Interoception

Pain is inextricably linked to the body and, in the case of chronic pain, a primary health care problem, often associated with abnormalities in the central representation of painful body parts. Recent work in cognitive neuroscience showed that altering the central representation of the body through multisensory bodily inputs such as visuotactile in the rubber hand illusion or visuomotor during mirror therapy may be of relevance for the understanding and treatment of pain

Interoceptive signals, such as the heartbeat, are processed in a network of brain regions including the insular cortex. Recent studies …

Research in clinical and human neuroscience indicates that important brain mechanisms of self-consciousness are based on the …

Interoceptive signals modulate visual processing during specific time-windows. Brain activity is enhanced for body images shown in synchrony with the heartbeat. Fronto-temporo-parietal areas are linked to the cardiac effect on body processing.

There is growing evidence that interoceptive signals conveying information regarding the internal state of the body influence perception and self-awareness. The insular cortex, which receives sensory inputs from both interoceptive and exteroceptive sources, is thought to integrate these multimodal signals. This study shows that cardiac interoceptive signals modulate awareness for visual stimuli such that visual stimuli occurring at the cardiac frequency take longer to access visual awareness and are more difficult to discriminate. Two fMRI experiments show that the insular region is sensitive to this cardio–visual synchrony even when the visual stimuli are rendered invisible through interocular masking. The results indicate a perceptual and neural suppression for visual events coinciding with cardiac interoceptive signals.

Recent evidence suggests that multisensory integration of bodily signals involving exteroceptive and interoceptive information …