When you refer to “me” or “I,” what are you referring to? Exactly where is that “me” or “I”? What are the boundaries?
If you were to say, for example, “I hurt my hand,” does it indicate that the real “you” is separate from your hand?
If you were to say, “I hurt my self,” is there a “self” that is separate from you? Some psychologists believe there is a separate “self” where those mysterious, almost indescribable “qualia” reside, a”self” that gives you subjective feelings about the emotion of the color red and the sense of awe at a sunset or great music.
Is the real “you” your physical brain, or is it something separate from it? Or is the real “you “your entire thinking apparatus? If so, you do your thinking with far more than the 3lb lump of meat in your skull.
Scientists are beginning to understand that thinking is a full-body exercise, with the in-skull brain being but one important part.
Please take a look at the excerpts from the following article.
The secret signals our organs send to repair tissues and slow aging
Your organs are constantly talking to each other in ways we’re only beginning to understand. By Claire Ainsworth. February 2, 2026, New Scientist Magazine
Biologist Chunyi Li, saw that when deer 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 when he and his colleagues 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.
This is how we traditionally visualize our brain, but it is only a small part of the picture. Every cell in our body communicates, directly or indirectly, with every other cell via a network similar to that in our brain. In short, our entire body functions like a brain.
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.
Every part of the body communicates with every other part via nerves and chemicals, forming a brain-like web.
Indeed, inter-organ communication is now seen as critical machinery for controlling metabolism, aging and overall health.
In addition to the nervous system and the blood/endocrine system, both of which provide inter-organ — indeed inter-cell — communication, we have:
*Paracrine & autocrine signaling (local chemistry) in which cells signal nearby cells (paracrine), or themselves (autocrine). Examples are inflammation signals, tissue repair, and tumor signaling.
*Immune system signaling: Cytokines, chemokines, antigen presentation. Cells “talk” about threats. Examples are fever, swelling and fatigue
*Gut–brain axis: Two-way communication between gut and brain. Your gut is constantly “voting” on your behavior Uses: nerves (vagus nerve), hormones, immune signals, microbiome chemicals
*Mechanical signaling: Cells respond to pressure, stretch and movement. Examples: Bones strengthen under load; muscles grow with stress; blood vessels respond to flow
*Bioelectric fields: Subtle electrical gradients across tissues guide wound healing and physical development (These are background electrical patterns, not just nerve impulses.)
*Exosomes: Extracellular vesicles (tiny packages). Cells send exosomes that carry RNA, proteins and signals
*Gene regulation signaling: Cells change behavior by turning genes on/off Triggered by: The environment, chemicals, stress
Our body produces a hormone called leptin, which helps regulate appetite and energy balance. This transformed our perception of fat: once seen as passive storage tissue, it is now thought of as a dynamic, vital organ.
Pretty much every organ or tissue is chipping in. One of the biggest surprises is bone, long thought of as a lifeless mechanical scaffold. 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.
A 2018 study showed that these signals can be jammed by existing blood-pressure drugs known as beta-blockers, which inhibit the release of stress hormones such as adrenaline by the sympathetic nervous system.
Shin-ichiro Imai at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, thinks of this orchestration as an interconnected system that maintains stable function, or “robustness”. When this robustness falters, it leads to aging and physiological decline. “We need to integrate all the different pieces from all the different layers, like a molecular layer, cellular layer, tissue, organ layer, to understand the whole system,” he says.
Imai and his colleagues showed that a specific subset of hypothalamic neurons in mice communicates with adipose tissue via the sympathetic nervous system, triggering the release of an enzyme essential for producing NAD+, a molecule vital to cellular metabolism.
Moreover, the 2024 study concluded that “these findings clearly demonstrate the importance of the inter-tissue communication.
Other organs, including skeletal muscle and the small intestine, also converse with the hypothalamus. Imai and his colleagues have identified the hormone that skeletal muscle uses to communicate with this brain region.
The body’s diverse languages 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 that convey information about energy status and cellular health, and new signaling molecules, such as those produced when skeletal muscles contract and act on many other tissues, including the brain and liver.
And 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.
But one of the most exciting discoveries in the field of inter-organ communication is the way many of these factors are shunted around the body in mysterious bubble-like blobs known as extracellular vesicles (EVs), which are a key way for organs to send messages.
Here, too, new varieties of EVs are continually being unearthed, such as the discovery last year of particularly massive ones dubbed “blebbisomes”, which function as mobile communication centers. At the opposite end of the spectrum are the tiny exomeres and supemeres, both discovered in 2021, which aren’t encased in a membrane. Plus, there are oncosomes, produced by cancer cells.
Obesity, too, exerts some of its effects on the body via EVs. These 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.
“We’re looking at the whole connection between obesity and dementia,” says Das. Fat also communicates with the liver via EVs, and fat-derived EVs also appear 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.
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. 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 neighbors over a garden fence.
The massive amount of inter-cell communication rivals and resembles the brain itself, and via these connections, literally is part of the brain.
What we term “thinking” is a whole-body exercise, not limited to the brain.
The following article provides one stunning example:
Just one dose of psilocybin relieves symptoms of OCD for months
Taking psilocybin – the psychedelic component of magic mushrooms – eased symptoms of obsessive compulsive disorder among people who did not respond to conventional treatments, and the effects lasted at least several months.
By Chris Simms, March 5, 2026, New Scientist Magazine
“If we give you a trip, we think we can break the cycles of obsessive thinking and behavior,” says David Nutt at Imperial College London, who wasn’t involved in the research. “The whole point of OCD therapy is about teaching people to behave differently. So, rather than check the lights 15 times, you check them twice.”
About 1 to 3 percent of people have OCD, a condition characterized by obsessive thoughts and compulsive habits, which can be overwhelming. Treatments tend to include talking therapies and antidepressants, but between 40 and 60 percent of people with OCD don’t respond to them.
Your entire body, not just your brain, is involved in your thinking processes, over most of which you have no control.
Every chemical you ingest affects every cell in you body. In many cases the effect is minimal, even unnoticeable. In other cases, the effect is profound.
There’s a popular claim that every breath you take contains atoms once breathed by people like Jesus or Julius Caesar. It sounds like poetic nonsense. Mathematically, it isn’t.
Every breath you take contains an astronomically large number of molecules. The atmosphere, though huge, is finite. Over time, air mixes. Not perfectly, not instantly—but enough.
Now think about a human lifetime. Hundreds of millions of breaths. Each one releasing vast numbers of molecules into the air. Spread those molecules across the entire atmosphere and the fraction becomes tiny. But your next breath is enormous at the molecular level.
Tiny fraction × enormous number = not tiny anymore. The result? Each breath you take contains millions of atoms that once passed through the lungs of people who lived long ago. So when you inhale, you’re not just breathing “air.” You’re breathing a thoroughly mixed, endlessly recycled history of the planet.
Every atom is a messenger. Those atoms carry energy and structure and participate in reactions, When they enter your body, they don’t just sit there. They interact. They affect chemistry, alter electrical states, and influence cells
Your body continually receives input from air (oxygen, CO , trace gases), food (chemicals, nutrients), and internal systems (hormones, immune signals).
There is no clean boundary between “you” and “the outside world.” Separation is and illusion. We talk as if we “breathe air” and we “eat food,”, But physically, we continuously exchange matter with everything around us. Atoms move in, react, and move out. The system is not isolated. It is open and constantly mixing.
If atoms that were once in Caesar, a tree, or a cloud are now in you, the idea of a fixed, isolated self becomes very shaky. What persists is not matter. It’s a pattern of responsiveness, responsiveness is not just internal processing. It is the ongoing interaction between a system and a shared physical world.
You are not a thing. You are a process. And that process is built from pieces that have belonged to everything else.
Thus, the notion of “self” control is patently false. We simply cannot control our thoughts, and not having thought control, wecannot control our behavior, despite the illusion that we do.
Every cell in your body communicates — directly or indirectly — with every other cell via several communication channels, including: Nervous, blood/endocrine, paracrine & autocrine signaling, immune system signaling, gut–brain axis, mechanical signaling, bioelectric fields, exosomes and gene regulation signaling.
If all these chemicals and signals affect your thinking and your behavior, where does that leave the notion of free will?
If every cell in your body communicates with every other cell, while thousands of chemicals enter us from outside our bodies every day — and each of these chemicals and communications has some effect on our decision-making, our opinions, and our actions — where does that leave the notion of a “self” that makes our decisions?
The illusion goes well beyond our bodies. We literally are made of “star stuff.” Right after the Big Bang, the universe consisted mostly of hydrogen and helium. That’s it—no carbon, no oxygen, no iron. All the rest of us was forged in stars that exploded and created every known chemical.
The sun continues to affect us via its radiation and gravitation. It affects our moods, our actions, and our beliefs. The chaos of the “butterfly effect” means that even a small perturbation in your body can result in a meaningful effect on your life.
(Edward Lorenz repeated a simulation he had previously run, but rounded a value from 0.506127 to 0.506. The small alteration caused the program to produce an entirely different weather simulation.)
One can ponder the subtle changes that may have occurred in Jesus’s mind and body, ultimately giving rise to a religion with 3 to 4 billion followers and to the countless historical events that ensued. Consider how many people were born or died, how many suffered or thrived, and how many achieved success or faced failure—all as a result of minor influences stemming from one man’s thoughts.
What tiny changes in your ancestors have led to your current life situation?
SUMMARY
You are not just your brain. You are the universe.
Your brain is intricately connected to, and affected by, your body. Your thoughts, beliefs, moods, desires, and actions are not solely the product of your brain, but are the result of the trillions of interactions each second among every cell in your body.
You do not control the vast majority of those interactions, which means you cannot control your thoughts, beliefs, etc. Though you live with the persistent illusion of central control, you do and think as you are. You are in the same position as the OCD victim who cannot control his hand flapping or his thoughts and desires. The difference is that your thoughts and actions may be considered “normal, typical, average,” or in some way judged appropriate.
Imagine a world where everyone has OCD. What would “free will” mean in that context?
And just as we are connected to our bodies and environments, we also are connected to the sun, the moon, and even to the stars and the rest of the universe. We do not know, and perhaps never will know, how much we on Earth are affected by a star a million light-years distant.
The entire universe is interconnected in a vast web of influence, in which we are barely more than insignificant specks. Yet here we are, hardly above the status of ants, claiming we have control over ourselves, even without fully understanding what a “self” truly is.
#Monetary Sovereignty - Mitchell 