Sense and Salience

Over the past decades, we have learned much about how the brain constructs internal representations of the external world through stimulation of the senses. However, our brains do not simply record the physical scenery around us. Instead, they must extract salience from the incoming sensory streams, and combine salience with internally sensed information about physiological and mental state that guide behavioral reactions, learning, and survival. New questions have emerged about how neural activities in sensory brain areas enable humans and other animals to function and thrive in their worlds, and how brain health may become dysfunctional when the processing of stimuli goes awry. Here we argue that the sensory nervous system lies at the core of such questions due to its centrality in driving how the rest of the brain infers the world outside and inside its body.