Department of Psychology, College of Science, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA.
Department of Psychology, College of Science, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA; Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Charlestown, MA, USA.
Biol Psychol. 2023 Sep;182:108626. doi: 10.1016/j.biopsycho.2023.108626. Epub 2023 Jul 6.
Each organism must regulate its internal state in a metabolically efficient way as it interacts in space and time with an ever-changing and only partly predictable world. Success in this endeavor is largely determined by the ongoing communication between brain and body, and the vagus nerve is a crucial structure in that dialogue. In this review, we introduce the novel hypothesis that the afferent vagus nerve is engaged in signal processing rather than just signal relay. New genetic and structural evidence of vagal afferent fiber anatomy motivates two hypotheses: (1) that sensory signals informing on the physiological state of the body compute both spatial and temporal viscerosensory features as they ascend the vagus nerve, following patterns found in other sensory architectures, such as the visual and olfactory systems; and (2) that ascending and descending signals modulate one another, calling into question the strict segregation of sensory and motor signals, respectively. Finally, we discuss several implications of our two hypotheses for understanding the role of viscerosensory signal processing in predictive energy regulation (i.e., allostasis) as well as the role of metabolic signals in memory and in disorders of prediction (e.g., mood disorders).
每个生物体在与不断变化且部分可预测的世界进行时空交互时，必须以代谢有效的方式调节其内部状态。在这方面的成功在很大程度上取决于大脑和身体之间的持续沟通，而迷走神经是这种对话中的关键结构。在这篇综述中，我们提出了一个新的假设，即传入迷走神经参与信号处理，而不仅仅是信号传递。迷走神经传入纤维解剖结构的新遗传和结构证据支持两个假设：(1) 当沿着迷走神经上升时，告知身体生理状态的感觉信号计算空间和时间内脏感觉特征，遵循在其他感觉结构（如视觉和嗅觉系统）中发现的模式；(2) 上行和下行信号相互调节，从而对感觉和运动信号的严格分离提出质疑。最后，我们讨论了我们的两个假设对理解内脏感觉信号处理在预测性能量调节（即适应）中的作用以及代谢信号在记忆和预测障碍（例如，情绪障碍）中的作用的几个影响。
