🍄 The Bodymind Schema

The mind is not your brain, and your body doesn’t exist to carry your head around. Bodymind is one.

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“Another aspect of the future is—forget the neuropeptides—to recognize that it is the emotions that are important; emotion-based therapies, expand on that. I want to get involved in really proving rigorously that these things matter. That mind matters. And I say the mind is not your brain, and your body doesn’t exist to carry your head around. Bodymind is one thing, it’s one field property.” —2010 ALICE Archived Interview: Candace Pert, PhD (1946-2013) 

Hello, we’re Alice and we are always in a state of wander. In 2010, our interview with Candace Pert, “The Mother of Psychoneuroimmunology”, opened our bodymind to the fact that every thought, memory, emotion, perception and prediction that we construct in our life includes something about the state of our bodymind. Emotions, Dr. Pert explained, are not simply chemicals in the brain. They are electrochemical signals that carry emotional messages throughout the body. These signals, a mixture of peptides, have far reaching effects.

“As our feelings change, this mixture of peptides travels throughout our body and our brain. And they’re literally changing the chemistry of every cell in your body—and sending out vibrations throughout our bodymind and even to other people.” —Candace Pert, ALICE.

Putting “interoception” into mental health

Could our bodies’ ability to sense internal bodily signals—what’s known as “interoception”—be the vital next step to diagnose and treat mental illness? Yes, says former neuroscientist Moheb Costandi, author of Body Am I: The New Science of Self-Consciousness (MIT Press, 2022). “When we feel anxious or excited we might say that we have ‘butterflies in our stomach,’ and when we have a hunch about something, we might say that we have a ‘gut feeling’ about it,’ writes Costandi for Proto.life. “Such sensations are a small component of the milieu of signals arising from inside our bodies—others include sensations of hunger, thirst, a full bladder, and those we’re not usually aware of, like signals associated with our breathing and the beating of our hearts. Interoceptive signals play an important role in how we feel and what we think. As well as having a strong influence on our emotional states, they also subtly affect how we perceive the outside world, and can influence decision making and other cognitive processes in various ways. And it is now becoming increasingly clear that processing of these signals goes awry in a wide variety of mental health disorders.”

Camilla Nord, principle investigator at the Mental Health Neuroscience Lab at the University of Cambridge, tells Costandi that: “Interoception may be a missing variable in psychiatric treatment, which may be important in certain groups of patients who have extreme bodily experiences.” Profound physical changes known as “somatic” symptoms (shortness of breath and sweating, for example) are common in patients with anxiety and depression and can be very debilitating. “Interoception-based treatments may be a path to treatments for people [with such symptoms] who we cannot treat very well at the moment.”

Alarm cells

There is a fundamental drive, instantiated by the brain, to minimize errors in our own sensory predictions. But sometimes it’s in overdrive. British neuroscientist Sarah Garfinkel was studying the brain circuitry involved in persistent fear when she found that a safe environment doesn’t always make people feel less afraid. “Parts of Ann Arbor bring The Truman Show to mind, with their wood-frame houses and white picket fences,” reports New Scientist. “Home to the University of Michigan, the city oozes middle-class prosperity and security. So, while doing research there a decade ago, Sarah Garfinkel was shocked to discover that young veterans of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan felt terrified even in Ann Arbor. ‘It broke my heart,’ said Garfinkel, now a Professor of Neuroscience and Psychiatry at the University of Sussex. And it changed the course of her career.”

Working with traumatized veterans, Garfinkel realized that a safe environment didn’t help them feel less fearful. And their fear was physical as well as mental. Their hearts were constantly racing, their pupils dilated and their palms sweaty. “It seemed to me that what their bodies were doing was meaningful, but I was just scanning their brains,” she said. 

Garfinkel set out to understand the body-mind connection. “Our thoughts, feelings and behaviors are shaped in part by the internal signals that arise from our body,” she found. But beyond that, reports New Scientist, “it is leading her and others to a surprising conclusion: that the body helps to generate our sense of self and is a key part of consciousness. This idea has practical implications in assessing people who show little sign of consciousness. It may also force us to reconsider where we draw the line between life and death, and provide a new insight into how consciousness evolved.”

Sense of self

Research into bodily awareness is leading us to rethink the nature of consciousness. “Our understanding of how the brain works will progress only when we stop observing the brain in isolation, and start thinking of it as one part of a system that includes the body and its environment,” Costandi writes in The Guardian. 

Gärdenfors describes a phenomenon called “phantom limbs.” “A phantom limb means that after an amputation, you feel an arm or leg that is no longer there,” he writes in Psychology Today. “The phantom limb itself is a result of the body model continuing to simulate the arm or leg as part of the body despite the lack of real feedback from the limb. Some patients experience the phantom limb as paralyzed, meaning they have no control over it.”

So how does that work? Phantom sensations occur because the brain creates a dynamic model of the body by integrating tactile and visual information with limb position signals from the muscles and tendons. Costandi explains that “this model, variously called the ‘body schema’ or ‘body image’, is crucial for both the perception and control of the body. But when a limb or other body part is removed, the schema is not properly updated, and so it retains an imprint of the missing part. As a result, the individual remains conscious of the missing part—often, even more so than of their existing body parts.”

Winging it

In a 2020 study, German researchers showed that bees can accurately judge gaps between obstacles relative to their wingspan, and reorient their bodies accordingly to avoid inflight collisions. At Columbia University’s Creative Machines Lab, researchers developed a starfish-shaped robot with an in-built body schema, which can adjust its gait after having a limb removed. The latest version of this robot creates its own body schema from experience.

This leaves us out on a limb. “If self-consciousness is based in bodily awareness, then it is unlikely that a lab-grown ‘mini-brain’ could ever become conscious, as some ethicists have claimed,” says Costandi. “By the same token, transhumanist’s claim that we will one day gain immortality by uploading our brains to supercomputers will probably always be science fiction.” Or will it?

What else we are wandering…

🧠 Fake news
The brain can tell apart an AI-generated face from a real one, show two new studies from The University of Sydney. In the first experiment, online participants failed to distinguish between real and synthetic faces, and even perceived the fake ones as “more real” than the real faces. In the second, a new sample of participants in a lab were asked to wear electroencephalography (EEG) caps. The electrodes fitted to these caps then measured the electrical activity in the participants’ brains.

This experiment “seemed to tell a different story,” explains Robin Kramer, Senior Lecturer in Psychology, at the University of Lincoln, in The Conversation. “During the task, different faces were presented in a rapid sequence, and while this was happening, participants were asked to press a button whenever a white circle (shown on top of the faces) turned red. This ensured participants were focused on the centre of the screen where the images were being shown. The results from the EEG test showed that brain activity differed when people were looking at real versus synthetic faces. This difference was apparent at around 170 milliseconds after the faces first appeared onscreen.”

👀 Are you for real?
“This N170 component of the electrical signal, as it’s known, is sensitive to the configuration of faces (that is, the layout and distances between facial features),” continues Kramer. “So one explanation might be that synthetic faces were perceived as subtly different to real faces in terms of the distances between features like the eyes, nose, and mouth. These results suggest there is a distinction between how we behave and what our brains ‘know.’ On the one hand, participants couldn’t consciously tell synthetic faces from real ones, but on the other, their brains could recognize the difference, as revealed by their EEG activity.”

🔍 Try for yourself here: The New York Times Real or Fake Quiz

🧠 The full story
In the 1950s and 60s, the German-American psychoanalyst Hilde Bruch recognized that disturbances of interoception play an important role in anorexia nervosa. She wrote in a 1962 paper that one “outstanding characteristic of the anorexic patient is a disturbance in the accuracy of perception or cognitive interpretation of stimuli arising in the body, with failure to recognize signs of nutritional need as the most prominent deficiency of this type.” The disturbance, she adds, is “more akin to inability to recognize hunger than to mere loss of appetite… Awareness of hunger and appetite in the ordinary sense seems to be absent… Even though occasionally hunger may become overwhelming in its biological urgency, usually there is denial and non-recognition of the pains of hunger, even in the presence of stomach contraction. On the other hand, there are complaints of acute discomfort and fullness after the intake of the smallest amount of food.”

🧠 Altered states
There are now novel new attempts to treat conditions like anorexia nervosa, including immersive virtual reality (VR). “Like video game playing, immersive VR allows for agency and action, and agency and action are prime ways of training the predictive brain,” explains cognitive scientist Andy Clark, describing a recent study. “Participants with anorexia were first encouraged to experience a body with a healthy BMI (body mass index) as if it were their own. To encourage this, subjects used a VR headset to view the abdomen of their healthy BMI VR body being touched and stroked with a soft brush while simultaneously feeling an identical stroking routine applied to their real abdomen. This encouraged them to identify fully and viscerally with the VR body. Later, when asked to estimate the size of their own (non-virtual) body parts, those trained with the healthy BMI virtual body showed a reduced tendency to over-estimate the size of their actual body parts.”

In 2022, The New York Times reported that “the V.R. segment in healthcare alone, which according to some estimates is already valued at billions of dollars, is expected to grow by multiples of that in the next few years, with researchers seeing potential for it to help with everything from anxiety and depression to rehabilitation after strokes.”

💬 Filling in the ___________.
We create very elaborate conversations in our minds. “Humans just cannot turn off our propensity to try to map patterns or fill in blanks,” Will Wright, Game Designer of SIMS and SPORE, tells ALICE. “Humans are great at filling in blanks. Typically, in an average conversation, you only understand about half the words that are spoken to you, but your brain tricks you into thinking you’ve understood all the words, because your brain through context can guess at the other half, and fills them in very smoothly. You don’t even notice the fact you didn’t hear them. I found this very useful to apply on the computer game side. Scott McCloud’s book made a very elegant case for the value in what he called ‘the gutter,’ basically how much of the experience you were giving over to the viewer. So in comics, the comic artist is defining individual spots in time, but frequently they leave large gaps between these individual panels, and the user is basically filling in these blanks and imagining how did they go from this to that. And it’s a very rich world in comics. And in computer games we have the same abilities. And The Sims when you’re playing it, you never hear the people actually speaking English. In fact, they speak this gibberish language. And you only get very subtle hints as to what they’re talking about. But people, in their minds, are imagining these very elaborate conversations.”

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