🍄 I - I - I'm just a love machine and I won't work for nobody but you...

What if our gut bacteria really do guide us to act with a sense of purpose?

Aug 18, 2023

From the minds of Sputnik Futures. Exploring every rabbit hole there is. For more wanderings, become an Alice in Futureland subscriber—it's free.

Share Alice in Futureland

🍄 AudioDose: this is Alice on Sonic Mushrooms. Dance with microbes here.
🎧 Microbes and The Love Hormone with Dr. Susan Erdman
🎧 Alice in Futureland podcasts
📘 ALICE book Thriving with Microbes: The unseen intelligence within and around us

Hello, we’re Alice and we are always in a state of wander… As it turns out, the molecule behind a meaningful life may well be hypothalamic mastermind oxytocin.

Dr. Susan Erdman at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston, is exploring how parent-infant bonding after birth not only enhances a baby’s physical health but can also impact the potential for a virtuous life, with effects extending to future generations. Dr. Erdman’s premise is to establish a generational paradigm of increased human virtue, based upon novel findings involving probiotic bacteria and the “love hormone” oxytocin in mouse models.

According to the published grant, early life events and the brain hormone oxytocin are central in human pair bonding. The study proposes a microbial restoration strategy to stimulate natural oxytocin secretion, based on a phenomenon discovered in mouse models. Creative collaborations between MIT and Harvard-MGH will use probiotics originating from healthy human breast milk, namely Lactobacillus reuteri 6475, to stimulate oxytocin and beneficial parent-infant bonds. The team hypothesizes that oral supplements with L. reuteri will boost oxytocin levels and favorable behaviors including empathy, altruism, and spirituality in mothers and their infants. Actionable outputs will inspire public health change, with vast potential to improve human existence. The transcendental aspect of oxytocin raises the intriguing possibility of a deeply enriched human experience on the other side of microbes. If our ultimate goal is a physically healthy and purposeful life, then our microbial passengers and oxytocin are important partners in our journey.

How Could You Not Love This Idea?

Below is an excerpt from our lovefest with Dr.Susan Erdman. ALICE whole-heartedly believes she is a rock star!!!

"We hypothesize that microbes that boost hormones that make us care about others—want to take care of others—don't do it at the expense of taking care of ourselves. We still take care of ourselves. We have the capacity to reach outside of ourselves and take care of others, and try and make this a better world for all of us. We believe that the essence of all of this comes from better understanding those very primal microbial connections with the gut, the immune system, and the nervous system as a whole, to give us the potential to be the best that we can possibly be, and work toward making the world a better place for all of us. So in the past five years or so, I began to reach out and share the ideas and the vision that I have for things in a lay audience format, and teach people about what we've learned about this, because, I think it gives so much reason for optimism about the human condition. What I am trying to come across with is that a curiosity about trying to understand what makes us who we are turns over some rocks that give us the reason to have huge optimism about what the human condition has the potential to become.

This question about our identities, our sense of purpose, our desire to care about more than ourselves for the greater good is probably one of the most riveting questions of human existence. And we set out to try and understand some of the scientific underpinnings of that exact question. So if there were a question that hits the nail on the head, it's that one.

So I'm going to try and explain how it is that we made the initial discoveries the scientific discoveries that give us some clues as to how microbes might give us the potential to enjoy a more rewarding, more purposeful, and more socially global existence. Going back to our earliest inklings about searching for a microbe to use to understand the potential of the microbiome to help human health, to help us stay healthy and be healthy, to do things like counteract the development of cancer, to make our immune system healthy, to minimize autoimmune diseases, to begin to understand how we might be able to make things like ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease diseases of the past, rather than diseases of the present or the future—all of these things come from our understanding the microbial underpinnings in the immune system.

The Mother Bond

When we started to investigate organisms that we thought would have the potential to help us really understand who we are and how we can stay healthy, we zeroed in on a human breast milk microbe, with the reasoning that these are the tools that a mother passes onto her infant. This is a survival kit for the future. And this survival kit has two major components. And this, again, is dramatic oversimplification. But it has a microbe, and it has a food source for that microbe to be able to establish itself in this very naive environment of this poor, helpless infant being born into this very threatening and complicated world. So Mom passes along the survival kit. And what this survival kit does is it also helps Mom. And what it does is it helps Mom because she's carrying these microbes. And because her hormonal environment is one that supports this passing along the survival kit to her developing infant, she also is connected, in a very deep kind of way, to this microbial connection. We decided to scientifically mine–to dig deeply into the scientific underpinnings of this connection—to help us understand how this survival kit might be a clue as to what mammals have the potential to become. And when you dig deep into this survival kit, it tells you, actually, about all of the living species in the world. But it gives you clues as to how people became what we are, and what might motivate us.

Most powerful among those things in the mother-infant bond is a social bonding hormone called oxytocin. And oxytocin was originally thought of–people think of it as a woman's hormone. And it turns out, it is a woman's hormone in a lot of ways that are linked with childbirth, pregnancy, and being able to expel that infant from the human body and start it on its trajectory on Earth. Oxytocin is very important in all of that. So oxytocin causes muscle contractions in the uterus that introduce the infant to the world. The infant is bathed in a sea of oxytocin at the time of birth, and begins to develop neurological connections, and also gut microbial connections based on relationships with this hormone, oxytocin. But one of the most powerful things, which is well-substantiated by animal models systems, is that oxytocin is really important in a mother having a desire to take care of her infant. And this, in the most simplistic way, is kind of earth-shattering. This is about as close to an aha moment as what we've had in our entire scientific journey. Because realizing that this microbe fills this niche with this mother-infant bond was what led us to explore the possibility that this microbe might actually be interfacing with this hormone oxytocin. And so I told you a little bit about what oxytocin does in the physical manifestations of expelling the baby from the mom's body, helping give birth, causing the uterine contractions that allow the baby to begin to have an independent existence. But above and beyond that, oxytocin also—in combination with other hormones—helps control the expulsion of breast milk. So again, it's causing muscle contractions that are helping the mom give the breast milk—the food of the survival kit to the baby.

But there's more to it than that. And this is where the mouse model studies have given us tremendous insight. In mouse models, and in other animal model systems, it becomes very obvious that not only is the oxytocin important in actually the contractions of giving birth and the contractions of supplying that breast milk—which are key to a mammal being able to interface with the environment and get their offspring started on this trajectory of life, these life-giving events, the very essence of the mother caring for her infant, also requires oxytocin. So animal model systems that are completely missing oxytocin are capable of producing milk, although they hold it in their breast and they can't feed it to their babies, because they can't expel it very effectively. They're sometimes capable of giving birth, although not very efficiently, because they don't have the hormone to give birth. The mothers have zero interest in actually taking care of their babies in the absence of this hormone oxytocin. That's how important it is for everything about the mother-infant bond. In the absence of this hormone, there are other hormones that might step in to help kind of try and patch things together, as part of feedback loops. But oxytocin is the master controller when it comes to a mother's interest in taking care of her infant.

So this–this is the lightbulb moment. This is flash, flash, flash. If a mom is going to take care of her baby, she has to have this hormone. If this microbe is facilitating the production of this hormone, we have discovered something incredibly fundamental about what it takes for life—what it takes to build a life, to keep a life, and then to create a very interesting, selfish microbe who actually is invested in the social existence of mammals. All of this became a possibility when this microbial passenger—this microbial symbiont, this microbial who is as deeply invested in our survival as we are—are they actually helping us be a social being? Are they actually helping us want to take care of our—the next generation? This was the question that we went after.

And we were completely shocked when we hit the jackpot, and found out that this microbe, when it's separated from that system and given to an adult animal, is actually capable of boosting the levels of the hormone oxytocin within the brain, and within all of the tissues of the body of the lucky individuals that are carrying this organism. This idea that you could separate this microbe out and you could cause oxytocin to increase gives us clues to social networks that are previously uncharted.

So what do we have? We have a microbe that boosts a hormone that isn't just important in how a mother takes care of her infant, her interest in nurturing that infant. If you go back to all of the basic psychology of generations earlier—so basic scientific studies looking at how important family nurturing of offspring is, in order for that individual to be a good, contributing, healthy, happy member of society in the future—whether it's an animal model system, or it's a person—that psychology science is very well-established, providing the evidence for a nurturing environment early in life. So that, in and of itself, is an amazing discovery.

But just as amazing is the potential you could take that microbe out of that system and separate it, and put it into an adult, and change that adult's interest in taking care of others. And so this opens the path to explore the possibility that it's not just animals more interested—animal models—and mice in a cage more interested in taking care of their cage mates, or a mother mouse that becomes pregnant and is taking better care of her babies, but that you may be able to actually change the axis of caring in an individual within a society.

The Hormone of Connection

So let's play with that concept for a moment and say this is a hormone that, in human subjects, has been connected with expressions of empathy, expressions of altruism, and expressions of enjoyment of spirituality—the concept of belonging to a greater whole. That doesn't mean traditional religions, necessarily. It means the common threads of humans having a meaningful, spiritual experience that makes us belong to something, that makes us part of a larger whole, and makes us care about that larger whole to the same extent that we care about ourselves—maybe even more than we care about ourselves as an individual.

And that concept—that sort of thing that humans have searched for, that idea of what would make us care about—what would make us altruistic? What would make us care about some individual that's not even clearly related to us? Why would we possibly care about their survival? We care about their survival because these microbes are manipulating an axis within our brains that is giving us the capacity to return back to a primal, larger whole—that the survival of that whole is ultimately what drives the ultimate benefit of the survival of each of us as individuals. And these holistic relationships—this holobiont, these microbes that we carry with us—sometimes the microbes that we've dismissed over time, because our practices are not so natural as they used to be—our diets are not so natural, our birthing processes are not so natural, we use antibiotics to counteract bad microbes—this ends up changing elements of those microbial underpinnings, these very fundamental relationships that drive our potential with human existence.

We have the opportunity, by understanding this process, to get the benefits of how antibiotics might help us counteract bad bacteria, how giving birth within a hospital and under certain conditions might help us eliminate deadly diseases—we can still get the benefits of all of those things, and still have the potential to understand how to make us the best human beings and human experience that we can possibly have, in the larger picture of things. And we see those connections in a very fundamental way, with scientific underpinnings between microbes, how the immune system works, and hormones that have far-reaching potential.

And oxytocin is not the only hormone that's modulated by this microbe, but in ways that has the potential to change who we can become as a society, how much we care about others, and our interest in caring for others to the same extent that we care for ourselves—that potential exists with a key, through a hormone like oxytocin.

We've gotten clues from our fundamental nature as humans—going back to those microbes, which appear to have been partners in human and mammalian existence for maybe millennia—important factors who make us what we are. Many of those are whole microbial factors.

Passing a whole microbe from one generation to the next is a tremendous gift. We talked about it in the sense of a survival kit—a mother-infant special bond survival kit—that gives us some clues as to how we might stay healthy across a lifetime, and maybe pass those benefits onto the next generation and beyond. Those are all built in very natural concepts. And even though we've gone to great lengths scientifically to try and understand all the details of it, those are not really scientific discoveries. They are us rediscovering who we are, in a most fundamental sense. They are things that societies have instinctively known for generations.

And when you go back to generational wisdom, you see these same themes arising over and over again—concepts that grandparents would pass on to their children, their grandchildren and so forth—that become part of the human record of trying to understand how we can stay healthy, how we can survive, how we can make the best life possible for ourselves, and for our friends and family, and maybe reaching further than that. Everything that we've talked about up until this point has been in that theme.”

Thank you Dr. Erdman!

What Else We Are Wondering…

🔍 Babies, Bugs and Brains
The early microbiome associates with infant brain and behavior development. Growing evidence is demonstrating the connection between the microbiota gut-brain axis and neurodevelopment. Microbiota colonization occurs before the maturation of many neural systems and is linked to brain health. Because of this, it has been hypothesized that the early microbiome interactions along the gut-brain axis evolved to promote advanced cognitive functions and behaviors.

🔍 Hello My Psychobiome
There is mounting evidence that gut bacteria influence the nervous system and may alter how you think, feel and act, inspiring a new class of drugs that mine the microbiome for psycare.

🔍 Gut Microbes May Treat Social Difficulties in Autism
Treatment with Lactobacillus reuteri, a species of gut bacteria found in yogurt and breast milk, enhances social interactions in three mouse models of autism, a study suggests. The findings lend support to the idea that the gut microbiome—the population of microbes in the body—holds clues to autism therapies.

🔍 Pucker Up, Each Kiss Swaps 80 million Microbes!
Similar to how we didn’t understand why breast milk contained so many indigestible sugars only to find out they are the perfect food for the blooming gut microbiome— could kissing be an ancient evolutionary technique specifically designed to swap microorganisms and expand our microbial diversity?

🔍 Meditate With Your Gut Microbes For Better Health
Gut microbes found in Buddhist monks linked to lower risks of anxiety, depression, heart disease. Regular deep meditation, practiced for several years, may help to regulate the gut microbiome and potentially lower the risks of physical and mental ill health. The gut microbes found in a group of Tibetan Buddhist monks differed substantially from those of their secular neighbors, and have been linked to a lower risk of anxiety, depression, and cardiovascular disease. Research shows that the gut microbiome can affect mood and behavior through the gut–brain axis.

🔍 Microbes Can Create a More Peaceful World
Microorganisms should be 'weaponized' to stave off conflicts across the globe, according to a team of eminent microbiologists.

Craving more?

🎧 Microbes and The Love Hormone with Dr. Susan Erdman
🎧 Alice in Futureland podcasts
📘 Alice in Futureland books