Neural Sources and Underlying Mechanisms of Neural Responses to Heartbeats, and their Role in Bodily Self-consciousness: An Intracranial EEG Study.
Author: Park HD1, Bernasconi F1, Salomon R2, Tallon-Baudry C3, Spinelli L4, Seeck M4, Schaller K5, Blanke O1,6
Affiliation:
1Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience, Center for Neuroprosthetics and Brain Mind Institute, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), 9 Chemin des Mines, 1202 Geneva, Switzerland.
2Gonda Multidisciplinary Brain Research Center, Bar Ilan University, 52900Ramat Gan, Israel.
3Laboratoire de Neurosciences Cognitives (ENS - INSERM U960), Départment d'Etudes Cognitives, Ecole Normale Supérieure - PSL Research University, 75005 Paris, France.
4Presurgical Epilepsy Evaluation Unit, Department of Neurology, Geneva University Hospital (HUG), 4 Rue Gabrielle-Perret-Gentil, 1205Geneva, Switzerland.
5Department of Neurosurgery, Geneva University Hospital (HUG), 4 Rue Gabrielle-Perret-Gentil, 1205Geneva, Switzerland.
6Department of Neurology, University of Geneva, 24 rue Micheli-du-Crest, 1211 Geneva, Switzerland.
Conference/Journal: Cereb Cortex.
Date published: 2017 Jun 7
Other:
Volume ID: 1-14 , Special Notes: doi: 10.1093/cercor/bhx136. [Epub ahead of print] , Word Count: 224
Recent research has shown that heartbeat-evoked potentials (HEPs), brain activity in response to heartbeats, are a useful neural measure for investigating the functional role of brain-body interactions in cognitive processes including self-consciousness. In 2 experiments, using intracranial electroencephalography (EEG), we investigated (1) the neural sources of HEPs, (2) the underlying mechanisms for HEP generation, and (3) the functional role of HEPs in bodily self-consciousness. In Experiment-1, we found that shortly after the heartbeat onset, phase distributions across single trials were significantly concentrated in 10% of the recording sites, mainly in the insula and the operculum, but also in other regions including the amygdala and fronto-temporal cortex. Such phase concentration was not accompanied by increased spectral power, and did not correlate with spectral power changes, suggesting that a phase resetting, rather than an additive "evoked potential" mechanism, underlies HEP generation. In Experiment-2, we further aimed to anatomically refine previous scalp EEG data that linked HEPs with bodily self-consciousness. We found that HEP modulations in the insula reflected an experimentally induced altered sense of self-identification. Collectively, these results provide novel and solid electrophysiological evidence on the neural sources and underlying mechanisms of HEPs, and their functional role in self-consciousness.
© The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.
KEYWORDS: bodily self-consciousness; heartbeat-evoked potentials; insula; intertrial coherence; intracranial EEG
PMID: 28591822 DOI: 10.1093/cercor/bhx136
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