Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life.

I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine.

Today we are going to discuss the gut and the brain.

And we are going to discuss how your gut influences your brain and your brain influences your gut.

As many of you probably know, there is a phenomenon called your gut feeling, which tends to be something that you seem to know without really knowing how you know it.

That's one version of the gut feeling.

The other is that you sent something in your actual gut in your body and that that somehow drives you to think or feel or act in a particular way.

Maybe to move toward something or to move away from something.

Now, today we aren't going to focus so much on the psychology of gut feelings but on the biology of gut feelings and how the gut and brain interact.

Because indeed your gut is communicating to your brain both directly by way of neurons, nerve cells, and indirectly by changing the chemistry of your body, which permeates up to your brain and impacts various aspects of brain function.

But it works in the other direction too. Your brain is influencing your entire gut. And when I say entire gut, I don't just mean your stomach, I mean your entire digestive tract.

Your brain is impacting things like how quickly your food is digesting, the chemistry of your gut.

If you happen to be stressed or not stressed, whether or not you are under a particular social challenge or whether or not you're particularly happy, will in fact adjust the chemistry of your gut.

And the chemistry of your gut in turn will change the way that your brain works.

I'll put all that together for you in the context of what we call the gut microbiome.

The gut microbiome are the trillions of little bacteria that live all the way along your digestive tract and that strongly impact the way that your entire body works at the level of metabolism, immune system, and brain function.

And of course we will discuss tools, things that you can do in order to maintain or improve your gut health.

Because as you'll also soon see, gut health is immensely important for all aspects of our well-being at the level of our brain, at the level of our body.

And there are simple, actionable things that we can all do in order to optimize our gut health in ways that optimize our overall nervous system functioning.

So we will be sure to review those today.

This episode also serves as a bit of a primer for our guest episode that's coming up next week with Dr. Justin Saunenberg from Stanford University.

Dr. Saunenberg is a world expert in the gut microbiome.

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