Professor Hong-Wei Dong | Mapping the Mind’s Command Centre for the Body

The brain’s ability to manage stress and guide behaviour, including making decisions or interacting with others, relies in part on an area called the medial prefrontal cortex. But exactly how this region controls the body’s internal responses has remained unclear. New research on mice led by Prof Hong-Wei Dong and his team at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) sheds light on a little-studied part of the brain that may play a key role. The work reveals a complex network, unconvering a previously undefined “primary visceromotor cortex” in the mouse brain, that helps link thoughts, feelings, and physical state. This discovery could reshape our understanding of how the brain controls stress, emotion, and internal bodily functions, and offer new insights into human mental health disorders.