C’mon, you know where our second (or first!) brain is for us guys.🤣

Yes, the gut enteric system is fascinating. In addition to what you mentioned, the gut immune system, which contains the largest number of lymphocytes in the body, is intricately linked with the enteric nervous system. It is also continuously communicating with the gut microbiome. So you can see the intimate association between our brain, our immune system, and the microbial world. Makes complete sense as the natural course of our evolution from single cell organisms.

By the way, I witness the link between the gut nervous system and brain daily. My daughter had widespread damage to her brain during fetal development. She also has an incompletely developed enteric nervous system that has resulted in impaired intestinal motility that causes fecal retention and impaired gastric emptying that resulted in a catastrophic gastric rupture a couple of years ago. Fortunately, she recovered from that, but I have a lot of GI issues to manage with her. Ironic, since most of my research in my veterinary career was in gastroenterology!