alt.hn

2/16/2026 at 6:54:37 PM

Neurons outside the brain

 https://essays.debugyourpain.com/p/you-are-not-just-your-brain

by yichab0d

2/17/2026 at 12:40:16 AM

> I find it more plausible that the feeling of speaking from the gut is akin to allowing that center of intelligence coordinate the rest of our body.

The author thinks that mentally poking the bodymap created by the brain can cause changes in the actual processing. I wouldn't believe this without proofs other than introspection(1). Technically, the vagus nerve can carry enough information to produce speech (the gut should be articulate, of course), but it certainly nowhere near the corpus callosum or the spinal cord. I doubt that it can allow to "coordinate the rest of our body".

(1) As far as know conscious manipulation of the heart rate is achieved by changing respiratory patterns, not thru direct control of the signals that the brain sends there.

by red75prime

2/17/2026 at 1:39:00 AM

> In several cases, memories of the old heart’s host seem to become accessible to the recipient ^2.

That does not seem at all to be what citation 2 is saying.

by CephalopodMD

2/17/2026 at 2:33:12 AM

There's a case cited in that paper which does suggest something similar:

> A report in the lay literature describes the case of Claire Sylvia who reported changes in her personality, preferences, and behaviors following a heart and lung transplant at Yale-New Haven hospital in 1988. Following surgery, Sylvia developed a new taste for green peppers and chicken nuggets, foods she previously disliked. As soon as she was released from the hospital, she promptly headed to a Kentucky Fried Chicken to order chicken nuggets. She later met her donor’s family and inquired about his affinity for green peppers. Their response was, “Are you kidding? He loved them… But what he really loved was chicken nuggets” (p. 184, [9]). Sylvia later discovered that at the time of her donor’s death in a motorcycle accident, a container of chicken nuggets was found under his jacket [9].

I haven't read the whole thing, maybe there's something more relevant as well. That report isn't really about accessing the previous persons "memories" but at least claims she adopted a part of their personality. I'd be skeptical about its accuracy without more such reports, however.

by m4x

2/16/2026 at 9:33:05 PM

By the same logic, you could ask "what part of a computer 'is' the computer? The CPU? The hard drive? The RAM? The TPM? The power supply? The sum of all peripherals? Etc"

You could ask all kinds of philosophical questions about this, but at the end of the day, there are parts that are easily replaceable and parts that are harder if you want to preserve the identity of a particular machine.

E.g. while RAM, CPU, GPU, power supply etc are all essential for running a PC, you can also swap them out without many problems. In contrast, the data on the hard drives or the TPM might be hard or impossible to restore.

In the same way, I'd still see the brain as the center of the self, because so much cognitive information is stored there.

by xg15

2/16/2026 at 11:49:48 PM

A modern computer looks more like a worm that believes it is self-aware.

There are so many SoC subsystems in a computer that the CPU only thinks it knows what's going on and can be catastrophically wrong about it in some cases. Brian Cantrill has a pretty good rant about it in one of the recent Oxide videos.

by hinkley

2/16/2026 at 10:55:38 PM

What really called my attention is the personality change after transplants. I am not super sure about how good the science is.

Also. We are very neuro-centric, but the system also had all type of hormones and other chemical messages affecting it.

by thuridas

2/17/2026 at 12:47:00 AM

There's a short science book called Hidden Guests, it talks about why women have the potential to end up with microchimeric "incursions" from sexual partners and their own fetuses, fetuses can have microchimerism with each other (not just twins but prior fetuses from same mother) and fetal cells crossing into the mother and towards the end talks about the resemblance between this and transplants( someone else's cells thriving in one's body). So if organ transplants can potentially have that effect, it's already happening to sexually active women, with the caveat that for the fetal cells it wouldn't have much formed personality, yet.

by stevenwoo

2/16/2026 at 8:56:33 PM

>but it is also possible to live in more harmonious relation between the head, heart, and gut — all the intelligence centers.

Aren't those the supposed locations of the "chakras"?

by krackers

2/16/2026 at 11:42:23 PM

I don't know about chakras, but 'Chi' followed imaginary conduits through the connective tissue that... turned out actually there are conduits through connective tissue for lymph to move. They're just really really tricky to image so we didn't know about them until about ten years ago.

I took a Yoga class years ago (my tight wrists made it very unpleasant) and on the last day of class the instructor pulled out some obscure stuff and had us do some energy work, which I was sure was going to be complete bollocks. And about five minutes before the end of the class I experienced feelings that were identical to Flow state (that slightly buzzy feeling when you're in the grove and just crushing a task.) I recall thinking, "Oh this is potentially addictive. I'm glad this is the last class."

I'm betting that 10-20% of the mysticism stuff eventually turns out to be true and the rest is speculation built on top of correlation with those objectively true bits. Science eventually gets around to studying coincidences. Medicine tends to be more arrogant and dismissive of anything they can't measure, for far longer than is strictly healthy.

by hinkley

2/16/2026 at 10:50:34 PM

Sort of, but it generally goes more like: base/perineum, genitals, navel, heart, throat, forehead, and then one at the top of the head or just above. The Sefer Yetzirah, however, references specifically "Head, Belly, and Chest" as the three loci of the human body. (§ 3.4-5)

by cjameskeller

2/16/2026 at 11:46:33 PM

There's a healthy debate about whether the dantien is below the navel being mistranslated as near the pubic bone versus three inches toward your spine, either in your viscera or in the lowest layers of muscle in your abdominal wall.

by hinkley

2/16/2026 at 9:12:32 PM

Gurdjieff was literally, physically correct: we are three-brained beings.

by bitwize

2/16/2026 at 10:34:09 PM

I'm in the middle of reading "All and Everything" and had the exact same thought!

by SoleilAbsolu

2/16/2026 at 11:02:11 PM

Link?

by baxtr

2/16/2026 at 9:23:50 PM

A very powerful meditation practice is called self-inquiry. One version of it is after you calm your mind down (say with breath meditation) you look for where u think u r. Wherever that is, ask yourself if that’s where u r, what is looking at it? Keep going, don’t intellectualize it, and keep looking.

by siavosh

2/16/2026 at 6:54:37 PM

"[i]f you look closely at our nervous system, you’ll see that there are neuronal clusters distributed throughout the body. Human computation is better understood as distributed than centralized."

by yichab0d

2/16/2026 at 9:54:32 PM

It's kind of like having a computer at the home, but tens of thousands of computers at a data center. Things like reflexes can happen quickly because you don't have to go all the way to the brain, but your arm isn't going to be adding 2+2 by itself.

by pixl97

2/16/2026 at 9:35:14 PM

Interesting article, Douglas Hofstadter's book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_a_Strange_Loop takes it a step further and says that parts of our consciousness/soul lives outside of ourselves and in the minds and brains of others. Since one can generally guess how person you know would respond in a given situation, such as how a spouse might be able to know exactly what their spouse would say/do, and in that sense our "souls" are distributed. It's a bit more nuanced than that, but I think that gets the point across of how parts of ourselves live in others.

by nlarion

2/17/2026 at 2:29:43 AM

An alternate theory is that we develop models of other people’s behavior to predict their actions, and then we apply a form of those models to ourselves, which becomes what we think of as self-awareness. But the models are just models, they aren’t the mind, which is why our conscious self often has trouble controlling, or even predicting our own behaviour.

by mr_toad

2/16/2026 at 10:09:06 PM

I think that is Hofstadter grieving his wife, and reflecting on how we embed models or predictions of others in our own neural networks, more than anything else.

We build models of the world in order to predict it.

But I guess you could say other people are objectively shaping the neurons in our brains. But so is that fiddly printer tray or whatever, to a small extent.

by kpil

2/16/2026 at 10:44:05 PM

Hey that printer tray is a bit of someone's soul too. Many people's work and decisions, even a bit of the nature of our whole society is recorded in those flimsy things. It may or may not be comforting that most of what we contribute to the world will ultimately be considered mundane, even and perhaps especially if it's successful.

by conartist6

2/16/2026 at 11:22:00 PM

Makes sense. The boundary we draw around a group of neurons that we call "self" is just arbitrary.

by amelius