Pretty Smart for an Intestine! By Mrs Vera West

     I only guessed that this was true following the folk wisdom of “gut feelings,” but your intestines have an intelligence all of their own, known as the enteric nervous system, and it may have evolved in animals before the central nervous system, assuming that evolution really did occur:
  https://www.livescience.com/62683-colon-brain-neuron-firing-pattern-detected.html?utm_source=ls-newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20180531-ls

“The enteric nervous system (ENS) contains millions of neurons essential for organization of behavior of the intestine,” wrote the team of researchers from Australia who observed the so-called second brain hard at work using a combination of high-precision neuronal imaging techniques. When the researchers stimulated isolated mouse colons with mild electric shocks, they saw “a novel pattern of rhythmic coordinated neuronal firing” that corresponded directly to muscle movements in nearby sections of the large intestine. These rhythmic, synchronized blasts of neuron activity likely help to stimulate specific sections of intestinal muscles at a standard rate, the researchers wrote. This ensures that colonic muscle contractions — also known as “colonic migrating motor complexes” — keep fecal matter moving in the right direction (out of the body, that is), and at a steady pace. “This revealed that activity in the ENS can temporally coordinate [muscle] activity over significant distances along the length of [the] colon,” the team wrote. According to the researchers, similar synchronized neuron routines are also common in the early stages of brain development. This could mean that the pattern they identified in the colon is a “primordial property” held over from the early stages of the enteric nervous system’s evolution.”

     A more recent article discusses studies in rats which indicates that the brain/gut link may be even stronger, especially regarding the formation of memories:
  https://www.livescience.com/62825-brain-gut-connection-helps-form-memories.html?utm_source=ls-newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20180615-ls

“The gut and the brain mainly communicate through the vagus nerve, the body’s longest nerve. In the new study, the researchers wanted to test what would happen in rats if parts of this nerve were cut so that it could no longer send signals from the gut to the brain. Because this gut-brain axis is typically engaged only when an animal is eating, the researchers thought that this function could serve animals in remembering where good food was in their environment. This could be important for the animals to “remember where they are in space, so that they could find that food again,” Kanoski told Live Science. Kanoski and his team set up several tasks that challenged the rats to find and remember either locations or objects in the space around them. In one experiment, for example, the researchers shone a bright light that would be annoying enough to prompt a rat to search for an escape.

With an intact vagus nerve, the rats were able to remember where the location was if they’d previously found it and gone there. But if the gut-brain connection was surgically altered, the rats had trouble remembering where an escape location was, even though they had previously been there, the researchers found. Similarly, when the scientists had the rats try to find objects that the animals had previously located, they had difficulty if their vagus nerve was blocked from sending signals. When the researchers looked at the brains of the rats that had altered vagus nerves, they found that there was decreased activity in the hippocampus, an area of the brain involved with specific types of memory. That includes helping the animal figure out its own position in space and that of other rats and objects. Specifically, the rats had decreased numbers of several proteins in the hippocampus that are responsible for creating new neurons and connections between neurons. These proteins therefore also play a role in forming memories.”

     In short, an increasing amount of scientific research is showing that the bodies of animals are not composed of isolated biological atoms, slammed together, but are intrinsically related systems where each part has essential relationships with the rest of the whole organism. Holist “organicist’ philosophers such as Lord Alfred North whitehead, got it right:
  https://www.iep.utm.edu/whitehed/ 
  https://www.scribd.com/document/230169966/Whitehead-Physicology