In our next Researcher Live series, we will be focusing on ‘Brain-body Interactions and new treatments for psychiatric disorders’ – bringing you four fantastic speakers.

Join our fourth episode on 28^th October at 3 pm BST / 2 pm GMT for a talk with Dr. Esra AI, Columbia University. Sign up here to receive email reminders for this series.

What are we going to talk about in this episode? 

Internal bodily signals such as heartbeats can influence human cognition, perception, and action. However, the underlying mechanisms of these effects are poorly understood. In my talk, I will demonstrate how the heart influences somatosensory perception and motor activity. In a series of behavioral and EEG experiments, we have shown that somatosensory perception is impaired both during the systolic phase of the cardiac cycle and when heartbeats evoke strong cortical responses. Using simultaneous EEG-TMS, we further investigated whether these cardiac effects originate from general changes in excitability. In the motor domain, we observed that systolic cardiac signals have a facilitatory effect on motor excitability – in contrast to sensory attenuation that was observed for somatosensory perception. This suggests that action and perception have distinct windows in the cardiac cycle for optimal information processing. 

Together, this talk will highlight how cardiac signals influence the way we perceive our external world and interact with it.

Series programme:

• 24^th October, 4 pm BST / 3 pm GMT - ‘Interoception and mental health: integrating mind body and brain interactions’ with Dr Sahib Khalsa, University of Tulsa

• 24^th October, 6 pm BST / 5 pm GMT – ‘The brain-body axis in neurodevelopmental conditions’ with Dr Eleanor Palser, University of California, San Francisco 

• 27^th October, 4 pm BST / 3 pm GMT – ‘How the brain processes gut feelings’ with Dr Ryan Smith, University of Tulsa

• 28^th October, 3 pm BST / 2 pm GMT – ‘Heartbeats Influence Perception and Motor Activity’ with Dr Esra AI, Columbia University