The Salience Network: A Neural System for Perceiving and Responding to Homeostatic Demands

The term "salience network" refers to a suite of brain regions whose cortical hubs are the anterior cingulate and ventral anterior insular (i.e., frontoinsular) cortices. This network, which also includes nodes in the amygdala, hypothalamus, ventral striatum, thalamus, and specific brainstem nuclei, coactivates in response to diverse experimental tasks and conditions, suggesting a domain-general function. In the 12 years since its initial description, the salience network has been extensively studied, using diverse methods, concepts, and mammalian species, including healthy and diseased humans across the lifespan. Despite this large and growing body of research, the essential functions of the salience network…