Abstract
In this editorial, we discuss the neurobiological processes underlying the early emergence of awareness that we term the “when” and “how” the mind comes to live inside the body. We describe an accumulative developmental process starting during embryonic life and continuing to fetal and postnatal development, of coupling of heart rate, body movements, and sleep states on the behavioral level with underlying mechanisms on the structural, functional, cellular, and molecular lev-els. A developmental perspective is proposed based on Perceptual Control Theory (PCT). This in-cludes a developing sequence of modules starting from early sensing of neural intensities to early manifestation of human mindful capacities. We also address pharmacological treatments adminis-tered to preterm infants, which may interfere with this development, and highlight the need to consider this potential “side effect” of current pharmaceuticals when developing novel phar-macogenomic treatments.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 13-21 |
Number of pages | 9 |
Journal | Current Neuropharmacology |
Volume | 21 |
Issue number | 1 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Jan 2023 |
Keywords
- Fetal development
- brainstem
- coupling
- epigenomics
- preterm infants
- thalamus
All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes
- Clinical Neurology
- Neurology
- Psychiatry and Mental health
- Pharmacology (medical)
- Pharmacology