When this happens, the brain will reduce spending on two “expensive” things: moving the body and learning new information. Maintaining allostasis is a lot like managing a budget for the body, in which glucose, water, salt, and other biological compounds constitute the currency, Barrett says as with any budget, it’s possible to run a metabolic deficit. Ironically, Barrett notes, these regions’ limbic cortices, once derided as the brain’s reactively emotional “inner beast,” may be closely tied to the anticipatory processes that construct our perception of the world. Barrett’s research shows that both networks, working in concert, contribute to allostasis and its interoceptive consequences. “This predictive process is the way your brain navigates the world, guides your actions, and constructs your experiences,” she said.īarrett’s work with functional MRI (fMRI) has also shed light on the role of the brain’s default mode network, which helps to initiate prediction signals, and the salience network, which helps to determine which unexpected sense data are important to learn in a given moment. Creating this internal model of your body in the world allows the brain to infer the causes of the sense data that it receives through the retina and other sensory organs. To maintain allostasis, Barrett continued, the brain must continually construct concepts that guide the body by integrating scraps of sensory input with memories of similar experiences from the past. “This means there is a piece of your body in every concept that you make, even in states that we think of as cold cognition.” “Your body is part of your mind, not in some gauzy mystical way, but in a very real biological way,” she said during an Integrative Science Symposium at the 2019 International Convention of Psychological Science (ICPS) in Paris. Interoception - your brain’s representation of sensations from your own body - is the sensory consequence of this activity, Barrett says, and is central to everything from thought, to emotion, to decision making, and our sense of self. The core task of a brain working in service to the body is allostasis: regulating the body’s internal systems by anticipating needs and preparing to satisfy them before they arise. Brains evolved to regulate a body so that it could move around the world efficiently.” They didn’t even really evolve for you to see or hear or feel. “They did not evolve for you to think or to perceive the world accurately. “Brains didn’t evolve for rationality,” said Barrett. This is because our brains didn’t evolve to react to the world around us, but rather to predict what’s going to happen to us next, APS President Lisa Feldman Barrett of Northeastern University explains. Watch a muted video of a book falling off a table, however, and your brain may still generate a version of these sensations - causing you to jump at the illusory slam of the book hitting the ground even though the signals we would normally process as sound or vibration are absent. A heavy book falls off a table next to you, and your brain allows you to see, hear, and feel the impact. It’s common to conceive of the brain as an organ designed to react to stimuli from the outside world.
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