Wanderlust

A short primer on your longest nerve

The word “vague” has a Latin root, which means “wandering”.

If we climb a little higher up the tree, we arrive in 16th century France, where the word is used to signify emptiness or vacancy. In English, we use this word to mean “uncertain” but the same word in French means “wave”.

Like a wave in the ocean, coaxed from the water by the wind and forever aimlessly rolling over itself.

I imagine the first anatomists as cosmonauts, discovering the longest nerve in the body, tracing its tortuous path from the bottom of the brain and down into the gut and naming it in Latin: nervus vagus. The wandering nerve.

The intrepid traveller in the uncharted universe of human biology.

These are the thoughts that run uncensored through my brain as it sloshes against the inside of my skull, which has just made uncomfortable contact with the linoleum beneath the nurse’s station where four large vials of my blood sit on a plastic tray.

I don’t characterize myself as squeamish. My compulsion to understand how the brain works has required me to cut apart a fair number of them over the years, and I’ve been enamoured of all things gross since I was a small child. But like so many of our inexplicable, irrational behaviours, the tendency to hit the floor at the sight of blood is reflexive, an evolutionary short circuit that bypasses your rational mind and heads straight for your autonomic nervous system.

We can find similar examples across so many different species that it seems to be a conserved evolutionary strategy to avoid predation; a secret third option when neither fight nor flight are available.

Most animals are simply very convincing actors. They retain awareness while they appear to be dead. Humans, on the other hand, completely lose consciousness — thanks to the vagus nerve, and for reasons that still aren’t entirely understood.

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