TY  - JOUR
A1  - Babo-Rebelo, Mariana
A1  - Richter, Craig G.
A1  - Tallon-Baudry, Catherine
T1  - Neural responses to heartbeats in the default network encode the self in spontaneous thoughts
T2  - The journal of neuroscience
N2  - The default network (DN) has been consistently associated with self-related cognition, but alsoto bodily state monitoring and autonomic regulation. We hypothesized that these two seemingly disparate functional roles of the DN are functionally coupled, in line with theories proposing that selfhood is grounded in the neural monitoring of internal organs, such as the heart. We measured with magnetoencephalograhy neural responses evoked by heartbeats while human participants freely mind-wandered. When interrupted by a visual stimulus at random intervals, participants scored the self-relatedness of the interrupted thought. They evaluated their involvement as the firstperson perspective subject or agent inthethought (“I”), and on another scaleto what degreethey werethinking aboutthemselves (“Me”). During the interrupted thought, neural responses to heartbeats in two regions of the DN, the ventral precuneus and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, covaried, respectively, with the “I” and the “Me” dimensions of the self, even at the single-trial level. No covariation between self-relatedness and peripheral autonomic measures (heart rate, heart rate variability, pupil diameter, electrodermal activity, respiration rate, and phase) or alpha power was observed. Our results reveal a direct link between selfhood and neural responses to heartbeats in the DN and thus directly support theories grounding selfhood in the neural monitoring of visceral inputs. More generally, the tight functional coupling between self-related processing and cardiac monitoring observed here implies that, even in the absence of measured changes in peripheral bodily measures, physiological and cognitive functions have to be considered jointly in the DN.
KW  - default network
KW  - heartbeat-evoked responses
KW  - MEG
KW  - self
KW  - spontaneous cognition
Y1  - 2017
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/44373
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-443738
SN  - 1529-2401
SN  - 0270-6474
N1  - Copyright © 2016 Babo-Rebelo et al. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License Creative CommonsAttribution 4.0 International,which permits unrestricted use,distribution and reproduction in any medium provided that the original work is properly attributed
VL  - 36
IS  - 30
SP  - 7829
EP  - 7840
PB  - Society for Neuroscience
CY  - Washington, DC
ER  -