There's the question of top-down processing versus bottom-up processing. Are our brains the CPU where all the signals are received and processed? Or perhaps do some of our organs process some of the signals?
In my opinion, our organs do a bit of processing before sending to the brain.
Efficiency, and evolution strongly favours it, suggests there is a lot of edge processing happening in the periphery. A lot of information is already consolidated in our retinas before being piped to the visual cortex, and some dinosaurs developed secondary brains to deal with predators biting their tails. It doesn’t make sense to transmit raw data to the brain to have it consolidated there, but there will be some issues with the peripheral nervous system dropping important information (maybe optical illusions or auditory hallucinations fall into that category).
my gut feeling is that there's something to this
the whole enteric brain idea, has been around for a while, and my understanding is that there are neural "nodes" conected around the abdomen that collectivly have the same number of nuerons as a cat
Reflexes don't need to travel to the brain.
Some big dinosaurs even had secondary brains to deal with input from far-away extremities. The larger the animal the more incentive you have for a distributed neural processing evolutionary path. Either that or you develop very fast nerves.