The Visceral Mind Project
The ECG will be built around The Visceral Mind Project, which aims ultimately to provide a mechanistic basis for understanding brain-body disruption through the lens of computational psychiatry (henceforth, ‘embodied computational psychiatry’). The project will use a variety of techniques developed throughout my postdoc, with an emphasis on computational modelling, machine learning, and causal manipulation of visceral signals to identify how the body shapes decision-making and awareness. This project will be *fully* open; as we progress, we’ll be regularly sharing updates through our lab notebook, and all data, code, and experimental materials will be made available to the public. Our goal is not only to understand brain-body interaction in predictive processing, but to build the first ever open neuroimaging database in this newly emerging research domain. In this way the ECG will act as a catalyst for mechanism-based research in interoception and the computational psychiatry of disordered brain-body interaction.
In Denmark, the ECG will be based at the Danish Neuroscience Centre at Aarhus University Hospital, the Centre for Functionally Integrative Neuroscience, and the Aarhus Institute for Advanced Studies. For this arm of the project, we’ll scan 500 Danes performing a metacognitive learning task, concurrently with quantitative MRI and functional brain imaging. This will enable us to establish how visceral signals from the heart, lungs, and stomach shape the precision-weighted balance of priors and prediction errors in both perceptual and metacognitive beliefs. Further, by applying canonical covariate and other machine learning techniques to brain connectivity and microstructure, we’ll identify sensitive cortical fingerprints indexing individual differences in visceral-weighting. This arm of the project will bring together the latest in fMRI, MEG, and statistical modelling of brain data to answer two key questions: 1) how do visceral signal shape decision computations, and 2) can we use individual differences in the sensitivity to visceral signals as an index of sub-clinical psychiatric symptoms.
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