Evidence for a large-scale brain system supporting allostasis and interoception in humans

Kleckner et. al (2017) here introduces a system, conceptually similar to the large-scale intrinsic brain system involving senses such as sight and hearing for example, to represent sensations from within the body known as interoception. The group of researchers behind this study also relate this system with the regulating peripheral systems in the body called allostasis. The existence of an intrinsic allostatic/interoceptive system in the brain was evaluated using tract-tracing studies of macaque monkeys, two magnetic resonance imaging samples totalling 550 entries, and a new Embodied Predictive Interoception Coding (EPIC) model. After evaluating another sample of 41, it was proven that individuals with stronger connectivity between system hubs performed better in terms of interoceptive ability. Kleckner et. al (2017) provide new insights for the brain’s functional architecture and claims to have possibly united mental and physical illness. [NPID: interoception, interoceptive awareness, allostasis]

Year: 2017

Reference: Kleckner, I. R., Zhang, J., Touroutoglou, A., Chanes, L., Xia, C., Simmons, W. K., Quigley, K. S., Dickerson, B. C., & Barrett, L. F. (2017). Evidence for a large-scale brain system supporting allostasis and interoception in humans. Nature human behaviour, 1, 0069.

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