While your immune system and brain organ systems maintain your homeostasis, your brain tries to run the show in your body. From behavior to immune response, it influences every relationship, including the communication between the immune system and the peripheral nervous system.

Certain aspects of this brain-body connection are clear, such as the facts that neurons are integral components of your immune system and that your immune system relies on reflex nerve circuits which influence cells within the bloodstream.

Born in the brain, neurons or nerve cells in the central nervous system transmit impulses through electrical and chemical signals that carry information throughout your body and coordinate the function of human life. Sensory nerve cells are present on the front line of all our host defenses and like the cells we call macrophages or antigen-presenting cells, nerve cells interact directly with inflammatory products of the viruses, bacteria, parasites, and subsequently you, the host.

In fact, the neural relationships with the blood cells of the immune system allow a rapid response to many threats to it. This is in effect the internet of the body, and it relies on action potentials, the body’s electric system which is the basis for electrical signaling in those neurons, to run.

Action potentials of the nervous system is the immune system’s quick way of transmitting information, above and beyond that of cytokines and chemokines.

Your memory, your cells must communicate prior to going to the scene of an inflammatory event. To coordinate this response, your immune system has a communication network called the biological regulatory system, which is composed of a pair of powerful chemicals: cytokines (which tell cells what to do) and chemokines (which tell cells where to go).

These chemicals are produced throughout the body and provide quick and long-lasting innate and adaptive response. But when an even faster response is needed to major infection or injury, like a severe burn to a raging pneumonia from a virus and other traumatic invasions and events, your innate response counts on the nerve-immune system connection and the cytokines released by nerve cells.