People may advise you to listen to your gut instincts: now research suggests that your gut may have more impact on your thoughts than you ever realized. Scientists from the Karolinska Institute in Sweden and the Genome Institute of Singapore (…) reported that normal gut flora, the bacteria that inhabit our intestines, have a significant impact on brain development and subsequent adult behavior. (…)

Scientists have long recognized that the bacterial cells inhabiting our skin and gut outnumber human cells by ten-to-one. Indeed, Princeton University scientist Bonnie Bassler compared the approximately 30,000 human genes found in the average human to the more than 3 million bacterial genes inhabiting us, concluding that we are at most one percent human. We are only beginning to understand the sort of impact our bacterial passengers have on our daily lives.

{ Scientific American | Continue reading }

previously { The human mind has no knowledge of the body }

science | April 26th, 2011