It’s not the thought that counts: Allostasis at the core of brain function

In psychology and neuroscience, scientific questions are often framed in terms of mental activity (e.g., cognition, emotion, and perception); however, the brain is an organ with a particular function that only it can fulfill. Converging evidence suggests that this function is allostasis: the predictive regulation of competing demands from internal bodily systems. We review evidence for a distributed allostatic system that organizes whole-brain signaling, scaffolds psychological phenomena, and places bodily regulation at the core of brain structure. We also demonstrate, with an example from Alzheimer's disease, how an "allostasis-first" perspective might transform hypothesis generation in the context of neurological health and disease. In sum, the common conception that the brain is primarily for thinking, or other cognitive processes, is potentially misleading, and neuroscience may benefit from a theoretical structure that centers on basic questions of how the brain coordinates and efficiently regulates the body.