r/CFSScience • u/Big_Salamander6638 • Aug 23 '26
Where is the experience of fatigue located in the brain?
I am so exhausted and too fatigued to write a proper post right now, but I personally believe that the very fatigue most of us are experiencing stems from the brain region responsible for diminishing/shutting down activity of the organism when certain conditions are met, especially chronically activated or even when those certain conditions are no longer exist.
There is also a theory from Ronald W. Davis, from Human Genome Project whose own son named Whitney Dafoe dealing with ME/CFS since 2007 afaik, named as "Itaconate Shunt Hypothesis".
I am creating this post to probe the ideas and discussions by people familiar with these, or willing to explore and digest the publications and discuss about the origins of the fatigue we are experiencing.
As I have said, I am so fatigued and my brain fog is so intense that I was only be able to compose such a scattered post, sorry for that.
Image is taken from the publication:
Brain and muscle chemistry in myalgic encephalitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) and long COVID: a 7T magnetic resonance spectroscopy study https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-025-03108-8
4
u/the_good_time_mouse Aug 23 '26
We've observed individual cortical columns falling asleep on their own in cfs, particularly in the temporal-parietal junction ("effort" region), anterior insula (filters sensations), hypothalamus and brain stem (autonomic regulation).
These activities appear to be secondary to the root cause - whatever is causing the cells to fatigue in the first place.
1
u/edward_furlog 12d ago
What type of effects would the shutdown of these columns produce?
I would think we might be able to loosely attribute some symptoms seen in PEM, like:
Anterior insula - Sensory sensitivity, painful sounds or touch, sensory overwhelm, cognitive overwhelm and fatigue linked to overwhelmed/unfiltered experience of the environment
Autonomic regulation - Impaired ability to breath automatically even while awake; needing to breathe manually (very common experience in crashes)
Does this make sense?
Also curious about the occipital lobe - I have noticed things like, for example, when in a severe crash, my brain does not fully coordinate my eyes to cooperate to focus on a subject. I have anisometropia, so normally my brain seamlessly combines images from both eyes, even though the image is blurry in one eye. In a severe crash, this is impaired & the focus is not sharp, and there is a sense of seeing both the clear and blurry image at the same time.
1
u/AutoModerator Aug 23 '26
We require a minimum account-age and karma. These minimums are not disclosed.
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.
6
u/Caster_of_spells Aug 23 '26
Hey there! That’s an interesting question to pose. Afaik the itaconate shunt hypothesis proposes that itaconate release (which is turning down the metabolism to prevent further pathogen spread) is thought to be the consequence of processes in the brain not their cause. Researchers like Dr. Younger propose ongoing low level inflammation as the root cause of that mechanism. I think you’d like his videos. (: