The Attitude Lounge with Kodwo Brumpon: Your body speaks. Do you listen?

“When the small toe is hurting, the whole self, swoops down to attend to it.” – African proverb

Recently, whilst driving, I was debating on which route to use to avoid traffic. I had a tightness in my stomach to use a particular one, but I ignored it and used the other option. Interestingly, I got stuck in traffic and it got me thinking about the Portuguese neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, whose somatic marker hypothesis has broadened our understanding of decision-making.

His argument is that our emotions are not cognitive afterthoughts but rather physiological events. So the changes in our heart rates, tightness in our guts, etc are signals to guide us, particularly in situations of complexity and uncertainty.

For centuries, poets and philosophers have written about bodies speaking to us. They have told us that when we feel fear in our chests, that is not metaphor. It is our autonomic nervous system flooding our bodies with adrenaline, our hearts preparing for fight or flight, or our ventromedial prefrontal cortex integrating that visceral data into a felt experience.

When intuition strikes as a sensation in our guts, it may reflect the enteric nervous system, sometimes called the ‘second brain,’ processing information through its millions of neurons and signalling upward before conscious thought catches up.

Sadly, because many of us have been living under the tyranny of the brain, we treat these signals from the body as unimportant, and in many cases, we label them as our emotions. For too long, our culture has taught us to worship the brain as the CEO of the human experience.

We have been trained to live in our heads, so we treat our intellect as the pilot and the body as a vehicle for the mind, a mere container. But growing research now shows that the mind and the body are not separate systems, with the intellect dictating what should be done. Rather, they are parts of the same system.

This means, many of us have been operating under a ghostly illusion. Academics call it the Cartesian dualism, formulated by René Descartes, the French philosopher, who famously declared, “I think, therefore I am.” He argued that the mind was an immaterial, yet thinking substance. And the body was a material, and extended substance of the mind.

They are fundamentally distinct yet interact. To this end, he split reality into mental and physical substances, famously arguing the mind can exist without the body. His view did not just seep into our everyday lives, but even our everyday language. That is why many of us can say, “My body is tired, but my mind wants to keep going.” We illuminate the mind over everything else. This metaphor is not just a little wrong, but catastrophically wrong.

Now we know the body is not a passive receiver of commands from the mind, but an active participant in our cognition. Your gut feelings are literally gut feelings, but it is your body processing information at speed that even when the mind cannot name it. Yes, it is not logical reasoning, but a felt sense to alert you on what to do in a particular situation, if you pay attention to it. The science now says our bodies scream more truth than scepticism might suggest.

For example, studies now confirm that when you feel a tightness in your chest, you are experiencing fear. How does this happen? The science say that fear activates the sympathetic nervous system, triggering tachycardia and thoracic constriction as the body prepares for threat.

Neuroimaging studies consistently show that fear processing involves the amygdala, which projects to autonomic centres controlling cardiovascular response, thus the tightening in our chests. In other words, you do not feel fear and then your heart races.

Your heart races, your stomach clenches, your throat dries, and then your brain labels that pattern fear. The feeling is the pattern. There is no separate mind watching the body. The mind is the brain’s story about what the body is doing.

The radical conclusion is that there is no mind and body, but a body that thinks. Your intellectual fortitude, that is your ability to reason, to plan, to write a business plan or solve a differential equation, is not piloting the body as a vehicle.

Rather, they are specific set of processes that emerge from the gut, the heart, the immune cells, the muscles, and the skull-bound brain, all acting as one. So, when you feel truth in your bones, that is not a metaphor. It is your body talking to you. Your body is you, and until you learn to listen not as an interpreter but as a whole, integrated self, you will remain fractured, living in the illusion that your head is the king and the rest of your body is just transport…

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