Giulia Enders
Here is the full transcript of German author and scientist Giulia Enders’Talk: The Surprisingly Charming Science of Your Gut at TED conference. She is the author of the book Gut: The Inside Story of Our Body’s Most Underrated Organ.
TRANSCRIPT:
A few years ago, I always had this thing happening to me, especially at family gatherings like teas with aunts and uncles or something like this. When people come up to you, and they ask you, “So, what are you doing?” And I would have this magical one-word reply, which would make everybody happy: “Medicine. I’m going to be a doctor.” Very easy, that’s it, everybody’s happy and pleased.
And it could be so easy, but this effect really only lasts for 30 seconds with me, because that’s then the time when one of them would ask, “So, in what area of medicine? What specialty do you want to go into?” And then I would have to strip down in all honesty and just say, “OK, so I’m fascinated with the colon. It all started with the anus, and now it’s basically the whole intestinal tract.” And this would be the moment when the enthusiasm trickled, and it would maybe also get, like, awkwardly silent in the room, and I would think this was terribly sad, because I do believe our bowels are quite charming.
And while we’re in a time where many people are thinking about what new superfood smoothie to make or if gluten is maybe bad for them, actually, hardly anyone seems to care about the organ where this happens, the concrete anatomy and the mechanisms behind it. And sometimes it seems to me like we’re all trying to figure out this magic trick, but nobody’s checking out the magician, just because he has, like, an embarrassing hairstyle or something.
And actually, there are reasons science disliked the gut for a long time; I have to say this. So, it’s complex. There’s a lot of surface area — about 40 times the area of our skin.
Then, in such a tight pipe, there are so many immune cells that are being trained there. We have 100 trillion bacteria doing all sorts of things — producing little molecules. Then there’s about 20 different hormones, so we are on a very different level than our genitals, for example.
And the nervous system of our gut is so complex that when we cut out a piece, it’s independent enough that when we poke it, it mumbles back at us, friendly. But at least those reasons are also the reasons why it’s so fascinating and important.
It took me three steps to love the gut. So today, I invite you to follow me on those three steps. The very first was just looking at it and asking questions like, “How does it work?” and “Why does it have to look so weird for that sometimes?”
And it actually wasn’t me asking the first kind of these questions, but my roommate. After one heavy night of partying, he came into our shared-room kitchen, and he said, “Giulia, you study medicine. How does pooping work?” And I did study medicine but I had no idea, so I had to go up to my room and look it up in different books.
And I found something interesting, I thought, at that time. So it turns out, we don’t only have this outer sphincter, we also have an inner sphincter muscle. The outer sphincter we all know, we can control it, we know what’s going on there; the inner one, we really don’t.
So what happens is, when there are leftovers from digestion, they’re being delivered to the inner one first. This inner one will open in a reflex and let through a little bit for testing. So, there are sensory cells that will analyze what has been delivered: Is it gaseous or is it solid? And they will then send this information up to our brain, and this is the moment when our brain knows, “Oh, I have to go to the toilet.”
The brain will then do what it’s designed to do with its amazing consciousness. It will mediate with our surroundings, and it will say something like, “So, I checked. We are at this TEDx conference — ” Gaseous? Maybe, if you’re sitting on the sides, and you know you can pull it off silently. But solid — maybe later.
Since our outer sphincter and the brain is connected with nervous cells, they coordinate, cooperate, and they put it back in a waiting line for other times, like, for example, when we’re at home sitting on the couch, we have nothing better to do, we are free to go. Us humans are actually one of the very few animals that do this in such an advanced and clean way.
To be honest, I had some newfound respect for that nice, inner sphincter dude — not connected to nerves that care too much about the outer world or the time — just caring about me for once I thought that was nice. And I used to not be a great fan of public restrooms, but now I can go anywhere, because I consider it more when that inner muscle puts a suggestion on my daily agenda.
And also I learned something else, which was: looking closely at something I might have shied away from — maybe the weirdest part of myself — left me feeling more fearless, and also appreciating myself more. And I think this happens a lot of times when you look at the gut, actually. Like those funny rumbling noises that happen when you’re in a group of friends or at the office conference table, going, like, “Merrr, merrr”. This is not because we’re hungry. This is because our small intestine is actually a huge neat freak, and it takes the time in between digestion to clean everything up, resulting in those eight meters of gut — really, seven of them — being very clean and hardly smelling like anything. It will, to achieve this, create a strong muscular wave that moves everything forward that’s been leftover after digestion. This can sometimes create a sound, but doesn’t necessarily have to always.
So what we’re embarrassed of is really a sign of something keeping our insides fine and tidy. Or this weird, crooked shape of our stomach — a bit Quasimodo-ish. This actually makes us be able to put pressure on our belly without vomiting, like when we’re laughing and when we’re doing sports, because the pressure will go up and not so much sideways. This also creates this air bubble that’s usually always very visible in X-rays, for example, and can sometimes, with some people, when it gets too big, create discomfort or even some sensations of pain. But for most of the people, is just results that it’s far easier to burp when you’re laying on your left side instead of your right.
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