Thanks to Neuroscience News for the picture
A post about bacteria that live in your brain. It’s already there, but is it really an uninvited guest?
Assistant Professor in Biomedical Studies at Dublin City University, Janosch Heller, has recently published his fascinating research findings in The Conversation.
His paper, yet to be peer-reviewed, follows earlier research in 2013 in which the writers determined that ‘body sites previously presumed to be sterile in healthy humans, such as the vascular endothelium, have been shown to be colonized (by bacteria) without apparent signs of disease’…
Then they went on to describe what they had found in the brain.
‘all examined human brains contained bacterially-expressed RNA and associated products together with a predominance of α-proteobacteria, regardless of the patients’ immune status and concurrent diseases. Moreover, a similar bacterial population was observed in the brains of non-human primates.
Heller’s research goes further: ‘the human brain microbiome was found to be a subset (about 20%) of the gut microbiome. Although more bacteria were found in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s, the researchers were not able to find a pattern of bacteria that were only found in diseased brains.’
The upshot of this seems that we may have a bank of working bacteria in our brain. We know that bacteria have memory and can communicate. Even bacteria can remember their past: Escherichia coli bacteria form their own kind of memories of exposure to nutrients, and pass these memories down to future generations, which can help them evade antibiotics.
Might bacteria’s clever chemical signalling take us ever ever closer to understanding our human sentience and consciousness? The science on this falls short. Unlike armchair philosophers, scientific researchers tend to be disadvantaged by their own science – being funded by medical research grants; and unless they are Arthur Reber: The First Minds; or Nicholas Money: The Selfish Ape: Human Nature and our Path to Extinction, scientists tend to be fixated on the supremacy of homo sapiens over all other life-forms.
Previously, my posts on the microbiome have focused on our gut biome. In my last post here I examined the existence of independent neural memory and activity in the spine. Within two months of that post we are informed that bacteria residing in our brain seems to be there not by accident or mishap.
Perhaps this further points to the possibility that we are the servants or agents of our microbiome. Maybe, by adjusting our DNA, it is bacteria that determine our evolution to meet their needs? Might they be the conductors of our human orchestra?
It is said that, during the human dying process, our body seeks neither hydration nor nutrition. In effect, signals from the microbiome that would be processed by our brain as a demand for sustenance are not sent/received. Instead, the body’s bacteria moves to autolysis. We should consider whether our microbiome is key, not just for our life, but our death.
Perhaps our microbiome knows much more about us than we do? After all, we inherit it at birth and it appears to herald our death. Maybe these are the best reasons to take care of it whilst we can?
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