The physiological state of our body keeps score of the past, shapes our present mental state, and biases our decisions and future actions, yet neuroscience largely ignores the massive flow of mutual information between the body and the brain. We started a new program that brings together physiologists and neuroscientists to develop a shared research program centered on brain-body interactions. The foundation of our multidisciplinary program is the view that interoception informs higher cognitive processes, decision-making, and socio-emotional processes that are anchored to hierarchically organized homeostatic loops that process signals generated by different organ systems. Our goal is to obtain a rich, multidimensional characterization of the physiological state of the organism that includes brain activity, energy management, cardiocirculatory, renal, endocrine, and metabolic processes across multiple behaviors in both healthy individuals and animal models of disease.
The program brings together senior, mid-career, and junior faculty from the Departments of Physiology, Neuroscience, Nutritional Sciences and Wellness, the Cancer Center, BIO5 Institute, and Biomedical Engineering.
