WHY DO WE FEEL ‘BUTTERFLIES IN THE STOMACH’?

According to some studies, our ‘second brain’ is responsible.

American scientists have shown that the 100 million cells that surround the digestive tract function as a kind of secondary abdominal brain, dedicated to controlling a large number of reactions of our body in correspondence with psychic processes. Its information influences, through a series of nerve transmissions, the decisions made by the ‘thinking’ brain.

According to these studies, feelings and intuitions rise ‘from the gut’, along with many other signals from the belly, such as nausea, vomiting and pain. In the brain, the emotional memory collects and stores all this visceral information.

For example, the unpleasant sensations aroused by a dangerous situation (such as the belly pain we feel before an imminent examination when we have not studied), such as the tingling caused by the closeness of the desired subject or the revolution that is unleashed in our guts when we are approached by a subject we do not want to treat.

Every time we see ourselves in a situation we have lived before, our feelings and our behavior are determined by the unconscious data extracted from the gigantic catalogue of emotion. In this memory bank, the sensation of having butterflies in the epigastrium is linked to falling in love or ‘love at first sight’.