Changes in physiological arousal – as revealed by pupil dilation and heart rate – shape our confidence in decisions about uncertain perceptual information.

People who have attempted suicide exhibit blunted sensory processing during breathing and pain perturbations, as well as lower heartbeat perception accuracy and reduced mid/posterior insula activity during interoceptive attention.

Pre-verbal infants demonstrate an implicit sensitivity to interoceptive sensations, which fluctuates spontaneously during emotional processing and guides audiovisual preferences in the environment.

Anterior insular cortex activity predicts how well we attend to our bodily signals, while lesions to this brain region disrupt this ability.

Distinct interoceptive and gustatory bacterial food cues converge to control neuroendocrine gene expression in two neurons, which modulates and is correlated with internal states driving feeding versus foraging behavior.

Lesion analyses in right hemisphere stroke patients reveal the crucial role of the right anterior and posterior insula in the perception of affective touch.

Human subjects actively adjust the acquisition of sense data based on how their bodily cycles alter their senses, i.e., sensing tactile stimuli for longer periods when concurrent physiological signals are present vs. sensing for shorter periods when these are quiescent.

Neural correlates of somatosensory target detection are restricted to secondary somatosensory cortex, whereas activity in insular, cingulate, and motor regions reflects stimulus uncertainty and overt reports.

Training attention-mindfulness, emotion-motivational, and social cognitive skills over the course of 3 months alters brain functional and microstructural organization as a function of training content.

Noninvasive human magnetoencephalography recordings characterize the functional relationship between respiration, neural oscillations, and performance in low-level perception.