Anyone who is interested in communications and the brain should spend a little time with Heribert Watzke, food scientist and researcher into what he calls the little or lower brain.  It turns out that you’ve got 100 million neurons – 20 different varieties  — in your gut, connected to the emotional centers in your bigger or upper brain, the one in your head.  Those neurons are mostly concerned with keeping you alive and fed, but they are also responsible for your ‘gut feel’ – that sense you have in your stomach when things are right or wrong. 

So you literally do think with your gut – and paying attention to that busy little brain down there is a good first step to being able to think with your whole brain.  If you can think with your whole brain, you can communicate with your whole brain, and greatly increase your presence and awareness with everyone and everything around you. 

The explosion of brain research in the last decade or so is revealing two extraordinary things about our huge, powerful, and largely unconscious minds.  First is that neurons are incredibly specialized.  Second is that they are surprisingly plastic.  That is, they can learn to do new things when the old roles are no longer useful. 

That means that we can almost certainly improve upon our current rather limited abilities to communicate with each other.  Increased awareness of our non-verbal signals in communications, to take only one example, brings with it a huge increase in our ability to read others. 

We are just beginning to understand the role that our brains play in communications, not to mention the rest of our bodies.  Watzke’s research is a step toward a greater understanding.  Watzke has an accent, and it takes a little patience to follow him, but the result is well worth the effort.