Andrew Huberman· PhD
Vagus Nerve & Sensory Pathways, Body & Brain
Loading…
The evidence is convergent. Multiple independent sources reach the same conclusion, the underlying mechanism is well-characterized, and even the field's most cautious voices treat it as worth doing.
Vagus Nerve & Sensory Pathways, Body & Brain
Every Sunday: the week’s new conflicts and verdict changes — and nothing else.
Native comments, Twitter mentions, and Reddit threads about this claim — surfaced together so the conversation isn't fragmented across platforms.
Bookmarking — the dossier-vs-overview split is the right call. Most of the time I want overview; sometimes I want receipts.
Would love a "what would change this verdict" RSS feed. Sign me up if it exists.
Now, why am I telling you all this stuff about sensory and motor? Because the vagus nerve is also unique in that it is both a sensory pathway and a motor pathway, and this is something that most discussions about the vagus nerve, in fact, I would say 99% of discussions about the vagus nerve that you see online, or when you hear about forgive me, in your yoga classes...
Now, this visual understanding, which hopefully is starting to take place in your mind, is extremely important to understand how 85% of the vagus nerve works. 85% of the vagus nerve works, by having these neurons that have axons in, say, the spleen, or around the lungs, or that innervate the heart, or that innervate any number of different organs in your body, and they collect sensory information about what's going on in each and every one of those organs.
These vagal neurons have another axon, that goes from their cell body, so they're what we call a bipolar neuron. They have another axon that extends up into the brain stem, and terminates in generally one of three different, what we call brain stem nuclei, which are just areas of the brain stem.
So basically, we can think of 85% of the vagus nerve, this huge superhighway, from the body to the brain, as being sensory. And when we talk about sensory, it's important that you understand that two types of sensory information are coming in through these wires, through these axons, and that are delivered to the brain, and in response to that sensory information as you'll soon learn, Your brain will change its levels of alertness. Sometimes it gets more alert. Sometimes it gets calmer. Sometimes it primes you to learn better. Sometimes it will turn on a fever, right? It will literally heat up your entire body, based on what those axons are sensing out in the periphery.
Different neurons or different nerve cells within the vagus nerve, for instance, are receiving or giving different types of information for different purposes.
The vagus nerve is a bundle of nerve fibers that comes out basically of your skull, out of the central nervous system and then sends fibers in to your heart, your gut, all sorts of visceral organs. That information is both apherrant and epherent.