Dr. Tabatha Barber explains how the vagus nerve creates a two-way communication highway between your gut and brain. When this pathway breaks down, you might struggle to find words or think clearly. Surgeons once routinely severed this nerve in heart patients, not realizing they were cutting off critical signals about inflammation.
It can show up as trouble with word finding, and I think for a lot of people, they don't understand this bidirectional relationship between the gut and the brain. The vagus nerve, which is a very important nerve, and I chuckle about this now, although I don't chuckle like at the expense of a patient, but I worked with a lot of cardiovascular surgery patients in cardiology who had their vagus nerve severed, and I literally cringe thinking that we didn't think that was a big deal 20 years ago, but now we know so much more. But how important that communication pathway between the gut and the brain is in terms of transference of information, transference of inflammation, depending on what's going on.
