Search Results

This chapter looks at the experiments that demonstrated in monkeys and humans the unforeseen lamina I pathway to the thalamus and its subsequent projection to the interoceptive cortex. The ascending interoceptive thalamocortical pathway is phylogenetically unique to primates; it most likely arose in conjunction with the enormous encephalization associated with the emergence of the primate lineage. The existence of this pathway was a surprise to most investigators in the field of somatosensory neurobiology. As mentioned in chapter 1, a sensory representation of general feelings from the body had been envisioned by the German natural philosophers of the nineteenth century. However, that concept was superseded by the heuristic codification of nociception and the assignment of pain and temperature sensations to the somatosensory cortex. The chapter's findings rectify that misconception and substantiate the fundamental neurobiological distinction between interoception and exteroception at the thalamocortical level in the monkey and human.

This chapter reviews three constructs that have important contributions to risky decision making. First, it considers interoception and its neural substrates, discusses the characteristics of interoceptive processing as they relate to decision making, and outlines the relationship between interoception and reward. Second, the notion of alliesthesia is introduced and the connection to interoception is provided, together with the presumed underlying neural substrates. Third, a heuristic homeostatic decision-making model is proposed, which is based on existing mathematical formulations of prospect theory augmented by a variable that indicates the internal state of the individual. Based on this extension, it can be shown that individuals undergo preference reversals in decision-making situations. These three approaches can be used to better quantify and understand decision-making dysfunctions in individuals with psychiatric disorders.

Early thinking on the role of emotions in cognition sometimes characterized them as a liability, but the modern understanding the computational role of emotions places them at the centre of fast decision-making by using the body’s self-state inventory as a source of value judgement. Additionally it is necessary to appreciate that the emotional system has a very complex structure owing to its lengthy phylogenetic development history. Consequently the full emotional picture requires appreciating its different levels in a six-level abstraction hierarchy. Lower levels regulate basic body needs and drives. Higher levels reconcile the evaluation of the external world with internal body-centric ratings. The highest levels manage signalling and feelings.

Is minimal selfhood a build-in feature of our experiential life (Gallagher 2005; Zahavi 2005, 2014; Legrand 2006) or a later socio-culturally determined acquisition, emerging in the process of social exchanges and mutual interactions (Fonagy et al. 2004; Prinz 2012; Schmid 2014)? This chapter, building mainly on empirical research on affective touch and interoception, argues in favor of a reconceptualization of minimal selfhood that surpasses such debates, and their tacitly “detached,” visuo-spatial models of selfhood and otherness. Instead, the relational origins of the self are traced on fundamental principles and regularities of the human embodied condition, such as the amodal properties that govern the organization of sensorimotor signals into distinct perceptual experiences. Interactive experiences with effects on “within” and “on” the physical boundaries of the body (e.g., skin-to-skin touch) are necessary for such organization in early infancy when the motor system is not as yet developed. Therefore, an experiencing subject is not primarily understood as facing another subject “there.” Instead, the minimal self is by necessity co-constituted by other bodies in physical contact and proximal interaction.

The integrated memory model (IMM) proposed that the change process in psychotherapy involves the joint activation and reconsolidation of episodic memory, semantic memory, and emotional responses. The IMM did not thoroughly elaborate on what was meant by “emotional responses,” but a key concept was the distinction between implicit and explicit emotion. This chapter reviews the three-process model (TPM) of implicit and explicit emotion and its implications for extending the IMM. The TPM provides a detailed characterization (at cognitive, computational, and neural levels of description) of the processes associated with an emotional response. These processes include (a) situation appraisal and the subsequent generation of an affective (bodily, cognitive, and automatic skeletomotor) response, (b) the subsequent internal representation of that response (in terms of bodily sensations and emotion concepts), and (c) the role of salience, attention, and goal relevance in moderating whether or not one becomes aware of their emotions. After introducing the TPM, the author illustrates its utility in clarifying the nature of emotional responses in the IMM. The chapter also illustrates how the TPM can provide insight regarding the specific processes targeted by therapeutic interventions and how they could promote more adaptive emotional functioning.

The chapter discusses the phenomenon of readers’ sense of presence in the narrative. It argues that readers develop a sense of ‘being there’ predominantly through the integration of textual cues that evoke exteroceptive and interoceptive embodiment. The perception of bodily states from the outside (exteroception) and from the inside (interoception) is joined by the counterfactual richness of these embodied cues, enabling multiple engagements, as a second feature of ‘presence’. These features lead to a reconsideration of how cognitive narratology has conceived of presence, immersion, and absorption. Rather than the space of the fictional world, here the dynamic of designed sensory flow is foregrounded.

The chapter proposes that the three different statistics, social, vegetative, and natural, are matched and compared with each other; this results in what the theory of predictive coding describes as actual input (and ultimately as prediction error); that is, the neural activity change in the reward system during value assignment. Such prediction error as the matching and comparison between different stimuli and their respective statistics is possible, however, only on the basis of coding the differences between the different stimuli—that is, difference-based coding—rather than coding the stimuli themselves, or stimulus-based coding. Hence, the example of reward again demonstrates predictive coding to presuppose difference-based coding. Furthermore, the discussion of reward shows that the concept of the prediction error and more specifically the concept of the actual input needs to be specified (and elaborated) by the matching and comparison between different statistics: natural, social, and vegetative.

How are the resting state activity’s prephenomenal structures transformed into a full-blown phenomenal state during stimulus-induced activity? The central stimuli input are interoceptive stimuli from the body, which continuously feed into the brain’s resting-state activity. Phenomenally, such continuous interoceptive input is manifested in our consciousness of the body, which is more or less almost always present in the background or the foreground of any consciousness.

From physical bodies this chapter proceeds to discuss virtual bodies, avatars, and robots. Depending on one’s viewpoint, the new social technologies are either opportunities for applying existing insights or, alternatively, are profoundly changing our familiar concepts of mind, body, self, emotion, and consciousness. The simple picture of emotional consciousness attributing the feelings we experience to their causes, begs the questions. A reliable link between feelings and their objects or causes cannot be taken for granted and is no explanation. Are there feelings related to nonconscious perception of bodily expressions? Body expression perception in the case of autism or schizophrenia provides perspective. How do we feel about nonhuman bodies like avatars or robots? Companion animals have health benefits. Realism is important in making avatars and robots useful, and the quality of virtual character perception increases when multiple sensory systems converge. Will we be able to invest an avatar with our self?

The perception of our own body is a defining characteristic of our sense of self and a prerequisite for interacting with the environment and guiding movements. In the traditional view, the body is perceived mostly through somatosensation. However, experimental results are increasingly demonstrating that visual and vestibular signals also play an important role in body perception, that somatosensation in body perception is not limited to touch as traditionally conceived but may also include signals from the interior of the body (interoception), and, perhaps most surprisingly, that how we perceive and represent our body can be rapidly altered by novel combinations of multisensory stimuli. These findings have important implications for our understanding of neurological impairments of body representation and for their rehabilitation.

Although the efferent role of the autonomic nervous system (ANS) in homeostasis has long been recognized, afferent aspects of the ANS—especially interoception—are increasingly recognized to be equally important. Interoception is fundamental to the regulation of internal physiology, particularly as it is coordinated with contextually determined and adaptive behavioral processes. A cardinal but often underappreciated feature of interoception is its role in myriad cognitive and affective processes that are integrated in health and disease. This chapter introduces the concept of interoception and outlines its historical origins and applications in multiple domains of psychology and psychobiology. It provides an overview of its peripheral and central neural substrates, and it outlines how this construct is best conceptualized within a multi-system and multi-level regulatory framework.

Embodied predictive processing accounts place the visceral milieu, its homeostatic functioning, and our interoceptive awareness thereof on the center stage of self-awareness. Starting from the privileged status that homeostatic priors have within the cortical hierarchy of an organism whose main imperative is to maintain homeostasis, we focus on the mechanisms that underlie interoceptive precision and its impact on embodiment and cognition. Beyond their privileged status for ensuring the stability of organism, this chapter considers the psychological importance that interoceptive priors and interoceptive precision have for self-awareness and the grounding of a coherent self-model. In a manner analogous to the role that interoception plays for homeostasis, interoception at the psychological level seems to contribute to the stability of self-awareness. This psychological role of interoception is illustrated by a growing body of research that considers the antagonism but also the integration between exteroceptive and interoceptive models of the self.

The self has long been hypothesized to be rooted in the neural monitoring of bodily signals. We propose here to focus on visceral inputs, which present some key characteristics. Inputs from the heart or the gastrointestinal tract are continuously produced, and can reach multiple cortical targets. In addition, cardiac inputs elicit a neural response at each heartbeat that can be recorded non-invasively in humans, even in the absence of measurable changes in bodily state. We review the recent experimental evidence that neural responses to heartbeats are related to the self, in situations where the self is explicit or reflective (bodily awareness, thinking about oneself) but also when the self is implicit (the self as the agent, the self experiencing a visual input). These results are compatible with our proposal that the integration of visceral signals generates a subject-centered reference frame underlying different facets of the self.

Internal states of bodily arousal contribute to emotional feeling states and behaviors. This chapter details the influence of interoceptive processing on emotion and describes how deficits in interoceptive ability may underpin aberrant emotional processes characteristic of clinical conditions. The representation and control of bodily physiology (e.g. heart rate and blood pressure) and the encoding of emotional experience and behavior share neural substrates within forebrain regions coupled to ascending neuromodulatory systems. This functional architecture provides a basis for dynamic embodiment of emotion. This chapter will approach the relationship between interoception and emotion within the interoceptive predictive processing framework and describe how emotional states could be the product of interoceptive prediction error minimization.

A regulatory battle for control ensues in the central nervous system following a mismatch between the current physiological state of an organism as mapped in viscerosensory brain regions and the predicted body state as computed in visceromotor control regions. The discrepancy between the predicted and current body state (i.e. the “somatic error”) signals a need for corrective action, motivating changes in both cognition and behavior. This chapter argues that anxiety disorders are fundamentally driven by somatic errors that fail to be adaptively regulated, leaving the organism in a state of dissonance where the predicted body state is perpetually out of line with the current body state. Repeated failures to quell somatic error can result in long-term changes to interoceptive circuitry within the brain. This chapter explores the neuropsychiatric sequelae that can emerge following chronic allostatic dysregulation of somatic errors and discusses novel therapies that might help to correct this dysregulation.

The importance of interoception for adaptive and maladaptive behavior, as well as for psychopathology, has gained growing interest, and dysfunctional interoception has been recognized as representing a core impairment across psychosomatic and psychiatric disorders. Eating is intrinsically guided by interoceptive signals and is directly associated with homeostatic psychophysiological needs, well-being, and survival. This chapter provides conceptually and empirically drawn conclusions focusing on the relevance of distinguishable dimensions of interoception for shaping eating behavior and body weight, and for eating disorders. Going beyond eating behavior per se, anorexia and bulimia nervosa are conceptualized as characterized by profound impairment of the self, with dysfunctional interoception at its core. Predictive coding models are addressed to integrate conclusions and empirical findings tentatively.

This chapter reviews studies that investigate the effects of mindfulness practice on attention under a number of guises: The effects of meditation on controlling attention, nonjudgmental alterting, the limits of perception, sustained attention, and the stability of attention. It investigates whether the effects are really due to changes in attention per se or to changes in effort. It reviews work on mindfulness and proprioception and interoception (awareness of the breath and of heart rate, body awareness, awareness of how emotion inscribes itself into the body, and sensitivity to signals of sexual arousal), timekeeping, and other aspects of cognition. It also examines what is known about meditation and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

Dimensional and transdiagnostic approaches have revealed multiple cognitive/emotional alterations shared by several neuropsychiatric conditions. While this has been shown for externally triggered neurocognitive processes, the disruption of interoception across neurological disorders remains poorly understood. This chapter aims to fill this gap while proposing cardiac interoception as a potential common biomarker across disorders. It focuses on key aspects of interoception, such as the mechanisms underlying different interoceptive dimensions; the relationship among interoception, emotion, and social cognition; and the roles of different interoceptive pathways. It considers behavioral and brain evidence in the context of an experimental and clinical agenda to evaluate the potential role of interoception as a predictor of clinical outcomes, a marker of neurocognitive deficits across diseases, and a general source of insights for breakthroughs in the treatment and prevention of multiple disorders. Finally, future directions to improve the dimensional and transdiagnostic assessment of interoception are outlined.