Brain-heart interactions at the edges of consciousness

Various clinical cases have provided evidence linking cardiovascular, neurological, and
psychiatric disorders to changes in the brain-heart interaction. Our recent experimental evidence
on patients with disorders of consciousness revealed that observing brain-heart interactions
helps to detect residual consciousness, even in patients with absence of behavioral signs of
consciousness. Those findings support hypotheses suggesting that visceral activity is involved
in the neurobiology of consciousness and sum to the existing evidence in healthy participants
in which the neural responses to heartbeats reveal perceptual and self-consciousness. Furthermore, the presence of non-linear, complex, and bidirectional communication between brain and heartbeat dynamics can provide further insights into the physiological state of the patient following severe brain injury. These developments on methodologies to analyze brain-heart interactions open new avenues for understanding neural functioning at a large-scale
level, uncovering that peripheral bodily activity can influence brain homeostatic processes, cognition, and behavior.