Physiological regulation through learnt control of appetites by contingencies among signals from external and internal environments

As reviewed by [Cooper, S. J. (2008). From Claude Bernard to Walter Cannon: emergence of the concept of homeostasis. Appetite 51, xxx–xxx.] Claude Bernardʹs idea of stabilisation of bodily states, as realised in Walter B. Cannonʹs conception of homeostasis, took mathematical form during the 1940s in the principle that externally originating disturbance of a physiological parameter can feed an informative signal around the brain to trigger counteractive processes – a corrective mechanism known as negative feedback, in practice reliant on feedforward. Three decades later, enough was known of the physiology and psychology of eating and drinking for calculations to show how experimentally demonstrated mechanisms of feedforward that had been learnt from negative feedback combine to regulate exchanges of water and energy between the body and the surroundings. Subsequent systemic physiology, molecular neuroscience and experimental psychology, however, have been traduced by a misconception that learnt controls of intake are ‘non-homeostatic’, the myth of biological ‘set points’ and an historic failure to address evidence for the ingestion-adapting information-processing mechanisms on which an operationally integrative theory of eating and drinking relies.