From the Periphery to Self-Representation: Sensory, Autonomic, Sensorimotor, and Neuroimmune Foundations of Body-Brain Communication

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Body-brain communication depends on the continuous detection, transmission, and integration of signals arising from peripheral tissues and the internal environment. This bibliographic study, developed as a critical and mechanistically oriented integrative review with a qualitative approach, analyzed 25 previously selected and verified scientific publications addressing sensory, autonomic, sensorimotor, and neuroimmune mechanisms involved in body-brain communication. The evidence was organized into four analytical domains: peripheral information and neural afference; autonomic organization, vagal signaling, and neuroimmune communication; proprioception, interoception, and body representation; and biological memory and experience-dependent plasticity. The findings showed that peripheral information is encoded by specialized sensory systems and integrated with ongoing physiological states rather than being transmitted as an invariant representation of the original stimulus. Vagal afferents constitute an important but nonexclusive visceral communication pathway, while sympathetic and parasympathetic components contribute according to the physiological and experimental context. Proprioceptive, interoceptive, tactile, and visual signals participate in the dynamic updating of body representation. Evidence of positional, epigenetic, mechanical, and sensorimotor memory further demonstrated history-dependent biological plasticity at distinct levels of organization; however, these phenomena represent mechanistically different processes and do not support the existence of a unified mechanism of body memory or the storage of psychological experiences in peripheral tissues. The study contributes scientifically by integrating mechanisms commonly investigated separately while preserving their experimental and inferential boundaries. It is concluded that body-brain communication constitutes a multilevel biological architecture in which peripheral signals, autonomic regulation, sensory integration, neuroimmune processes, and experience-dependent plasticity contribute to the continuous updating of bodily state. These findings also support further investigation into the physicochemical and bioelectrical conditions of the tissue microenvironment in which cellular communication occurs.