Professor in Medicine
Harvard University Program in Neuroscience
The goal of my lab is to understand the role of corticolimbic areas in guiding attention to, imagery, learning, and memory of, motivationally-salient external and interoceptive stimuli.
The way that external stimuli are encoded in brain activity is increasingly well understood. In contrast, we sorely lack a mechanistic understanding of interoception – the processes by which the brain receives, attends to, and acts upon visceral signals arising from inside the body (e.g., heartbeat, stomach stretch, pain). This is surprising given the urgent clinical mandate for understanding body-brain communication and its disruptions (e.g., in eating disorders, anxiety disorders, addiction, autism, cardiovascular, gastrointestinal and respiratory disorders, and pain). Our research aims to establish a cognitive neuroscience of interoception at cellular resolution.
