Interoception

…The call covers agency, interoception and emotion regulation, identity and self-narrative, and meaning or belonging. Projects should test mechanisms rather than only symptom relief. Up to USD 900,000 supports three years, including no more than 15% overhead. Submit an anonymised letter of intent by 5 October 2026 at 11:59 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time. Full proposals in February 2027 require invitation.

…Interoception is activated for example by mild hypercapnia during CO2 inhalation due to homeostatic disturbances of the body eliciting anxiety and even panic-like behaviours across species. Yet, although altered interoception is increasingly recognized as an important component of anxiety disorders, its underlying neural mechanisms remain little understood. Here, we aimed to elucidate whether trait anxiety levels affect the engagement of the anxiety network in response to CO2 challenge. Mice

Interoception, the internal perception of bodily states such as heartbeat and hunger, plays a crucial role in shaping cognitive and emotional states. Given that previous studies have shown postural control influences cognitive and emotional processing, understanding how postural control influences interoception could contribute to reveal the neural basis of its effects on cognition and emotion. Here, we aimed to investigate the effects of posture on interoception by using heartbeat evoked potentials (HEPs), which are event-related potentials that reflect the cortical processing of heartbeats.T

The subjective experience of internal sensation processing (interoception) which affects emotions, appears to be altered in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and anxiety disorders. Anxiety is a frequently co-occurring condition in patients with ASD, exacerbating ASD symptoms and causing functional impairments in these individuals. In contrast to anxiety in normotypic populations, our knowledge about the neuronal correlates of anxiety in ASD is very limited. Here we investigated behavioral responses to CO2 inhalation in Setd5 haploinsufficient (Setd5+/-) mice, which demonstrate signs of ASD and al

Integration of visceral-interoceptive signals seems to underlie our physiological experience of time. To further investigate this relationship, we used the non invasive stimulation of the auricular branch of the vagus nerve (taVNS), which, as has been highlighted, has a modulatory effect on several high-level cognitive processes. The vagal system is crucial in regulating the organism's homeostasis and it has broad connections with various cortical and subcortical regions. In our study, healthy subjects were engaged in explicit and implicit temporal tasks across two separate experimental sessio

Interoception it has a large influence on how animals make decisions and is necessary to adjust internal body function to the organism’s needs, such as during rest or hunting. The heart is essential in the process to adapt the animal to changing circumstances by increasing or decreasing its rate. Heart rate modulation occurs through the communication between sensory and motor ganglia of the autonomic nervous system. The vagal neurons transmit information to the heart and send information via the autonomic nervous system to the central nervous system. How they interact to change heart activity,

Interoception, the process through which afferent information reaches the brain to report the body's physiological state, is a critical element in adapting responses to potential threats. Cardiac interoceptive information has been shown to play a crucial role in these adaptive defensive processes. Neuronal circuits within the periaqueductal grey (PAG) play a pivotal role in controlling heart function, yet it remains unknown how PAG circuits process interoceptive signals as part of a defensive reaction to threats. Employing trans-synaptic retrograde tracing, we demonstrate that glycinergic neur

Brain-organ communications play a crucial role in maintaining the body's physiological and psychological homeostasis, and are controlled by complex neural and hormonal systems, including the internal mechanosensory organs. However, the progress has been slow due to technical hurdles: the sensory neurons are deeply buried inside the body and are not readily accessible for direct observation, the projection patterns from different organs or body parts are complex rather than converging into dedicate brain regions, the coding principle cannot be directly adapted from that learned from conventiona

Accumulating data indicate that the brain can affect immunity, as evidenced, for example, by the effects of stress, stroke, and reward system activity on the peripheral immune system. However, our understanding of this neuroimmune interaction is still limited. Importantly, we do not know how the brain evaluates and represents the state of the immune system. In this talk, I will present our latest study from our lab, designed to test the existence of immune-related information in the brain and determine its relevance to immune regulation. We hypothesized that the InsCtx, specifically the poster

Interoception, the sense of internal bodily signals, is essential for physiological homeostasis, cognition, and emotions. While human insular cortex (InsCtx) is implicated in interoception, the cellular and circuit mechanisms remain unclear. I will describe our recent work imaging mouse InsCtx neurons during two physiological deficiency states – hunger and thirst. InsCtx ongoing activity patterns reliably tracked the gradual return to homeostasis, but not changes in behavior. Accordingly, while artificial induction of hunger/thirst in sated mice via activation of specific hypothalamic neurons

…of internal organ sensing, interoception, is far behind. I will describe our findings on the role of PIEZO ion channels in the lesser-known interoceptive senses in multiple organ systems.

…affects emotional self-awareness and Interoception. In study 1 (N = 80), we tested this hypothesis by studying the spatio-temporal dynamics and entropy of eye-gaze during emotion processing tasks. Evidence from traditional and novel methods revealed that atypical eye-gaze and emot

Interoception, the sense of internal bodily signals, is essential for physiological homeostasis, cognition, and emotions. Human neuroimaging studies suggest insular cortex plays a central role in interoception, yet the cellular and circuit mechanisms of its involvement remain unclear. We developed a microprism-based cellular imaging approach to monitor insular cortex activity in behaving mice across different physiological need states. We combine this imaging approach with manipulations of peripheral physiology, circuit-mapping, cell type-specific and circuit-specific manipulation approaches t