From cognition in the body to the body in cognition

One of the exciting areas of research in biology aims at mapping and understanding how the state of the body is read out by the brain, and how this information is used to control not only bodily functions but also behaviors and mental processes. Work on brain-body interactions promises to widen the scope of neuroscience to encompass a more integrative understanding of both neuroscience and biology in general. Despite this integrative ambition, work in this field remains largely focused on exploring how bodily signals influence the brain in regulating homeostatic functions, such as breathing or feeding. Here, we emphasize that brain-body interactions provide a powerful and important entry point in understanding cognitive processes and their neuronal substrates, and that a lot is to be gained by breaking down the classic separation between those 'low level' body functions and 'high level' cognitive functions, such as learning and memory. We show that the interaction of these classically separated fields is likely to be ancient and appears across animals, including humans. Furthermore, we highlight that this is not only an important perspective towards an integrated understanding of biology, but also that it has the potential to inform clinically relevant neuropsychiatric disorders.