Most studies of “consciousness” focus on the brain (usually the human brain), as though the brain were a separate and distinct organ unto itself.
Recent findings in systems biology reinforce a simple yet profound reality: the human body is not a hierarchy in which the brain issues commands to passive organs.
It is a densely interconnected network in which tissues, organs, immune cells, hormones, and neural circuits continuously exchange signals.
Your brain and body are a unified one.
Your liver alters your brain chemistry through metabolic signals; your gut microbiome influences your mood and cognition; your immune responses reshape your neural activity; your stress hormones modify your cardiovascular and digestive functions.
Brain/body communication is multidirectional and persistent. No organ operates in isolation. Your brain is a highly complex integrative node within this network, and it is not separate from it.
Your brain is part of a continuous system where every element influences and is influenced by the whole.
What sets your brain apart is its complexity and capacity for information processing, rather than its separation from the common structure of integrated responses.
When scientists discuss consciousness, they often focus on the brain because it is a part of an animal that closely resembles our own and that communicates most effectively with us.
Here are some excerpts from an article in the February 7-13 issue of New Scientist magazine that demonstrate the concept of “your whole body is a brain.”
The secret signals our organs send to repair tissues and slow ageing
Your organs are constantly talking to each other in ways we’re only beginning to understand. By Claire Ainsworth, 2 February 2026
Biologist Chunyi Li, who has long studied deer in north-east China, noticed something odd that happened when the animals regrew their antlers each year. This regrowth coincided with healthier-looking animals that showed much faster healing of their wounds and less scarring, leading him to suspect that the regenerating antlers somehow promoted regeneration in the wider body.
Li’s hunch was confirmed last year when he and his colleagues at Changchun Sci-Tech University in Jilin, China, found that the growing antlers release messages that tell other parts of the body to shift into regenerative wound-healing mode – evidence of a hitherto-hidden communication network that connects distant organs.
In recent years, researchers have discovered a web of chatter among the human body’s organs and tissues, even those we once thought were dull and inert. We now know that your fat and brain tissue converse to influence the speed at which you age, your skeleton sends information packets to the pancreas to control metabolism, and much more.
By tapping into these communication networks, we may be able to develop radical new ways to boost our health and slow ageing – and some clinical trials of this approach are already underway.
Crosstalk between organs
These ongoing findings are emerging from the new field of inter-organ communication, which is building on the old physiological idea that organs function together as a greater whole.
We have long known that information is transmitted around the body via nerve networks and hormones, but what is extraordinary about these latest discoveries is the growing diversity of ways in which organs and tissues “talk” to each other to coordinate their action.
“I think we’ll suddenly see that organs are communicating in ways we didn’t know about,” says Irene Miguel-Aliaga at the Crick Institute in London.
Researchers discovered that fat fat, once seen as passive storage tissue, is now thought of as a dynamic, vital organ.
Since then, it has emerged that pretty much every organ or tissue is chipping in.
We now know that bone functions as a sophisticated “endocrine” organ, secreting a hormone called osteocalcin that influences metabolism, male fertility and exercise performance. It even reaches the brain, where it reduces anxiety, improves spatial memory and enhances cognition.
The skeleton has its fingers in so many pies because the energetic cost of running it is exorbitant. This is why it has such a powerful influence on so many other organs and tissues. And, importantly, other organs talk back.
One such organ is fat, which talks to bone via leptin. Back in 2002, it was discovered that fat sends signals to the brain, which responds in part by increasing nerve activity in the sympathetic nervous system, whose tendrils reach many organs, including bone.
There, its nerve endings send signals to osteoblasts, reducing bone building and increasing bone destruction. This means that leptin signals from fat are a major regulator of bone mass.
Osteoporosis isn’t the only condition that could benefit from intervening in inter-organ signalling: ageing itself could be a target.
This springs from the surprising discovery in 2013 that a small region of the brain known as the hypothalamus appears to integrate conversations from multiple organs, and so acts as a high-order controller of ageing and, in turn, longevity.
“This is the first demonstration in mammals that manipulation of specific neurons really delays ageing and extends lifespan. Moreover, the study concluded that “these findings clearly demonstrate the importance of the inter-tissue communication… in mammalian aging and longevity control”.
Let’s pause to review the highlighted words: signals, messages, tell, web of chatter, communication network, crosstalk, and conversations. These terms describe your brain and have now become applicable to every organ in your body.
Other organs, including skeletal muscle and the small intestine, also converse with the hypothalamus. For instance, in unpublished work, Imai and his colleagues have identified the hormone used by skeletal muscle to communicate with this brain region.
Each of these communication pathways operates independently but synergistically to maintain the overall system’s robustness, which we can tap into in turn.
This would involve interventions to strengthen each of these brain-organ conversations simultaneously “as an anti-ageing preventative measure”, he says. “We are working to translate this idea to humans.”
To do this, we need to fully understand all the different communication systems that organs use to send messages around the body.
We now know that organs use a bewildering smorgasbord of languages to communicate, not just the well-known routes of hormones and nerve action.
These include metabolites, small molecules carrying information about energy status and cellular health, and new signaling molecules, such as those produced when skeletal muscles contract that act on many other tissues, including the brain and liver.
New types of these messengers are constantly being uncovered, thanks to advances in analytical technologies.
A study from November last year found that cancer cells manipulate inter-organ signaling — in this case, via nerves — to undermine the immune response against them.
New varieties of extracellular vesicles (EVs} are continually being unearthed, such as the discovery last year of particularly massive ones dubbed “blebbisomes”, which function as mobile communication centres.
At the opposite end of the spectrum are the tiny exomeres and supemeres, both discovered in 2021, which aren’t encased in membrane. Plus, there are oncosomes, produced by cancer cells. All are emerging as important players in health and disease.
Heart cells and a type of cell from connective tissue called a fibroblast communicate via EVs to limit the amount of scarring in heart failure.
Obesity can communicate with multiple organs, crossing the blood-brain barrier to talk to immune cells in the brain called microglia, which are involved in brain inflammation.
Fat also talks to the liver via EVs, which are emerging as an important factor in a form of liver disease caused by metabolic dysfunction. And fat-derived EVs also seem to play a role in the development of heart arrhythmias in obesity.
Recent studies also show that EVs are implicated in neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s, transporting microRNAs and pathological proteins from the brain to peripheral organs.
We are even finding that these once-mysterious blobs play a pivotal role in ageing. A key factor in ageing is the accumulation of senescent, or “zombie”, cells, which promote inflammation and damage in tissue, leading to age-related decline.
Senescent cells release EVs that, like sparks from a wildfire, trigger senescence in other cells, even in distant organs. Senescent cells in the lungs of people with chronic lung disease emit EVs that trigger senescence in distant blood vessels.
No organ is an island. “You really cannot think of [diseases of these organs] as siloed. For example, the leading type of heart failure was long believed to concern the heart only.
But the more you look at it, it’s a systemic disease. It has obesity, it has liver dysfunction, it has kidney dysfunction, it even has dementia.
Think of the following as a parallel to the multitude of human languages:
This all raises the question of why our organs need to speak so many different languages.
One possibility is that the location of the conversation matters. “Maybe there’s a spatial logic to this communication, and then for that reason it matters what organ is next to what organ,” says Miguel-Aliaga.
Location matters regarding human languages. French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, and Catalan all derive from Latin spoken in Rome.
Accents, too, are location phenomena. Think of the U.S. Southern accent, the Midwest accent, the New York and New Jersey accents. Your accent provides a clue as to the location of your upbringing.
In 2024, she and her team found that, in fruit flies, adjacent organs influence each other’s shape by secreting specific substances, and that changing their geometry can make them function differently.
One reason why this kind of communication system might be useful is that it offers yet more versatility in targeting particular messages to specific “audiences” of tissues and organs.
Some signals, such as conventional hormones, are broadcast body-wide like a national radio show. Others could be locally confined, with organs whispering to each other like next-door neighbours over a garden fence.
While we don’t yet know for sure why so many languages are needed, their existence highlights the complexity of coordinating a collection of organs in space and time into a whole organism.
And it suggests that, while we thought we already knew everything about what our organs do, they are each likely to have a range of extra functions that we haven’t yet discovered.
Restoring good communication – local, organ-wide and body-wide – could also help us understand more about regeneration and perhaps how to make humans better at it.
Experiments linking the blood systems of both young and old mice have revealed the presence of signals that can rejuvenate some tissues and extend lifespan.
And studies of animals that excel at regeneration are starting to show that, in many cases, it is a process involving coordinated responses from different tissues and organs, even those remote from the injury.
Both local conversations between neighbouring tissues and body-wide communication are involved in this spectacular act of regeneration.
Now that we are learning to listen, we can find ways to turn their conversation to our advantage.
Your brain is just one of many organs, all functioning together as a system. And just as the entire system is “conscious,” so is each part of the system — brain, liver, kidneys, et al — each conscious in its own right.
Consciousness, that is, stimulus —>response or Integrated Responsiveness, is not an attribute solely of humans, nor of the human brain, nor even just of animals, but rather of everything that responds to stimuli.
Under anesthesia, the brain doesn’t stop. Certain subsystems become less responsive. Pain-reporting circuits are suppressed.
Other regulatory systems continue functioning. The organism is a distributed system. Your brain isn’t separate from the rest of your body.
All your organs are extensions of the same integrative network.
You don’t think only with your brain; every organ in your body contributes to what we perceive as “self.” We call it “consciousness.”
Existence, as you see, hear, feel, taste, and smell it, is an illusion created by your senses to help you navigate reality. Light photons are interpreted as red—a mere illusion. Chemicals are perceived as sweet or sour. Pressure waves are transformed into the illusion of music.
Our senses combine to create the illusion of self, or qualia. The feelings of “I” or “me” are constructs developed by our brains and bodies to interpret stimuli as effective survival tools.
Your consciousness is measured by your responses to stimuli. There is no magic. It’s all physics.
All forms of life, from bacteria to humans, create illusions for survival. It’s not the indefinable illusion of self; it’s Darwinian survival.
Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
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