The following Mark's Daily Apple article was written by Mark Sisson, and is narrated by Tina Lehman.

What is the Vegas nerve, and how does it impact health, mood, and performance?

In recent years, I've regularly vouched for the gut as our long-abused secondary brain.

Given what most of us grew up learning in school, it can feel like a mammoth shift.

Science and philosophy have long revered the brain as seat of consciousness, even the seat of

humanity itself. But when it comes down to it, everything is interconnected. Our consciousness

extends well beyond the brain. How we feel and who we are encompasses a much more expansive

and intricate system than any of us learned in high school biology.

At the center of this paradigm revision is something called the Vegas nerve.

Vegas, as a word, it sounds a little off-putting. If someone called me a Vegas, I'd probably

be mildly offended. But the literary origins of this word are actually kind of mystical.

Vegas in Latin translates to wandering, and I'd struggle to find a more apt definition. The Vegas nerve

runs from the base of the brain through the neck and into the chest and stomach, reaching all the

way to the gut. It's regularly likened to a highway,

whereby vast multitudes of nerves are constantly driving to almost every organ in the body,

delivering vital messages and returning to the brain with their own little snippets of info.

Around 80% of these nerve fibers are directed outwards from the brain,

while the remaining 20% or so work in reverse to send commands back to the brain from the various corners of the body.

Unsurprisingly, the role of this wandering nerve highway is far-reaching.

Regulation of breathing, control of digestion and satiety, taste response, hearing, vocalization, even

blood circulation.

It's the quiet overachiever of your parasympathetic nervous system, and it's stirring

...