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The self in context: brain systems linking mental and physical health

Nature Reviews Neuroscience volume 22, pages 309–322 (2021)Cite this article

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Abstract

Increasing evidence suggests that mental health and physical health are linked by neural systems that jointly regulate somatic physiology and high-level cognition. Key systems include the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and the related default-mode network. These systems help to construct models of the ‘self-in-context’, compressing information across time and sensory modalities into conceptions of the underlying causes of experience. Self-in-context models endow events with personal meaning and allow predictive control over behaviour and peripheral physiology, including autonomic, neuroendocrine and immune function. They guide learning from experience and the formation of narratives about the self and one’s world. Disorders of mental and physical health, especially those with high co-occurrence and convergent alterations in the functionality of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and the default-mode network, could benefit from interventions focused on understanding and shaping mindsets and beliefs about the self, illness and treatment.

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Fig. 1: A schematic of self-in-context models and their role in health and disease.
Fig. 2: Anatomy and functional connectivity of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex.
Fig. 3: Functional associations of ventromedial prefrontal cortex with connected brain networks.

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Code availability

Instructions and the code to generate the visualizations of the term-based meta-analytic association maps in Fig. 3 are included in Supplementary information S3.

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Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful for support from the US National Institutes of Health, including grants R01MH076136 and R01DA035484 (T.D.W.), R01DA043690 and R01DA042911 (H.K.) and NHLBI P01 040962 (P.J.G.), and for a Marie-Skłodowska-Curie/PRESTIGE fellowship (PRESTIGE-2018-2-0023) from Campus France (L.K.). The authors thank M. Meyer for helpful feedback, and L. Feldman Barrett and two anonymous reviewers for constructive peer-review comments on prior drafts of the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Paris Brain Institute (ICM), INSERM U 1127, CNRS UMR 7225, Sorbonne University, Paris, France

    Leonie Koban

  2. INSEAD, Fontainebleau, France

    Leonie Koban

  3. Institute of Cognitive Science, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO, USA

    Leonie Koban & Tor D. Wager

  4. Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO, USA

    Leonie Koban & Tor D. Wager

  5. Department of Psychology, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

    Peter J. Gianaros

  6. Departments of Psychiatry and Psychology, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA

    Hedy Kober

  7. Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, USA

    Tor D. Wager

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  1. Leonie Koban
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  2. Peter J. Gianaros
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  3. Hedy Kober
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  4. Tor D. Wager
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Contributions

L.K. and T.D.W. conceptualized the article, wrote the first draft and created the figures. P.J.G. and H.K. contributed to the conceptual model, literature review, interpretation and writing.

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Correspondence to Leonie Koban or Tor D. Wager.

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Nature Reviews Neuroscience thanks L. Feldman Barrett and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Koban, L., Gianaros, P.J., Kober, H. et al. The self in context: brain systems linking mental and physical health. Nat Rev Neurosci 22, 309–322 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41583-021-00446-8

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