The Vagus Nerve: How the Brain Listens to the Body

The brain listens to the needs of the body in order to carefully orchestrate our behavior and physiology. The vagus nerve is a major instrument of the body-brain axis, receiving vital signals from the body’s respiratory, cardiovascular and digestive systems. Yet, how the vagus nerve detects bodily stimuli at a molecular level has long remained mysterious.

In this Presidential Lecture, Stephen Liberles will discuss his lab’s efforts to elucidate the workings of the vagus nerve. He built genetic approaches to study the vagus nerve in mice and charted a striking diversity of sensory neurons in the heart, lungs and gastrointestinal tract. He discovered novel body-brain reflexes, sensory receptors, and mechanisms underlying classical reflexes, as well as key features of how bodily signals are organized in the brain. Defining body-brain communication pathways and underlying signaling mechanisms has revealed basic principles of neurophysiology and may provide new ways to treat autonomic diseases.