Martina Saltafossi

I'm happy to share my debut as first-author with the recent publication of our article in #JNeurosci:

www.jneurosci.org/content/earl...

Big thanks again to @tschreiner.bsky.social and the whole team who made this possible! 🧠🌬️

Interoception vs. Exteroception: Cardiac interoception competes with tactile perception, yet also facilitates self-relevance encoding | PNAS Internal bodily signals, notably the heartbeat, influence our perception of the external world—but the nature of this influence remains unclear. Di...

My very first paper is finally out in @pnas.org, with Catherine Tallon-Baudry and Patrick Haggard! Interoception, exteroception, the self and more, it's got it all.

Also it should go open access at some point
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Where & how in the body do you feel political disgust? 

What about hope?

..and are these sensations related to how much we know about politics?



🚀 These and other bodily matters are explored in our new preprint below; cool collab. led by great @andreavik.bsky.social 💪

The effects of task similarity during representation learning in brains and neural networks Nature Communications - Here, the authors show learning tasks with similar structures can initially cause interference and slow down learning, but both the brain and artificial networks gradually...

Our new paper, now published in @natcomms.nature.com , asks a simple question: when two tasks share a common structure, does the brain learn them more efficiently? Surprisingly, this was not the case. Thread below (1/7)
rdcu.be/eSwvU

Stylized logo of the MindBrainBody Symposium

*13th MindBrainBody Symposium*

📆 Mar 9-11, 2026
🏠 #Berlin & virtual
(deadline: Jan 8, 2026)

Keynotes:
- @ulrikebingel.bsky.social
- Karl Friston (online)
- @tinalonsdorf.bsky.social
- Sonja Kotz
- Julian Thayer

...& so much more: prizes, posters, talks, food, drinks, encounters.

Let's meet!

Thanks for the warm welcome! Very excited to share this and hope it can be helpful to people in the field

Exemplary analysis pipeline for respiratory data

'Robust circular cluster-based statistics
for respiration-brain coupling'

New preprint, and what a way to welcome @teresaberther.bsky.social to the #neuroskyence community. With @eliobalestrieri.bsky.social, she developed CBPT for circular #bodybrain analyses.

Paper: osf.io/preprints/ps...

🧵🔽

New paper out! 🚀

Using a differentiable implementation of the reduced Wong–Wang model, we optimized whole-brain simulations for 1444 subjects.

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Beyond the buzz: Grounding interoceptive interventions in mechanisms of brain–body coupling The field of interoception research is growing at a rapid pace. This Perspective highlights why establishing both mechanistic insight and construct validity will be critical prerequisites for…

This Perspective from @danlikesbrains.bsky.social @martinasaltafossi.bsky.social @janafehring.bsky.social @jgross.bsky.social & Teresa Berther argues for the need for mechanistic insight and construct validity for developing effective body-based health interventions. plos.io/47VjLRn

So happy this paper is now out in @plosbiology.org! We investigated whether fluctuations in MEPs can be explained by phasic influences from internal bodily rhythms, and whether this might happen independently per organ system.
#interoception #neuroskyence

Really enjoyed thinking about things a little differently together with @martinasaltafossi.bsky.social @janafehring.bsky.social @jgross.bsky.social and nonskyer Teresa Berther. Back into the data we go, much more to come soon.

New perspective paper out now in @plosbiology.org with a few thoughts on #interoception: What it is (or rather is not), how it can inform therapeutic interventions, and where (we think) the field of brain-body #neuroskyence has yet to find more solid ground to build on.

doi.org/10.1371/jour...

Top: Experimental set up. Single pulses of TMS were applied to the hand area of the right primary motor cortex with an inter-pulse interval randomized between 6 and 10 s. Simultaneously, the neuronavigated coil position (yellow), electrocardiogram (red), respiratory signal (blue), electrogastrogram (green), and electromyography from the left hand (gray) were recorded. The figure shows traces of a 20-s time segment from one participant of the cardiac (raw), respiratory (filtered), gastric (filtered), and EMG (raw) signals. The experimental measure was the Motor Evoked Potential amplitude measured on a hand muscle (first dorsal interosseous), analyzed against the phase of the cardiac, respiratory, and gastric rhythms. Note that the three rhythms have very different periods (~1 s for the heart, ~ 5 s for respiration, and ~20 s for the gastric rhythm). Bottom: Artwork illustrating how rhythms of the internal organs interact with the moment-to-moment fluctuations observed in corticospinal motor excitability. Image depicts an outline of a brain with representations of the three rhythmic organs influencing the motor system: the heart, lungs, and stomach. Image credit: Tahnée Engelen.

How do internal bodily rhythms influence #brain activity & motor function? @tahnee-engelen.bsky.social &co show that #cardiac, #respiratory & #gastric rhythms independently modulate motor excitability, revealing distinct #interoceptive profiles across individuals @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/4nMtpLT

Neural correlates of consciousness in an auditory no-report fMRI study Dellert et al. use functional magnetic resonance imaging and inattentional deafness to identify the neural basis of conscious auditory perception in humans. Their results reveal a dominant role of sti...

👂🧠NCC in an auditory no-report fMRI study 🧠👂
now out in @currentbiology.bsky.social @cellpress.bsky.social !

www.cell.com/current-biol...

Using inattentional deafness, we show that awareness of task-irrelevant sounds mainly activates stimulus-specific sensory brain areas.

A figure with 3 panels. Top: A plot of log-evidence for an experimental effect over peristimulus time, as inferred using vRSA. Bottom-left: a condition-by-condition matrix of regression parameters. Bottom-right: condition-by-condition matrix estimated by the vRSA model.

Do you like RSA analysis, M/EEG and Bayes? Then you'll love Variational RSA for M/EEG, by recently completed PhD student @alexlepauvre.bsky.social from Lucia Melloni's group. It's a method and SPM toolbox for multivariate analysis of M/EEG data. arxiv.org/pdf/2511.01784 . 🧵 [1/4]

Imagined movement increases the segregation of brain-heart networks Understanding the mechanisms of motor imagery, the mental simulation of movement without execution, is key for the development of neurotechnologies. For instance, for detecting covert motor intent in ...

More on the link brain-heart axis and sensorimotor function, relevant for BCI research 🤖: Different bodily rhythms are coupled with cortical regions at rest. Here we show that motor imagery triggers a decoupling of cardiac dynamics with motor cortex functional connectivity 🧠🫀 doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Functional specialisation of multisensory temporal integration in the mouse superior colliculus - Nature Communications Whether and how anatomically distinct regions of the superior colliculus (SC) exhibit specialisation in multisensory temporal integration to facilitate different behavioural responses are not fully un...

Proud to have contributed to @gaiabianchini.bsky.social and @flor-iacaruso.bsky.social new paper on how the superior colliculus temporally integrates multisensory information

Happy also to chat about our Brain-Body Analysis Special Interest Group (BBSIG) pipelines for preprocessing and analysing ECG, PPG and respiration (soon), openly available and ready-to-use with BIDS data as Jupyter Notebooks 🫀🫁

Work of +20 wonderful collaborators! ✨

📑 Documentation: www.bbsig.de

1/ To explore or to exploit? I’m excited to share my new preprint with @tobiasuhauser.bsky.social and @micahgallen.com, correlating variations in cortical microstructures with individual differences in exploration-exploitation behaviours, using a gamified task! 🧵 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Neural sensitivity to the heartbeat is modulated by fluctuations in affective arousal during spontaneous thought Spontaneous thoughts, occupying much of one’s awake time in daily life, are often colored by emotional qualities. While spontaneous thoughts have been associated with various neural correlates, the re...

Neural sensitivity to the heartbeat is modulated by fluctuations in affective arousal during spontaneous thought

This takes care of the usual autocorrelation issues in the surrogates and computes cluster mass based on complex representations in the polar plane so we can reliably control error rates in phase-related analyses. Putting together a quick tutorial paper plus open GitHub repo right now, more soon!

Together with Teresa Berther, @martinasaltafossi.bsky.social, @eliobalestrieri.bsky.social, and @ualsbombe.bsky.social, we have developed a pipeline which uses IAAFT-based respiration time series surrogates to then adapt gold-standard cluster permutation testing for circular (phase-binned) data.

Stats on #bodybrain #neuroskyence data can become non-trivial pretty quickly: Anything beyond t-tests on 'systole vs diastole' or 'insp vs exp' will include some form of phase binning, so we need adequate surrogates for robust permutation stats. Plus, these are not available for circular data.

Menstrual cycle phase alters corticospinal excitability and spike-timing-dependent plasticity in healthy females https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.30.679456v1

Scientists discover surprising link between gut-brain interactions and mental health Every emotion has a physical side, but one organ has been curiously overlooked in brain-body research. Now, scientists are turning their attention to the stomach—and discovering signals that may chang...

Thank you to @psypost.bsky.social for featuring our @natmentalhealth.nature.com research on stomach–brain communication and worse mental health symptoms
www.psypost.org/scientists-d...
Was also shared on X but with weirdly more hair colour comments 🌈 than the science itself 😅:
x.com/OwenGregoria...

I'm thrilled to share that our new paper is now published in Psychophysiology (Open Access):
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

@zacndr.bsky.social @teamlabuda.bsky.social @fraferri.bsky.social @danlikesbrains.bsky.social

An interoceptive model of energy allostasis linking metabolic and mental health Interactions between metabolic interoception and regulation may drive comorbidity between mental and metabolic ill-health.

What drives the bidirectional relationship between metabolic and mental ill-health?

Read our new metabolic psychiatry paper, “An interoceptive model of energy allostasis linking metabolic and mental health” www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... led by @saramehrhof.bsky.social @hugofleming.bsky.social

Villringer et al. Figure 1. Conceptual framework for brain–body states

Villringer et al. Figure 2 Brain–body micro-, meso-, and macro-states can be distinguished on the basis of their duration and reversibility

'Brain–body states as a link between cardiovascular and mental health'

by Arno Villringer, Vadim Nikulin & Michael Gaebler @mbe-lab.bsky.social @michaelgaebler.com @mpicbs.bsky.social sky.social

www.cell.com/trends/neuro...

Postdoctoral Research Fellowship (286516) | University of Oslo Job title: Postdoctoral Research Fellowship (286516), Employer: University of Oslo, Deadline: Wednesday, October 15, 2025

Please RT
2 new positions in the lab as postdoc & PhD!

Interested in stress, pain, or reward? This project has it all!

We are a friendly but ambitious group. Oslo is a capital city on the fjord & bordered by forest, great urban & outdoors opportunities: 💃 ⛷️ 🚣 🎭 🎶

www.jobbnorge.no/en/available...

Finally, we'll have the Brain-Body States Symposium on Friday morning, featuring @tahnee-engelen.bsky.social @leahbanellis.bsky.social @tschreiner.bsky.social and Anke Karabanov.
Friday's poster session will also feature the lab's recent work on respiration and active sampling.