Neural responses to heartbeats dissociate the self as the subject and the self as the object during spontaneous thoughts
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1
Laboratoire de Neurosciences Cognitives / Ecole Normale Superieure, Institut d'Etudes Cognitives, Ecole Normale Superieure, France
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2
Laboratoire de Neurosciences Cognitives, Institut d'Etudes Cognitives, Ecole Normale Superieure, France
The most fundamental sense of self is represented in the first-person perspective. This sense of self known as the 'I' is distinct from the 'Me', the most often studied form of self which relates to explicit reflection about oneself. Here, we propose and test the hypothesis that the neural implementation of the 'I' is rooted in bodily signal monitoring by the central nervous system.
We developed a new thought sampling paradigm in which subjects evaluated how much they were thinking as the subject ('I') and as the object ('Me'). In practice, 20 subjects fixated the screen and mind-wandered until a warning stimulus occurred at random interval. Subjects would then rate the thought that was interrupted by the warning according to 4 continuous scales: self as subject, self as object, time and valence. Magnetoencephalographic data and cardiac activity were recorded simultaneously. We measured neural responses to heartbeats preceding warning onset to test whether the amplitude of neural responses to heartbeats could predict subjects' ratings on the 'I' scale.
We tested the difference in heart-evoked responses between high and low scores for each scale using a cluster-based permutation t-test. We found a significant cluster for the 'I' dimension, over posterior magnetometers between 300 and 328ms after the T-peak (Monte-Carlo, p=0.024). The 'Me' dimension was associated with a significant frontal cluster, between 120 and 155ms after the T-peak (p=0.026). A General Linear Model approach is currently being developed to test to what extent activity in these clusters is specific to each dimension of the self. This would confirm that neural responses to heartbeats reference thoughts to the self and distinguish between 'I' and 'Me'.
Keywords:
Magnetoencephalography,
Psychophysiology,
self,
resting state,
mind-wandering,
brain-body interactions
Conference:
XII International Conference on Cognitive Neuroscience (ICON-XII), Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, 27 Jul - 31 Jul, 2014.
Presentation Type:
Poster
Topic:
Attention
Citation:
Babo-Rebelo
M,
Richter
C and
Tallon-Baudry
C
(2015). Neural responses to heartbeats dissociate the self as the subject and the self as the object during spontaneous thoughts.
Conference Abstract:
XII International Conference on Cognitive Neuroscience (ICON-XII).
doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2015.217.00017
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Received:
19 Feb 2015;
Published Online:
24 Apr 2015.
*
Correspondence:
Mrs. Mariana Babo-Rebelo, Laboratoire de Neurosciences Cognitives / Ecole Normale Superieure, Institut d'Etudes Cognitives, Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris, France, mariana.b.rebelo@gmail.com