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...

Mind wandering to physical sensations could impact your mental health People’s minds sometimes wander to their bodily sensations, which may reduce symptoms of depression and ADHD, a new study suggests.

Appreciate this clear coverage of our “body-wandering” paper in Science News.
www.sciencenews.org/article/mind...

Breath, Belief, and Brain: A Tripartite Map of Respiratory Interoception Interoception, the perception of signals from the body, has become central to understanding why bodily states are felt differently across individuals. Rather than being unitary, interoception is best ...

Journal Club - Breath, Belief, and Brain: A Tripartite Map of Respiratory Interoception www.jneurosci.org/content/46/1...

Graphical abstract showing four panels. Panel 1: a person in an MRI scanner with blue cognitive thought bubbles drifting from their head and pink body thought bubbles from their torso, with organs glowing inside. Panel 2: blue bubbles for cognitive items (Self, Words, Focus, Images, Future, Past) are larger than pink bubbles for body items (Breathing, Movement, Stomach, Heart, Skin, Bladder), with arrows showing body thoughts link to more negative and less positive emotion. Panel 3: physiological traces (EGG, ECG, respiratory) show higher arousal with body-wandering; a bar chart shows cognitive items (Past, Future, Repetitive, Vivid) correlate with more ADHD and depression symptoms while body items (Breath, Stomach, Skin, Heart) correlate with fewer. Panel 4: medial brain with thalamus, somatomotor cortex, and interoceptive regions highlighted, plus a chord diagram showing connectivity between these three regions.

New paper in PNAS! When the mind wanders, it often drifts to the body. We call this "body-wandering". These thoughts are often negative, but are associated with reduced ADHD & depression symptoms, driven by a distinct interoceptive-allostatic brain signature. pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2520822123

⏺ 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...

Check out our latest research - how does metacognition guide our evaluation of food quality?

Interoceptive ability is uncorrelated across respiratory and cardiac axes in a large scale psychophysical study - Communications Psychology Bayesian psychophysical modelling of cardiac and respiratory interoception (N=241) showed no cross-domain associations in sensitivity, precision, or metacognition, indicating that interoceptive perfor...

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

Check out our new python package for interoception, breathwork, and respiratory motor control research!

New website is up! Code for it can be found here: github.com/embodied-com...

1/ To explore or to exploit? I’m excited to share my new preprint with @tobiasuhauser.bsky.social and @micahgallen.com, correlating variations in cortical microstructures with individual differences in exploration-exploitation behaviours, using a gamified task! 🧵 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Check out our latest paper, a collaboration with @tobiasuhauser.bsky.social using gamified computational psychiatry measures to explore brain-behavioral correlates of decision making!

check our our latest update - a whole toolbox of stuff for interoceptive psychophysics!

New preprint! We are pleased to share our Hierarchical Bayesian framework for Interoceptive Psychophysics! Implemented in rstan, we provide a complete suite of tools spanning model comparison, parameter recovery, multifactor designs, power analysis, and more! 🎯 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Stomach–brain coupling indexes a dimensional signature of mental health - Nature Mental Health Using a relatively large and diverse sample of mostly young adults, this study by Banellis, Rebollo and colleagues examines associations between regional stomach–brain coupling and mental health and i...

I’m elated to share our latest publication - out now in @natmentalhealth.nature.com! www.nature.com/articles/s44... - tour de force by @leahbanellis.bsky.social @brainandstomach.bsky.social and the rest of the VMP team!

Absolutely loved discussing our recent @natmentalhealth.nature.com paper on IhmCurious
YouTube channel (www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDTv...), thank you for having me! & to
@micahgallen.com @brainandstomach.bsky.social & the @the-ecg.bsky.social team for all their hard work 🧠

I have a gut feeling you will enjoy @the-ecg.bsky.social postdoc @leahbanellis.bsky.social discussing our recent publication on the stomach brain connection, out now in Nature Mental Health!

Excited to chair @micahgallen.com 's fantastic seminar this Wednesday, June 25th at DPG! 🧠🫀 Join us in 📍 Room 2C, PSICO2 building. Don’t miss it! 🚀
#UniversityOfPadova #DepartmentOfGeneralPsychology

I'm so grateful to write my first magazine article with
Psyche Magazine! psyche.co/ideas/how-mu...
It features our preprint on 🫁 'Body-Wandering' 🫀 with invaluable guidance from
@micahgallen.com and @themindwanders.bsky.social
: biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Ever get distracted by your own body? We call this "body-wandering." 🧠🫀

Our latest study uncovers its neural fingerprint and the link to ADHD & depression symptoms. Awesome write-up by our own @leahbanellis.bsky.social, in Psyche Magazine!

psyche.co/ideas/how-mu...

#neuroscience #research #ADHD

Up next is the amazing @ashleytyrer.bsky.social presenting her recent preprint on beta blockade of cardiac and respiratory interoception.!

Thrilled to host a set of @the-ecg.bsky.social flash talks with our visiting colleague @beckety.bsky.social - organized by the excellent @ashleytyrer.bsky.social - first up is @acourtin.bsky.social talking about computational fMRI and pain learning!

Aarhus University Student Survey This questionnaire will take approximately 15- 25 minutes to complete. Please answer in a safe environment and as truthfully as possible. As a neurodiverse research team, we prioritize the comfort an...

Do you have #ADHD or #autism? We're running a short, anonymous survey on interoception. It takes just 15–20 minutes, and your input would mean a lot.
👉 docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Busy day - check out our latest preprint, exploring domain specificity in cardiac and respiratory interoception!

Is interoceptive sensing unified across internal organs? 🫀🫁 Our high-powered psychophysical study (N=241) suggests not. Bayesian evidence indicates interoceptive processes are largely modality-specific—challenging the idea of a unitary interoceptive sense.
🔗 Read here: osf.io/preprints/ps...

Thermosensory predictive coding underpins an illusion of pain Computational modeling reveals how uncertainty transforms harmless stimuli into perceptions of pain.

Excited to share our latest publication, out now in @ScienceAdvances: “Thermosensory predictive coding underpins an illusion of pain.” www.science.org/doi/10.1126/.... Read the full thread for details!

Why sign language could be crucial for kids with cochlear implants, studying the illusion of pain, and recent political developments at NIH On this week’s show: U.S. science policy updates, cochlear implants give children unprecedented access to sounds, and fooling the body into feeling pain gives insight into chronic pain conditions

Our close collaborator @francescafardo.bsky.social recently went on the Science Podcast to discuss our new publication on thermosensory predictive coding and illusory pain! Starting at 26:44 www.science.org/content/podc...

Very cool study!

Extremely cool study for a “body-first” target approach to interoception and metacognition! 🫀🫁🧠💊

Looking forward to hearing more about it tomorrow during the Special Talk session at the #MindBrainBody Symposium

#MBBS25

11/ I am exceedingly grateful for all the help and supervision from @micahgallen.com, without whom this project would not have been possible! Also for the support of our lab @the-ecg.bsky.social, @lundbeckfonden.bsky.social, @erc.europa.eu and CFIN @au.dk 🙏

A graphical abstract titled "Can Beta-Blockers Manipulate Interoception? A Placebo-Controlled Study." The image illustrates how bisoprolol and propranolol affect interoception. On the left, a green figure represents bisoprolol, showing a zoomed-in synapse where it selectively blocks β1 receptors. On the right, a purple figure represents propranolol, blocking both β1 and β2 receptors, affecting both brain and body. A psychophysics graph models interoceptive responses, showing response intensity over trials. Below, line plots compare placebo, propranolol, and bisoprolol effects on interoception—cardioception (threshold) and respiroception (slope)—indicating drug effects on bodily awareness.

Can we enhance interoception by controlling the heart? Thrilled to share our new study, led by @ashleytyrer.bsky.social , where we use computational modeling to show that blockading peripheral noradrenaline uniquely alters awareness of heart rate & breathing! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 🧵👇