(13th February) in DSB, Room 1.20. The speaker will be Sarah Garfinkel, a professor of Psychiatry at the University of Sussex who is very well known for her work on interoception (the sense of the internal body). Her talk will explore some of her research that shows that this sense of the internal body is relevant to cognition and emotion in interesting ways.
Sarah Garfinkel: Hearts and Minds: Hidden impacts on emotion and cognition
Talk abstract:
There is increasing recognition that cognitive and emotional processes are shaped by the dynamic integration of brain and body. A major channel of interoceptive information comes from the heart, where phasic signals are conveyed to the brain to indicate how fast and strong the heart is beating. This talk will detail how cardiac afferent signals can alter emotion processing and guide intuitive decision making. Moreover, this interoceptive channel is disrupted in distinct ways in first episode psychosis, schizophrenia, autism and anxiety. This talk will provide empirical examples and suggest how specific interoceptive disturbances may contribute to our understanding of distinct symptoms in these clinical conditions, including dissociation and altered affective processing. Finally, new work will be presented on interoceptive training to demonstrate enhanced interoceptive precision following targeted feedback. The discrete cardiac effects on emotion and cognition have broad relevance to clinical neuroscience, with implications for peripheral treatment targets and behavioural interventions.