Humans think and act not only with the brain but also with the heart, lungs, gut, and other viscera, such as the bladder, long regarded as primarily vegetative. A fresh wave of experiments is revealing the role of cardiac-cycle phase and baroreceptor firing in perception and social behavior; respiration-locked neural dynamics in attention and learning; and gastrointestinal rhythms and vagal...
Humans are unique in their ability to think about themselves and carry a more or less clear notion of who they are in their mind. Here we review recent evidence suggesting that the birth, maintenance, and loss of the abstract concept of 'self' is deeply tied to interoception, the sense of internal physiological signals. Interoception influences multiple facets of the self-concept, cutting...
Bodily self-consciousness, the state of mind that allows humans to be aware of their own body, forms the backdrop for almost every human experience, yet its underpinnings remain elusive. Here we combine an ingestible, minimally invasive capsule with surface electrogastrography to probe if gut physiology correlates with bodily self-consciousness during a virtual bodily illusion. We discover that...