Scientists used a vibrating capsule to assess people’s gut sensitivities and understand how the brain interprets these signals

My gut instinct tells me that the approach taken seems to be a little primitive, but the results are interesting!

"Our organs constantly communicate a multitude of complex signals to the brain to keep the body functioning. Scientists have been puzzled by how the brain interprets and controls those signals since interoception, the process of sensing signals from the internal organs, is still poorly understood. In a study published in Nature Communications, researchers from the Laureate Institute for Brain Research (LIBR) reported a novel tool for measuring the gut-brain connection. Such a tool could help researchers identify response patterns in healthy and diseased populations. ..."

From the abstract:

"Understanding the neural processes governing the human gut-brain connection has been challenging due to the inaccessibility of the body’s interior. Here, we investigated neural responses to gastrointestinal sensation using a minimally invasive mechanosensory probe by quantifying brain, stomach, and perceptual responses following the ingestion of a vibrating capsule. Participants successfully perceived capsule stimulation under two vibration conditions (normal and enhanced), as evidenced by above chance accuracy scores. Perceptual accuracy improved significantly during the enhanced relative to normal stimulation, which was associated with faster stimulation detection and reduced reaction time variability. Capsule stimulation induced late neural responses in parieto-occipital electrodes near the midline. Moreover, these ‘gastric evoked potentials’ showed intensity-dependent increases in amplitude and were significantly correlated with perceptual accuracy. Our results replicated in a separate experiment, and abdominal X-ray imaging localized most capsule stimulations to the gastroduodenal segments. Combined with our prior observation that a Bayesian model is capable of estimating computational parameters of gut-brain mechanosensation, these findings highlight a unique form of enterically-focused sensory monitoring within the human brain, with implications for understanding gut feelings and gut-brain interactions in healthy and clinical populations."

Scientists used a vibrating capsule to assess people’s gut sensitivities and understand how the brain interprets these signals.   | The Scientist Magazine® Scientists used a vibrating capsule to assess people’s gut sensitivities and understand how the brain interprets these signals.  

Parieto-occipital ERP indicators of gut mechanosensation in humans (open access)

Fig. 2: Parieto-occipital event-related potential (ERP) indicators of gut sensation during vibratory gut stimulation and their association with perceptual accuracy measures during normal and enhanced stimulation in n = 40 biologically independent samples.