Bodily organs such as the heart and the lungs play a crucial role in maintaining physiological homeostasis in a continuous closed-loop interaction with the brain. Beyond their vital role, recent developments have emphasized the remarkable contribution of bodily signals to high-level brain functions. A direct route by which bodily signals influence brain functioning is via modulation of...
The perception of internal bodily signals (interoception) is central to many theories of emotion and embodied cognition. According to recent theoretical views, the sensory processing of visceral signals such as one's own heartbeat is determined by top-down predictions about the expected interoceptive state of the body (interoceptive inference). In this EEG study we examined neural responses to...