GastroPy is now out in early beta! Please to share our Python toolbox for electrogastrography and stomach-brain coupling analyses. It includes tools for cleaning, visualising, and analysing EGG data, plus fMRI stomach-brain coupling workflows. Docs, code, and preprint below. osf.io/preprints/ps...
My latest feature for @sciam.bsky.social explores the research connecting problems with interoception to a wide variety of mental illnesses, including anxiety disorders, eating disorders, & PTSD. This work is ultimately circling in on a central message: the body & mind are inextricably intertwined.
One more month of my study left to go, and 150 more responses needed!
If you or someone you know is 18+ years old, is based in the UK, and identifies as neurodivergent/disabled then please consider taking part and/or sharing!
tinyurl.com/29jmjxzp
Every participant counts 😊
🎉 Excited to share our publication in PNAS! 🎉
What happens when our stream of consciousness turns towards the body? Our fMRI study of 536 individuals finds that 'body-wandering' is associated with patterns of brain connectivity, physiology, affect, and mental health:
www.pnas.org/doi/full/10....
Excited to share that our work on organ-specific interoception is now published in Communications Psychology!
www.nature.com/articles/s44...
@micahgallen.com @the-ecg.org
⏺ Graphical abstract for the MetaBites study. Three-panel layout flowing left to right. Left panel poses the research question: why does nutritional knowledge fail to predict dietary behaviour, testing caloric density versus nutritional quality (NRF 9.3). Centre panel shows the MetaBites task: a two-alternative forced-choice between two food plates with a confidence slider, measuring sensitivity, confidence, and familiarity ratings in 32 participants across 300 trials. Right panel presents key findings: a faceted bar chart showing higher sensitivity for nutritional quality judgements (d'=1.19 vs 1.10) but higher confidence for calorie judgements (68.2 vs 65.2); overlapping M-ratio distributions confirming higher metacognitive efficiency for calories (1.03) than NRF (0.80); and a familiarity bias diagram showing familiar foods are judged as more nutritious and less caloric. Conclusion states that a familiarity heuristic may partially explain why metacognitive insight for nutrition lags behind calories.
1/ New preprint led by @kellyhoogervorst.bsky.social - Introducing MetaBites, a novel task measuring metacognition in nutritional judgements. Why does nutritional knowledge fail to predict dietary behaviour? Could metacognitive biases explain the gap? #psychscisky 🧪 osf.io/preprints/ps...
Graphical abstract showing three panels. Left panel, "Multiorgan Interoception Measures," depicts a translucent human body silhouette with anatomically rendered heart (red) and lungs (blue), accompanied by schematic icons for three psychophysical tasks: the Respiratory Resistance Sensitivity Task (RRST), Heart Rate Discrimination Task (HRDT), and an auditory control condition. N = 241 participants. Center panel, "Psychophysical Modelling and Individual Differences," shows a fan of overlapping sigmoid psychometric curves in blue-to-red gradient representing individual variation in perceptual threshold (α) and precision (β), a hierarchical Bayesian model diagram, and icons for metacognitive bias and M-Ratio efficiency. Right panel, "Key Finding: No Cross-Modal Relationship," displays a scatterplot of cardiac versus respiratory sensitivity with a flat regression line (r ≈ 0, BF₀₁ > 6), a compact Bayes Factor heatmap with mostly blue null-supporting cells and one orange cell indicating that subjective confidence is shared across modalities (r = 0.51***). Takeaway: interoceptive ability is modality-specific.
Is there a single "interoceptive sense"? Our new study in
@commspsychol.nature.com says: probably not. In 241 participants, cardiac and respiratory interoception were completely uncorrelated — only subjective confidence was shared across domains. www.nature.com/articles/s44... #psychscisky 🧪
Data Organization in Spreadsheets Karl W. Broman & Kara H. Woo Pages 2-10 | Received 01 Jun 2017, Accepted author version posted online: 29 Sep 2017, Published online: 24 Apr 2018 1. Introduction 2. Be Consistent 3. Choose Good Names for Things 4. Write Dates as YYYY-MM-DD 5. No Empty Cells 6. Put Just One Thing in a Cell 7. Make it a Rectangle 8. Create a Data Dictionary 9. No Calculations in the Raw Data Files 10. Do Not Use Font Color or Highlighting as Data 11. Make Backups 12. Use Data Validation to Avoid Errors 13. Save the Data in Plain Text Files ABSTRACT Spreadsheets are widely used software tools for data entry, storage, analysis, and visualization. Focusing on the data entry and storage aspects, this article offers practical recommendations for organizing spreadsheet data to reduce errors and ease later analyses. The basic principles are: be consistent, write dates like YYYY-MM-DD, do not leave any cells empty, put just one thing in a cell, organize the data as a single rectangle (with subjects as rows and variables as columns, and with a single header row), create a data dictionary, do not include calculations in the raw data files, do not use font color or highlighting as data, choose good names for things, make backups, use data validation to avoid data entry errors, and save the data in plain text files.
Every day is a good day for sharing one of the most useful papers about research data ever written. PLEASE get your people to understand and follow this advice.
www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
University of Utah Health Campus at sunset. Image courtesy of the University of Utah.
📢📢 My lab at @utah.edu is officially open and I'm RECRUITING — especially techs/specialists and postdocs! Our research focuses on the neurobiology of interoception and learning & memory using tools from systems/comp neuro. Please share! 🧠🏔️🏜️
Apply/more info: zimmerman-lab.org#positions
Interoceptive Profiling for Predicting of Mental Health: A Person-Centred Approach
Rather than asking whether interoception predict mental health across a population, we examined how measures of subjective interoception naturally cluster within individuals 1/4
Research builds in the best ways. I presented our RISE interoception intervention 2+ years ago in CO, and Liz Atwood immediately saw the potential for youth. She ran with the idea & led this project adapting RISE for school-based health centers. Now the paper is out! psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?d...
Online Studies Psychological Science requires that authors who use samples from online data collection include a statement in the Method section explicitly addressing their approach to preventing and detecting automated or AI-generated responses. Rationale As large language models and other generative AI tools become more accessible, the risk of data contamination by non-human respondents has increased dramatically in research. Psychological science (and the social sciences generally) is particularly susceptible to this issue given its growing reliance on online data collection. Preventing automated responses during data collection and detecting them afterward often involve methodological trade-offs. For instance, technical barriers that aim to prevent LLM use (e.g., blocking copy-pasting functionalities) may eliminate behavioral indicators needed for detection (e.g., pasting rather than typing). This policy aims to enhance transparency and reproducibility of reported results by requiring authors to articulate their approach across both prevention and detection dimensions, enabling readers and reviewers to assess the likelihood of reported data being influenced by automated responses. Scope This policy applies to any submission with at least one study that includes data collected online without direct human supervision (e.g., via crowdsourcing platforms, student participants who complete the study online, online recruitment ads, or remote survey distribution tools). Required Reporting Authors must include in the Methods section either: A statement confirming that procedures were in place to prevent and/or detect and exclude automated or AI-generated responses, including a description of those procedures (e.g., explicit participant instructions against LLM use, disabled copy–paste functionality, CAPTCHA use, IP filtering, consistency checks, attention checks, adversarial prompting) as well as the types of automated responses that these procedures are suitable …
Maybe of interest: The submission guidelines of Psychological Science now demand an explicit statement on measures taken to reduce the risk of AI-generated responses for all online studies!
www.psychologicalscience.org/publications...
How the brain listens to the body matters.
Our new preprint investigates interoceptive processing in schizophrenia spectrum disorders across phenomenology, behavior, and heartbeat-evoked brain responses. 🧠🫀DOI: doi.org/10.64898/202...
Delighted to share my first paper of 2026 "Interoception and allostatic load after stroke: A scoping review". Available now, open access: doi.org/10.1016/j.ne...
It took several late night/early morning meetings, but I’m very happy to see this perspective piece on #Autistic #interoception published. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
Our paper on interoceptive rhythms and perception now is published in NeuroImage 🚀📄
@alexgalvezpol.bsky.social already shared a fantastic breakdown of our main findings in the thread below👇🏽
🔗Full OA article: doi.org/10.1016/j.ne...
#Interoception #Perception #Neuroscience #ActiveSensing
NEPTUNE project logo with affiliations & funders
New job alert 💫 We’re hiring a 3-year postdoc for the NEPTUNE project to study the causal mechanisms of paranoia and social learning.
Work with us on experimental psychopharmacology (THC), social cognition, and psychosis 🧑🔬
Apply here: lnkd.in/gQqnNvjR](my.corehr.com/pls/kclrecru...)
Please RT :)
A figure showing that non-invasive transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation (tVNS) modulates Pavlovian bias in a state-dependent manner. A milkshake vs. water load reduces hunger and these changes are associated with the effects of tVNS on Pavlovian bias.
Last preprint 🎶(of the year).
If vagus nerve stimulation alters motivation by amplifying internal signals, then bodily states should matter. Using milkshake vs. water loads, we show that tVNS-induced changes in Pavlovian bias are dependent on hunger. #neuroskyence 🩺
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
It is hugely fun & we are very lucky to do science for the sake of science. But it is amazing to see work we and many others I admire have done turn into public awareness thanks to excellent science writing.
(see also www.nytimes.com/2025/11/25/s...)
New writeup on interoception in Scientific American focusing on its role in mental health:
www.scientificamerican.com/article/inte...
A graphical abstract showing the research question and the operationalization of the study.
Out now in @ebiomedicine.bsky.social 🚨.
Hunger often affects our mood, but is this a conscious or a subconscious process? Using continuous glucose monitoring, we show that differences in mood are driven by hunger ratings, not just glucose. #neuroskyence 🩺
www.thelancet.com/journals/EBI...
Out now in Translational Psychiatry! www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Very excited to introduce InteroMap, a new bodily mapping tool designed to measure how we subjectively experience our bodily sensations, what we call interoceptive phenomenology 🧵👇
What is the most profitable industry in the world, this side of the law? Not oil, not IT, not pharma.
It's *scientific publishing*.
We call this the Drain of Scientific Publishing.
Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820
Background: doi.org/10.1162/qss_...
Thread @markhanson.fediscience.org.ap.brid.gy 👇
It's that time of year when many start thinking about applying for PhDs. If you're applying for a UK PhD position, here is a blog post I wrote a while back that might be helpful
#cognition #psychscisky #neuroskyence #psychjobs
Thank you to @psypost.bsky.social for featuring our @natmentalhealth.nature.com research on stomach–brain communication and worse mental health symptoms
www.psypost.org/scientists-d...
Was also shared on X but with weirdly more hair colour comments 🌈 than the science itself 😅:
x.com/OwenGregoria...
Even after recovery, relapse is heartbreakingly common in anorexia nervosa. Could the answer lie in the gut’s hidden signals? 🧵
Reilly, Brown & Frank link altered taste, touch, vision, and gut sensing to anorexia and bulimia nervosa, highlight knowledge gaps, and proposing neurobiologically-informed strategies for clinical translation. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38730196/
🚨Do you want to join our online seminars?
Next month we have this amazing seminar with Anna and Noa!
Register to join, it’s free 🤓
#somatosensation
#interoception
#sensory
#body
#science
#neuroscience
docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...
New qualitative paper! A foray into gastric interception. @lucysta02475610.bsky.social ran a LOT of focus groups, across groups with eating disorders, gastric disorders and neither, to understand how people experience the sensations from their GI system. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...