The role of Central Interoceptive Brain Circuits in Processing Bodily States

A painful tactile experience does not only trigger signals from the skin but also elicits changes in our heart, lungs, and gut. Similarly, feelings of hunger or thirst involve the integration of signals from many organs. Our lab has focused on examining the central circuits underlying sensory perception and motivation.

We have developed new tools to image the same hundreds of neurons across weeks in the brainstem and cortex as animals are exposed to various interoceptive stimuli, creating an ‘atlas’ of central neuronal representations of interoception

We will map this functional atlas to a molecular atlas of neuron types . This is a key step that will help define the neural circuit wiring diagrams by which diverse bodily signals are integrated. These efforts will reveal distinct neural activity patterns related to pain, hunger, thirst, and other bodily states, and also how these states can be modified by drugs such as recent anti-obesity drugs to drive both the pleasant feelings associated with satiety and the feelings of malaise that come with overeating.

The needs of our bodies, such as hunger or thirst, have a powerful impact on the way we experience our sensory environments.

Learning how motivational states are represented in the brain and how they shape the activity of neural circuits underlying perception may have significant implications both for basic neuroscience and our knowledge of brain disorders. 

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