Extremely grateful to my mentor @micahgallen.com, psychiatry expert FrancescoBavato, @acourtin.bsky.social @jesperfischer.bsky.social (check out their upcoming interoceptive hierarchical modelling paper soon!). This project would not have been possible without them! and the entire @the-ecg.org!

Our view is that studying interoception at rest may be missing the point entirely. Forthcoming work with @fiorelladpc.bsky.social calls it the "Quiescence Trap", like judging a car's aerodynamics while parked. We need to study bodily sensing during real physiological stress and symptom onset

Together, this pushes back on a widely held assumption linking resting interoceptive performance to general psychopathology. And it's not just us, recent large-scale clinical reviews and meta-analyses report similar null findings: (@olivierdesmedt.bsky.social)

What's more, a Semantic Analysis showed MAIA survey items share a lot of language with mental health constructs (depression, anxiety, mindfulness): In other words, these self-report scales may be picking up general affective beliefs — rather than picking out the body specifically

What explains this gap? Those 'bodily' questionnaire scores were largely unrelated to objective cardiac or respiratory task performance. What we believe about our bodily sensing may have little to do with how we actually sense it.

Results dependent on the model? A network analysis is consistent: self-reported interoception is tightly woven into the mental health symptom network (red with yellow nodes), while interoceptive task performance distantly sits apart from symptoms (blue with yellow nodes).

But there was one place where mental health relationships appeared: interoception questionnaires (MAIA subscales) 📝 People with worse mental health reported less trust in and less subjective comfort with body signals.

Perhaps the relationship only appears at higher symptom levels?📈 We tested clinical cut-offs & increasingly severe symptom ranges: no reliable link We don't know if this holds in more severe diagnosed patients, but it undermines resting interoceptive performance as a risk factor

No robust interoceptive-mental health pattern emerged: ❌ Not for cardiac 🫀 or respiratory 🫁 sensitivity. ❌ Not for perceptual precision. ❌ Not for confidence. ❌ Not for metacognitive efficiency. Bayesian analyses generally favoured the null. 💣

We also measured mental health comprehensively, spanning anxiety, depression, ADHD, autism spectrum traits, stress, sleep and somatic symptoms. These yielded eleven psychiatric symptom clusters and two global symptom dimensions. Did any of them relate to interoception?

Most studies rely on a single heartbeat task or bodily questionnaire. We went further: 456 people completed cardiac psychophysics 🫀 245 completed respiratory psychophysics 🫁 Adaptive tasks. Trial-wise metacognition. Hierarchical Bayesian models.

Our prediction was straightforward. Worse mental health symptoms should accompany altered bodily sensing: changes in perceptual sensitivity, precision, or metacognitive insight into heart-rate or breathing performance. We tested each organ sensing metric 🫀🫁

Sensing your body (‘Interoception’) is everywhere in theories of mental health. But when we tested how well hundreds of people sensed their heart and lungs, the link to symptoms was almost nowhere to be found. 💣 🚨New @natmentalhealth.nature.com paper 🚨🎉 asks why 🧵 www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Finally, I was lucky enough to get to write a @psyche.co magazine article about this work here: psyche.co/ideas/how-mu... , with a huge amount of help and thanks to @christianjarrett.bsky.social

I am extremely grateful for all the help from @micahgallen.com and @themindwanders.bsky.social , to whom we dedicate this paper in memory to. This project would not have been possible without them! and the extended ECG/BPP team, including and @lundbeckfonden.bsky.social and CFIN

We’re especially excited about future studies of body-wandering: ➡️ Experimental manipulations of bodily thought ➡️ Real-world tracking with mobile sensing ➡️ Longitudinal psychiatric interoceptive experience sampling

We also show that body-wandering aligns with the principal connectivity gradient—spanning association cortex (frontal and cingulate regions) with somatomotor sensory regions. It seems we are not always so disconnected from our body when mind-wandering.

We identified a brain signature of body-wandering, characterised by increased connectivity between somatomotor, interoceptive, and thalamocortical networks, using a robustly cross-validated Canonical Correlation Analysis.

The psychophysiological underpinnings of 'bodily' and 'cognitive' ongoing thoughts were strongly anti-correlated: 🫀Embodied thoughts:⬆️ negative affect, ⬆️ arousal, ⬇️ ADHD & depression symptoms 🧠Cognitive thoughts: ⬇️ negative affect, ⬇️ arousal, ⬆️ depression symptoms

However, the relationship between embodied mind-wandering and emotion is far from simple—we also find that individuals with higher ADHD and depression symptoms tend to body-wander less.

Interestingly, negative embodied thoughts vary across individuals along a continuum— opposing tendencies toward positive social daydreaming.

Crucially, we found that higher levels of body-wandering were linked to more negative thoughts, especially those involving the heart, bladder, and skin. This suggests that focusing on bodily sensations during rest can be associated with increased negative emotional experiences.

We first compared the cognitive vs body-related items (pink vs blue boxplots), finding that while interoceptive thoughts were overall less intense in frequency than typical cognitive dimensions, that respiratory sensations specifically dominated the interoceptive-axis.

After a 15-minute resting-state fMRI scan, healthy participants rated their thoughts along cognitive (e.g., self vs. other, past vs. future, detailed vs. vague) and bodily (e.g., heart, breath, bladder) dimensions.

It was truly an honour to work with @themindwanders.bsky.social and build on his groundbreaking work on the nature of mind-wandering. We used MultiDimensional Experience Sampling to quantify thoughts tied to bodily sensations like breathing, heartbeat, and gastric activity.

🎉 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....

The hard problem is solved - Thanks @naddenmark.bsky.social !

Incredibly impressed with the calibre of research by Ye Ella Tian showing the importance of multi-organ bodily health including immunometabolics (at Adriatica Summer School 🏖️) #teamlab #mambolab #psychologywellbeing_ch #fraferri_78 #erasmus_uda

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 🧠

In summary, we identified a unique mental health signature of stomach-brain coupling. Applying pharmacological or mechanical methods which alter the gastric rhythm/brain coupling may refine diagnostic and therapeutic interventions remediating maladaptive body-mind connections.