was discovered long ago in the 1860s

2:11.6

by a German doctor named Orbach.

2:14.6

His discovery was further refined by two English colleagues, Bayliss and Starling.

2:19.8

And then something extraordinary happened. Medical circles somehow forgot about the brain and the

2:25.7

gut. For a century, they completely lost sight of it. It was rediscovered only in the late

2:31.4

1990s by Michael Gerson, an American neuroscientist along with others.

2:37.0

Okay. So you get the basic idea. We have three brains. In Western science, we have only

...

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