Body-budgeting and interoception

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Chapter 4 endnote 20, from How Emotions are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett.
Some context is:

Along with your autonomic nervous system, your brain commands two other systems within the body that make physical movements possible. Your endocrine system regulates your metabolism, ions (like sodium), etc., through hormones, and your immune system protects your body against disease.

The autonomic nervous system, the neuroendocrine system, and immune system are integrated within your body’s internal environment, so for simplicity, I refer to the whole set of brain regions that regulate the systems of the body's internal environment as “body-budgeting regions.” Broadly speaking, interoception refers to the sensations that result from body-budgeting changes.

Body-budgeting regions include limbic and paralimbic areas in the cerebral cortex (e.g., the anterior, mid, and posterior cingulate cortices and the anterior insula). These cortical regions regulate the subcortical groupings of cells (called nuclei) that control the body's systems. These nuclei can be found in the central nucleus of the amygdala, the ventral portion of the striatum (including the nucleus accumbens), the basal forebrain (including the substantia nigra), the hypothalamus, the periaqueductal grey, the deep layers of the superior colliculus, the parabrachical nucleus, the ventral tegmental area, and the nucleus tractus solitarius.[1][2] Other regions of the cerebral cortex that regulate these subcortical body-budgeting regions include Broca's area (ventrolateral prefrontal cortex), dorso- and ventromedial prefrontal cortex, and the anterior portions of the temporal lobe.[3][4]


Notes on the Notes

  1. Craig, A. D. 2015. How Do You Feel? An Interoceptive Moment with Your Neurobiological Self. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
  2. Damasio, Antonio, and Gil B. Carvalho. 2013. “The Nature of Feelings: Evolutionary and Neurobiological Origins.” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 14 (2): 143–152.
  3. Carrive, Pascal, and Michael M. Morgan. 2012. "Periaquiductal gray." In The Human Nervous System, 3rd edition, edited by Juergen K. Mai and George Paxinos, 367-400. Boston:  Elsevier.
  4. For additional references, see Kleckner, Ian, Jiahe Zhang, Alexandra Touroutoglou, Lorena Chanes, Chenjie Xia, W. Kyle Simmons, Karen Quigley, Bradford Dickerson, and Lisa Feldman Barrett. 2017. “Evidence for a Large-Scale Brain System Supporting Interoception in Humans.” Nature Human Behavior 1: 0069.