Since this is a new blog, forgive a bit of a catch up.  This is about a recent Trends Cognitive Sciences opinion article I wrote, applying the framework of predictive processing/coding to interoception, emotion, and the experience of body ownership.  There’s a lot of interest at the moment in understanding how interoception (the sense of the internal state of the body) and exteroception (everything else) interact.  Hopefully this will contribute in some way.  The full paper is here.

Interoceptive inference, emotion, and the embodied self

ABSTRACT:  The concept of the brain as a prediction machine has enjoyed a resurgence in the context of the Bayesian brain and predictive coding approaches within cognitive science. To date, this perspective has been applied primarily to exteroceptive perception (e.g., vision, audition), and action. Here, I describe a predictive, inferential perspective on interoception: ‘interoceptive inference’ conceives of subjective feeling states (emotions) as arising from actively-inferred generative (predictive) models of the causes of interoceptive afferents. The model generalizes ‘appraisal’ theories that view emotions as emerging from cognitive evaluations of physiological changes, and it sheds new light on the neurocognitive mechanisms that underlie the experience of body ownership and conscious selfhood in health and in neuropsychiatric illness.

As always, a pre-copy-edited version is here.