South African Cannabis Community & Regulatory Association

The medicinal components of Cannabis are so effective because they work with the nervous system and the immune system via the cannabinoid receptors on cells throughout the body.  The manner in which the nervous system functions is largely responsible for the transformation we see in lasting healing.  That is to say, changing our thinking, languaging and actions literally creates different results in our bodies.

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"Human Beings have an Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) that is the body’s automatic regulatory system of nerves and controls that do all the background tasks that keep the body operating. The ANS is comprised of three separate subsystems, the Parasympathetic Nervous System (PNS), the Sympathetic Nervous System (SNS) and the Enteric Nervous System (ENS).

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The Parasympathetic Nervous System is responsible for many of our resting functions such as lowering heart rate, increasing digestive & gland activity and sexual arousal, while the Sympathetic Nervous System is mainly associated with modulation of hormones and neurotransmitters relating to “flight or fight” responses.

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The Enteric Nervous System is generally considered by scientists to be involved predominantly with food digestion, waste elimination and sending full/hungry signals to the brain. However, that doesn’t explain why 90% of the nerve fibers of the ENS run one way, from the stomach area, through the vagus nerve and up into the brain.

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Furthermore, 95% of the body’s serotonin is produced in the gut, not in the brain as most people would assume, making it even more likely that the total functionality of the ENS is far greater than managing our gastrointestinal needs. When you stop to consider that 90-95% of our thoughts occur in our subconscious minds, and also the idea that the Enteric Nervous System is also the organ of the subconscious mind, is it any surprise that most of the nerve fibers between the two systems originate in the ENS or that most of the serotonin is also produced in the ENS?

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The cerebrospinal system is the organ of the conscious mind and is the channel through which we receive conscious perception from the physical senses, and exercise control over the movements of the body. While the cerebrospinal or central nervous system (CNS)  has the brain as its control center, the ENS has a ganglionic mass in the belly known as the Solar Plexus, often referred to as our second brain*, as its central processing unit and it is in this co-processor that most of our everyday tasks get executed from. When things in our life become ‘second nature’, they are effectively processed through our ENS rather than our CNS.

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It is our vagus nerve that provides the gateway between the two systems, acting as a bio-informational data bus that routes the impulses going through in both directions. Since the vagus nerve acts as the central switchboard between our two nervous systems, it should not come as a surprise that impaired functioning of this one nerve can lead to so many different conditions and problems.

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Our consciousness’s natural tendency is to compartmentalize tedious tasks so that the brain can focus on higher priority activities.  As we go through life and learn to do things, such as tying our shoes, it would take far too much of our brain’s capacity to have to focus on every small aspect of life so once most things are learned with our conscious awareness, they then get handed over to our automatic background systems.  Over time more and more repetitive tasks go from originating in our conscious minds to happening in our subconscious minds.

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When an athlete is said to be ‘in the zone’ and performing at near perfect levels, it is because they are practically and literally almost unconscious and functioning entirely through their ENS. And when someone has an intuition, or in other words they have a ‘gut’ feeling, that information is coming to them through the Solar Plexus and when we say that someone has learned to play a song ‘by heart’,  in reality, it would probably be more accurate to say they learned how to play ‘by solar plexus’!

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The nervous system exerts a profound influence on all digestive processes, namely motility, ion transport associated with secretion and absorption and gastrointestinal blood flow. Some of this control emanates from connections between the digestive system and central nervous system, but just as importantly, the digestive system is endowed with its own, local nervous system referred to as the enteric or intrinsic nervous system. The magnitude and complexity of the enteric nervous system is immense – it contains as many neurons as the spinal cord.