PLoS OneAugust 27, 2025Amy Kartar, Toru Horinouchi, Balázs Örzsik et al.1 citation
The popularity of breathwork as a therapeutic tool for psychological distress is rapidly expanding. Breathwork practices that increase ventilatory rate or depth, facilitated by music, can evoke subjective experiential states analogous to altered states of consciousness (ASCs) evoked by psychedelic substances. These states include components such as euphoria, bliss, and perceptual differences....
Mismatches between perceived and veridical physiological signals during false feedback (FFB) can bias emotional judgements. Paradigms using auditory FFB suggest perceived changes in heart rate (HR) increase ratings of emotional intensity irrespective of feedback type (increased or decreased HR), implicating right anterior insula as a mismatch comparator between exteroceptive and interoceptive...
High Ventilation Breathwork (HVB) refers to practices employing specific volitional manipulation of breathing, with a long history of use to relieve various forms of psychological distress. This paper seeks to offer a consolidative insight into potential clinical application of HVB as a treatment of psychiatric disorders. We thus review the characteristic phenomenological and neurophysiological...
BACKGROUND The presence of auditory verbal hallucinations (AVH) does not currently feature in the main diagnostic criteria for Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). However, there is accumulating evidence that a high proportion of BPD patients report longstanding and frequent AVH which constitute a significant risk factor for suicide plans and attempts, and hospitalisation. AIM This study...
INTRODUCTION: Metacognition, or "thinking about thinking", is a higher-order thought process that allows for the evaluation of perceptual processes for accuracy. Metacognitive accuracy is associated with the grey matter volume (GMV) in the prefrontal cortex (PFC), an area also impacted in schizophrenia. The present study set out to investigate whether deficits in metacognitive accuracy are...
Naturalistic environments have been demonstrated to promote relaxation and wellbeing. We assess opposing theoretical accounts for these effects through investigation of autonomic arousal and alterations of activation and functional connectivity within the default mode network (DMN) of the brain while participants listened to sounds from artificial and natural environments. We found no evidence...
Interoception refers to the sensing of signals concerning the internal state of the body. Individual differences in interoceptive sensitivity are proposed to account for differences in affective processing, including the expression of anxiety. The majority of investigations of interoceptive accuracy focus on cardiac signals, typically using heartbeat detection tests and self-report measures....
Interoception refers to the sensing of the internal state of one's body. Interoception is distinct from the processing of sensory information concerning external (non-self) stimuli (e.g. vision, hearing, touch and smell) and is the afferent axis to internal (autonomic and hormonal) physiological control. However, the impact of interoception extends beyond homeostatic/allostatic reflexes: it is...
Identifying with a body is central to being a conscious self. The now classic "rubber hand illusion" demonstrates that the experience of body-ownership can be modulated by manipulating the timing of exteroceptive (visual and tactile) body-related feedback. Moreover, the strength of this modulation is related to individual differences in sensitivity to internal bodily signals (interoception)....
We describe a theoretical model of the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying conscious presence and its disturbances. The model is based on interoceptive prediction error and is informed by predictive models of agency, general models of hierarchical predictive coding and dopaminergic signaling in cortex, the role of the anterior insular cortex (AIC) in interoception and emotion, and cognitive...
Can conscious awareness be ascertained from physiological responses alone? We evaluate a novel learning-based procedure permitting detection of conscious awareness without reliance on language comprehension or behavioural responses. The method exploits a situation whereby only consciously detected violations of an expectation alter skin conductance responses (SCRs). Thirty participants listened...
There is now a wealth of evidence that anterior insular and anterior cingulate cortices have a close functional relationship, such that they may be considered together as input and output regions of a functional system. This system is typically engaged across cognitive, affective, and behavioural contexts, suggesting that it is of fundamental importance for mental life. Here, we review the...