Title: Visceral signals, brain dynamics and subjectivity

Catherine Tallon-Baudry
Cognitive and Computational Lab, Inserm, Ecole Normale Supérieure,
Université PSL, Paris


The brain monitors internal bodily signals to maintain bodily integrity
and to anticipate bodily needs. However, the influence of interoception
on brain activity and cognition goes well beyond the regulation of
feeding behavior and emotions. Here, I show that brain-viscera coupling
in humans is pervasive and accounts for substantial variance in
spontaneous brain dynamics, from firing rate to MEG-EEG and BOLD signal,
in cortical regions classically associated with the perception (of the
external world) - cognition - action loop. The monitoring of internal
organs might also contribute to the neural definition of the organism,
i.e. the simplest biological definition of the self. I propose and
experimentally test the hypothesis that the neural monitoring of
visceral organs contribute to subjective experience, which cannot exist
without a simple self, i.e. the subject of experience.