“I could do this without my head”

Hey there,

How bad of a morning would you have to be having before you could genuinely say:

“I could do this without my head.”

For a cockroach, this is less dramatic than you’d think.

A cockroach can survive for days, sometimes weeks, after losing its head.

Which feels deeply unfair considering some of us need coffee before answering an email.

Cockroaches have a surprisingly decentralized nervous system.

Their brain handles plenty of important jobs, but clusters of nerve cells called ganglia are distributed throughout the body.

These little command centers help control things like movement and reflexes without waiting for instructions from the brain every single time.

So even without its head, a cockroach can still:

Eventually, dehydration catches up with it because it can no longer drink.

Still, the whole situation raises an interesting question:

How much of what your body does is happening without you consciously thinking about it?

A lot.

Your heart rate changes.

Your digestion speeds up or slows down.

Your pupils adjust.

Your breathing shifts.

Your body is constantly collecting information and responding before your conscious mind gets invited to the meeting.

And humans have their own enormous communication network helping coordinate it all.

One particularly interesting player is the vagus nerve, which travels from the brainstem through the neck and connects with organs including the heart, lungs and digestive tract.

“Vagus” actually comes from the Latin word for wandering.

Apparently even our nerves like to roam.

The vagus nerve is involved in the parasympathetic nervous system, including processes associated with digestion, recovery and the body settling after stress.

Which means that sometimes the tension you still feel at 9 PM has roots that go far beyond whatever you happen to be thinking about at 9 PM.

🪳 Your body is gathering information all day long.
🪳 Stress can linger after the stressful event ends.
🪳 Small signals can travel surprisingly far.

Cockroaches figured out distributed communication roughly 300 million years before Slack.

And somehow theirs may involve fewer unnecessary meetings.

—Gabi & Bea