Robert Cooper, author of The Other 90%, says that we shouldn’t think of intelligence as happening only in the brain in our skulls. He talks of the “heart” brain and the “gut” brain. Whenever we have a direct experience, he says, it does not go directly to the brain in our heads. The first place it goes is to the neurological networks in the intestinal tract and the heart. He describes the first of these, the enteric nervous system, as a “second brain” inside the intestines, which is “independent but also interconnected with the brain inside the cranium.” He says that this is why we often experience our first reactions to events as a “gut reaction.” Whether or not we acknowledge them, he says, our gut reactions shape everything we do.
Ken Robinson, The Element, p.44