Ever have a “gut feeling”? Okay, stupid question.
Most people have, right? In fact, statistics show that
approximately fifty percent of humans have experienced a gut
feeling about something that later came true. With statistics
like that, you'd think science would have long been hankering to
understand exactly what is going on in the human stomach. Well,
recently, at least, there are a few researchers who are
beginning to suspect that everything might not be as it seems
beneath the belt. Indeed, parapsychologist Dean Radin, author of
The Conscious Universe, is committed to finding out if
the gut may in fact have “perception intelligence,”
an intelligence that would explain all of those gut feelings.
Say that again? The gut is intelligent? Okay, it might not get
you into MIT, but it does appear that the mind has a rival, or
at least a smaller sibling. According to Radin, research results
support growing evidence that humans do have more than one
brain—that there is a “dense place of
neurons,” down below, that points to the existence of a
“belly brain.” And the belly brain, as you might
imagine, seems to have responses and “feelings” that
are all its own. In fact, it might sometimes have a different
take on things than big brother upstairs. Who would have guessed
so much could be going on between meals?
Radin's research has also shown some surprising
evidence of just how perceptive the belly brain can be. In an
experiment at the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) with
twenty-six pairs of people, Radin showed one person, the
“sender,” eight minutes of video images, split into
four segments, each according to their emotional
content—happy, angry, sad, neutral (no images). Sixty feet
away, a second participant, the “receiver,” was
locked in a sealed room with electrodes monitoring heart, skin,
and stomach muscles. Then the sender consciously tried to send
the images to the receiver. The results have been persuasive.
IONS research director Marilyn Schlitz says, “We are
seeing that the gut is a very sensitive organ, so even if you
are in another room, my gut can sense when you
see a particularly evocative image and respond emotionally.
Therefore, your state can actually influence my state.”
Impressive. Not only is our belly brain sensitive, it appears to
be psychic to boot.
Exciting as these results are in providing evidence
of psychic phenomena between humans, they may also end up
proving our good old common sense. During Radin's experiments,
the largest effect on the receiver has been when the sender is
being shown images of food. All that sensitivity, all that
psychic power, and what does the belly brain really care about?
Surprise, surprise . . lunch.