For more than a century, the study of brain lesions has been central to understanding cognitive processes and normal brain function (e.g., Broca’s studies). However, what electrophysiological signatures emerge following a brain lesion?

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

The updated YouTube livestream link for Day 2 of the UCLA Health Brain Health Summit (which is happening now) can be found here: youtube.com/live/0Quufvj...

If you can't make the UCLA Brain Health Summit in person, the meeting will be live-streamed on Youtube here: teams.semel.ucla.edu/longevity/ev... (click on the hyperlink in the top right corner of the program).

Looking forward to kicking off tomorrow's UCLA Brain Health Summit. To get things ready, Indira Subramanian and I recorded this podcast hosted by Genein Letford: www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCdd...

New @bodybrainbehaviour.bsky.social preprint, and this is a big one for the lab: @teresaberther.bsky.social did the deepest of dives into #gut-brain coupling with MEG and HD gastrography. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... A brief 🧵on our first trip into this corner of #brain-body #neuroskyence:

What are the new and emerging treatments for anxiety disorders? We summarize these in a new review: www.bmj.com/content/392/...

Remarkable study from Christoph Thaiss and colleagues demonstrating a lifespan impact of a microbiome-vagal-CNS pathway dysfunction of gut interoception www.nature.com/articles/s41...

We are hiring! www.ru.nl/en/working-a...

Deadline today! Submit and abstract and join us to discuss science in the exciting brain body interaction field!

Honored to see our work cited in today’s New York Times in coverage of emerging data on next-generation GLP-1–based therapies. What does it all mean? Some brief thoughts below.. www.nytimes.com/2026/02/18/w...

I couldn’t agree more. Olu Ajijola & I are attempting to bridge this divide in interoception via conceptual frameworks (see below) but also via integrated multidisciplinary lab group activities. It’s simultaneously invigorating and daunting, but needs to happen. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

How do we build and sustain healthy brains across the lifespan? For decades, neuroscience has advanced through powerful reductionist approaches, identifying molecular pathways, neural circuits, and disease mechanisms. These discoveries have transformed medicine.

Pleased to share this newly co-authored expert opinion on the Polyvagal Theory (PVT): www.clinicalneuropsychiatry.org/download/why...

Mental health is shaping survival after heart disease—yet we rarely treat it that way. A new meta-analysis of 22 million people links PTSD, anxiety, depression & insomnia with higher risk of acute coronary syndrome. jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

“Diagnostic and Scientific Manual” sounds like a much more appropriate DSM label. And emphasizing a focus on the underlying causes and spectrums of psychiatric disorders are both huge positives!

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...)

Also hot off the press: new evidence of a potential role for float therapy in methamphetamine addiction recovery. While the Scientific American article briefly references this study, the full details can be found here: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

New writeup on interoception in Scientific American focusing on its role in mental health: www.scientificamerican.com/article/inte...

New @aanmember.bsky.social guidelines for the management of functional seizures led by Ben Tolchin. A landmark for people with FND worldwide. ✅Rigorous evidence-based process ✅Consensus practical recommendations ✅Endorsed by @fndsociety.bsky.social www.neurology.org/doi/10.1212/...

The role of the #SpinalCord in relaying brain-body signals has been hard to study noninvasively. @giuliog.bsky.social &co develop Electrical Spinal Imaging (ESI), enabling high-resolution, noninvasive recordings, revealing how #attention modulates spinal activity @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/3MswZOf

Perceptual Dysregulation in Psychiatric Nosology has been released! I'm pleased to see that the cover is pretty close to my initial mockup. You can find the entire collection here: link.springer.com/book/10.1007...

Thrilled to be a part of this meta-analytic effort to determine the effects of mindfulness and other forms of contemplative training on self reported interoception. See thread below from the lead author Isaac Treves. While the effect is clear, there are many open questions remaining

Cortical and subcortical mapping (n=90) of the human allostatic–interoceptive system using 7 Tesla fMRI, building up the same group’s earlier study on n=700 with 3 Tesla. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Such a nice collection of brain-body interaction articles in the special issue of @currentbiology.bsky.social. Love the beautiful vagus nerve on the cover by Andreas Vesalius www.cell.com/current-biol...

This is a very nice cross-species articulation of findings and challenges in body-brain and brain-body processing. Recommended reading for anyone interested in dipping their toes into this broad and rapidly developing area!

TIL that Dale invented the heartbeat counting task, not Schandry, and that it was known from the very first study that people underestimated their heart rate. It was orginally called a heart rate estimation task! journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.2...

📢 Join us at the Crick to start your lab! 💸 Generous core funding to give your ideas wings 🔬 Outstanding facilities to realise your nerdiest dreams 🙌 Supportive colleagues who lift you and your science up Happy to answer questions! Please repost!

During these uncertain times, I’m very happy to see that my institution, @scripps.edu has an open tenure-track Assistant Professor position. Any field in Chemistry or Biology is welcome. I’d especially love to see fellow neuroscientists apply. Please repost! apply.interfolio.com/174756

This World Mental Health Day, I’m reflecting on the science, people, and shared responsibility to build a future where mental health is supported and prioritized. Understanding the brain and the physiological mechanisms behind mental health is important to confront mental health challenges.

Save the date 📆. On Oct 22/23, @nationalacademies.org will hold a stellar virtual workshop on brain/body interations (open to all). www.nationalacademies.org/en/our-work/...

Even after recovery, relapse is heartbreakingly common in anorexia nervosa. Could the answer lie in the gut’s hidden signals? 🧵

How do perceptual processes contribute to the development of psychiatric illness? @skhalsa.bsky.social and I have compiled this volume with experts from across the world to begin to answer this question.

What if many psychiatric disorders share the same hidden glitch in how the brain infers reality? In a new volume, Al Powers and I gather experts to examine how disrupted sensory inference across #vision, #touch, #proprioception and #interoception might unify our understanding.

Highly recommended reading for anyone interested in #interoception especially from a public-facing standpoint

This is an incredible tool for visualizing real-time activity of internal organ system dynamics in zebra fish - I trust it’s only a matter of time until we see a suite of “functional body connectivity” papers during various interoceptive perturbations… #interoception

🎉 Happy to share our latest paper on #Physiology&Behavior @elsevierconnect.bsky.social Together with Luigi Micillo, Nicola Cellini and Giovanna Mioni we explored the link between cardiac #interoception and time perception 🧵in the comments

Interesting molecular parallel to our human ISO findings: β-adrenergic and GABAergic modulation engage posterior insula, but using these states to guide action triggers zif268 plasticity in anterior insula. www.eneuro.org/content/12/8...

Public access to the first fly connectome that spans the whole CNS - BANC!: codex.flywire.ai?dataset=banc Different from prior connectomes - it is brain + cord (think spinal cord) We use it to ‘embody’ the system and find it resembles ‘subsumption architecture’ doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Postdoc job alert! I’m looking for someone with a PhD in neuroscience/psychology, psychiatry, biomed engineering, computational modeling or a related field to join my NIH-funded team at UCLA studying the neural & computational mechanisms of #interoception in anorexia nervosa 1/2

In the aftermath of last night’s west coast tsunami warning this article on emergency alerts rings true. Thankfully there does not appear to have been much damage theconversation.com/emergency-al...

Who needs podcasts when you have AI? Voila: the latest podcast on one of my papers, brought to you by NotebookLM! It’s not great (& gets a bit repetitive when you run several papers through it), but when you realize all they did was feed the paper into it, and generated a user-friendly output, whoa…

@peterkok.bsky.social and I wrote a book chapter on how layer specific fMRI can shine light on disorders hallmarked by perceptual disturbances. This is part of a series on Perceptual Dysregulation in Psychiatric Nosology edited by @skhalsa.bsky.social and Al Powers link.springer.com/chapter/10.1...

Latest article from our group articulating a harmonized vision for interoceptive neuroscience research, with my stellar co-authors who are also physician-scientists. It was a genuine privilege to work on this with them. More of this kind of empirical collaboration is needed!!

🚨 New paper out! Phase confusion: How inconsistent cardiac labeling obscures interoception research 🫀🧠 We unpack methodological incosistencies and propose a way forward with the HEARTS framework. In Biol. Psychol. - Open Access: 🔗 shorturl.at/YJhyn 1st paper of great @angeliacaparco.bsky.social!

What if 'gut feeling' was more than a metaphor, and the key to treating obesity and gastrointestinal disorders? This new commentary, born from the 2024 NIDDK workshop on Interoceptive Contributions to Obesity & DGBI is now out in Gastroenterology: sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Can inflammation reveal why some individuals with depression can't feel joy? In this latest work led by Jonathan Savitz, Mike Irwin, and @mpwpaulus.bsky.social published in the American Journal of Psychiatry, we attempted to address just that: psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/...