Primordial emotions, neural substrates, and sentience: affective neuroscience relevant to psychiatric practice

In this commentary, the notion of sentience is appraised from the perspective of affective neuroscience. Following Denton’s formulation of primordial emotions, we consider interoceptive and motivational feeling states as foundational to core sentience emerging from allostatic regulation. Drawing on evidence regarding human brain substrates implicated in the expression of air hunger and psycho-immunological responses, we conceptualize representations within, and interactions between, neural regions that support emergent higher-order allostatic ‘policies’, wherein sentience may serve as a bridge between the signalling of salient deviations within homeostasis and intentions-to-act. The role of glia in mediating the adaptive functions of reactive neural architectures is increasingly appreciated within a broader formulation of brain biology across spatio-temporal scales and arguably grounded on the governance of energy metabolism. The relevance to psychiatry of Pereira Jr.‘s formulation of sentience, as expressed through the filter of affective neuroscience, is reviewed with reference to emerging evolutionaryinformed models of psychopathology.