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Bewustzijn (Claxton (Hoofdstuk "Bodies: what are we made of…

- - - - The healthy, happy heart should have a constant beat. But Goldberger found that it doesn't.. Hormone levels in the blood of normal, healthy people also fluctuate much more than seems necesarry. So what is going on?
        The answer seems to lie in the fact that the heart, if it is to stay healthy, needs to keep talking to the rest of the body. It is not just doing its thing in isolation. The heart actually has its own little brain, which enables it to keep in constant communication with the lungs, the liver..
      - Other bodily systems also have brains of their own. The digestive system contains its own nervous system that enables it to regulate its responses to inputs of various kinds, even when it has been disconnected from the brain and the spinal cord. .. there are more than a billlion nerve cells in the small intestine alone. Many are connected with the activity of the gut itself, for example in maintaining healthy relations with the vast army of bacteria that have set up camp principially in the lower gut. But many are also in constant communication with the other organs and regions of the body, including the brain.
      - Because they can be readily dissected out of the body, they have tended to be treated in terms of their most evident functions, and understood through simple analogies: the lungs are like bellows; the heart is like a pump; the stomach is a food processors;.. Each is 'intelligent' in its own right. But when we come to think about the intelligence of the body as a whole, it is the way the different organs and elements communicate with each other - how the intelligent whole becomes more than the sum of its parts - that is of more interest.