Emeran A. Mayer
The field-defining figure in neurogastroenterology, and a co-author of Bonaz et al. (2021) — his only appearance in raw/, and the wiki’s route into the gut-brain literature.
The reframing he is responsible for
Mayer’s lasting contribution to this wiki’s subject matter is nomenclatural in form and mechanistic in substance. “Functional gastrointestinal disorders” named a class of conditions by what could not be found in them — no lesion, no biomarker, no organic pathology. “Disorders of brain-gut interaction”, the Rome-classification successor, names them by a proposed mechanism: a failure of the bidirectional regulatory loop between gut and brain.
That is not a cosmetic change, and it is the same move the interoceptive account of functional-disorders makes generally. A symptom with no peripheral abnormality is not thereby unexplained; it can be a failure of representation and regulation, which is a positive claim with testable content. See disorders-of-brain-gut-interaction.
What his sections supply
In the 2021 review, Mayer’s material is the IBS and microbiome content: the epidemiology (5–20% worldwide, significant socioeconomic burden), the biopsychosocial link to stress and emotion, the connectivity findings in attention/emotion/pain networks, and the microbiota-gut-brain-axis mechanisms — enteroendocrine relay, short-chain fatty acids, lipopolysaccharide activation of vagal TLR4, and the honest verdict that dysbiosis causality “is elusive.”
The finding of his that matters most for the rest of the wiki is the IBS interoceptive profile: patients score high on subjective interoceptive sensibility while showing deficits in interoceptive processing — the accuracy-low/sensibility-high discrepancy, arrived at in a measurement tradition with no contact with the cardiac-interoception literature where the wiki learned that pattern. See interoceptive-trait-prediction-error.
Placement, and a caution
Mayer is also a prominent popular-science author on the gut-brain connection, and the microbiome is a field with a large gap between what is anatomically established and what is publicly claimed. The wiki holds his work entirely through one co-authored review section; none of his primary papers is in raw/. The material recorded here is deliberately proportionate to that — the pathways are real and well-characterized, the causal and therapeutic claims are weak by the source’s own account, and the wiki should not let the former license the latter.
Related: bruno-bonaz, whose vagal programme is the efferent counterpart to Mayer’s afferent one, and with whom he shares the 2021 review’s gut sections.