The Autonomic Brain: An Activation Likelihood Estimation Meta-Analysis for Central Processing of Autonomic Function
By Florian Beissner, Karin Meissner, Karl-Jürgen Bär, Vitaly Napadow. Journal of Neuroscience, 2013
814 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The autonomic nervous system (ANS) is of paramount importance for daily life. Its regulatory action on respiratory, cardiovascular, digestive, endocrine, and many other systems is controlled by a number of structures in the CNS. While the majority of these nuclei and cortices have been identified in animal models, neuroimaging studies have recently begun to shed light on central autonomic processing in humans. In this study, we used activation likelihood estimation to conduct a meta-analysis of human neuroimaging experiments evaluating central autonomic processing to localize (1) cortical and subcortical areas involved in autonomic processing, (2) potential subsystems for the sympathetic and parasympathetic divisions of the ANS, and (3) potential subsystems for specific ANS responses to different stimuli/tasks. Across all tasks, we identified a set of consistently activated brain regions, comprising left amygdala, right anterior and left posterior insula and midcingulate cortices that form the core of the central autonomic network. While sympathetic-associated regions predominate in executive- and salience-processing networks, parasympathetic regions predominate in the default mode network. Hence, central processing of autonomic function does not simply involve a monolithic network of brain regions, instead showing elements of task and division specificity.
Subfields: Cardiology and Cardiovascular Medicine, Cognitive Neuroscience, Endocrine and Autonomic Systems
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c36905b8dc4011c8a6a412d295eddbd2c62a4b5a
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In Cognitive Neuroscience
Citations in the corpus
- The Salience Network: A Neural System for Perceiving and Responding to Homeostatic Demands (2019, background): “Many groups, including ours, have highlighted the role of the salience network in autonomic processing (Critchley et al., 2011; Beissner et al., 2013; Guo et al., 2016; Sturm et al., 2018), but it has proved challenging to disentangle representations related to homeostatic salience from those that…”