[Music]
[Applause]
so everytime our heart beats it sends a
signal to your brain and this is what I
think is so amazing about the complexity
of our brain that it’s responding to the
outside while it’s also responding to
your hidden thoughts and then
simultaneously it also has represented
in its activity the moment-to-moment
fluctuations and signals that are coming
from your internal visceral organs so as
you sit here listening your brain is
activating with each heartbeat and it’s
not just your heart you have represented
in the neural activity of your brain
signals from the other organs as well so
you also have for example the slow wave
of the stomach also being represented in
your brains right now thus our minds and
our bodies are intrinsically and
dynamically coupled our thoughts
feelings and behaviors are shaped by
imparts the internal signals that arise
from our body and this is important
because the signals from our body are
informative our hearts do not just beat
regularly and in fact our hearts have
these beautiful patterns of activation
and flutters and curves of increasing
and decreasing activity and these
different signatures are associated of
different states for example if you’re
sitting here waiting in anticipation
then your heart does this classic
slowing down and this will happen when
you’re waiting at the traffic lights and
other day-to-day activities and you also
have these patterns of acceleration and
the acceleration curves that occur with
different emotional states and if you
model these cardiac changes and brain
and see which areas are Co activated you
have areas involved in a motion that
corrective a with changes in the heart
and this helps observe this
there that our feelings derived from
this dynamic relationship between brain
and body and our senses thus fall into
different categories you have X
reception which is sense in the outside
world and this occurs through
traditional senses such as sight and
also touch these can be contrasted from
the proprioception which is sensing the
position of your body and space and this
too then can be contrasted to
interception which is sensing the inside
world such as your internal visceral
organs such as your heartbeats
and if you were to come to my lab then I
would sit you down and I would test how
accurately you can detect when your
heart is beating and we can do this with
different tests for example I will
attach the pulse oximeter your finger
and I might simply get you to count the
number of heartbeats while you’re at
rest and see how accurate you are or I
might play you tones and sync an outer
sync with your heart and see how well
you can make these super nasty judgments
and these are classic happy detection
tests but my work shows and that people
don’t necessarily have insight into how
good or poor they are so you might think
you’re guessing on every trial but
actually you might be performing
perfectly at these tasks and thus we can
characterize individual differences in
interceptive accuracy and interoceptive
awareness and then see how these
individual differences they’re map on to
the way in which you experience emotion
and the role of the body in emotion has
long been known William James in 1884
theorized that it’s the sensing of
internal bodily sensations that gives
rise to emotional experience that you’re
not afraid because you you run or you’re
afraid it’s the act of running which
gives rise to the sense of fear because
it’s the feeling of the pounding of your
heart which gives rise to this feeling
of fear and we were able to look at this
in the lab doing experiments to test the
way in which the detection of
sensations might increase your emotion
so those individuals who are more
interceptive Li accurate willful
emotions of a greater intensity and as
modern-day Nero scientists were also
able to look at the nearest circuitry in
the brain that underlie this so if I put
you in a scanner and get you to focus on
your heart then you’ll see you activated
this area called the anterior insula and
the degree to which this is activated
predicts how good you are at detecting
your heart so the more intercepted lis
accurate you are the more activity you
have in this particular region and if I
also get you to be emotional in the
scanner and see which areas are
underlying emotion processing in general
you also have this area activated and in
a conjunction analysis of both emotion
processing and cardiac monitoring
particularly shows up this area giving
rise to the idea that this area is
integrating bodily signals to give rise
to the experience of emotion thus our
hearts are able to guide our emotional
experiences detecting these signals can
influence the intensity with which we
experience emotions but what I really
want to speak to you about today is the
fact that our hearts tell us not just
about how we’re feeling but our hearts
can also be informative about how other
people around us are also feeling so for
example in this particular experiment by
conv Ling cartel they monitored the
hearts of people who are undergoing
particular rituals in this case a
firewalking ritual where people need to
walk over burning embers and coals and
they monitored the heart of the person
undergoing this and then they also
monitored the hearts of all taneous lis
to a relative or a spouse or unrelated
observer and what they were able to see
that for the related person or the
person marry to the individual in
question undergoing this you have these
beautiful trappings of heart rate that
happen between the individual and the
related observer thus the cardiac
changes that were occurring
in the person going over the burning
embers and coals were also expressed in
the observer and it’s not just our
hearts that can represent the states of
other it can also happen in other
physiological signatures such as the
eyes and one of my favorite experiments
by Neil Harrison and he really was they
monitored the eyes of people and they
also got people to look at faces and
these faces depicted all their
formations happy and sad and then they
manipulated the pupil size of the faces
and they found that small pupil size was
particularly associated with sad faces
and if a sad face had a smaller pupil
size then people judged those faces of
sadder but then what I think is so
beautiful is that when they were
monitoring the pupil size of the
observer their own pupil size got
smaller as well and this happens
specifically sad faces thus this
physiological signature is sadness which
is a smaller pupil size then happens in
the observer such that they’re not just
saying or feeling sad for the person
that seemed to embody and feel that
feeling themselves their body is
adopting the physiological signature of
sadness such that they experience it too
and in our search to understand these
mechanisms are underlie emotion we can
see how maybe populations and
individuals who process emotions
slightly differently may have different
channels of information and a lot of my
work at present is working with people
with autistic spectrum conditions and
people with autism and can have trouble
sometimes understanding their own
emotion and the emotions of others and
my work where these individuals show
that they’re also impaired in their
capacity to really detect internal
bodily signals such as their heartbeats
we’re focusing on this gives you part
the story which has potentially this is
the mechanism through which a motion
processing is potentially impaired in
these individuals but it’s only part of
the story and actually if you monitor
their body and monitor their body while
other people are experience emotions or
pain then people with autism have a body
response which shares the emotions with
others so for example buit all didn’t
experiments where people um had pain
stimuli applied to them and people watch
this occur and people with autism had an
embodied skin conductance response that
the represented pain of the other person
in them so that they were having an
embodied empathetic response but not
being able to detect these signals
accurately also comes with a cost so
some of our work is also looking at
anxiety and showing their errors and
interceptive processing predicts higher
anxiety symptomatology but we’re working
now to create software platforms to make
people more introspectively accurate
such as heart rate and heart rate a
clinical and we’re giving people tours
to be more precise in detecting their
internal bodily signals and showing that
this can increase the accuracy and also
potentially decrease their anxiety so
your heart is a wonderful thing if you
perceive it accurately it can help you
have lower anxiety levels providing you
just notice it’s your heart and this
precision of detecting internal bodily
signals can also help you experience
motions more intensely but the thing
that I really want to stress today is
that your heart can inform you not only
about your own emotions but also about
the emotions of those people around you
that our hearts and our bodies can
represent other people’s joy
less than fear within ourselves so in
the search for utopia and in trying to
understand how we build communities I
believe that we build communities by
building bonds between people and one of
the ways this can happen is through our
physiological signals representing the
emotions of others so pay attention to
your heart it will help tell you how
you’re feeling will help you experience
at other people as well thank you
[Applause]
[Applause]
so everytime our heart beats it sends a
signal to your brain and this is what I
think is so amazing about the complexity
of our brain that it’s responding to the
outside while it’s also responding to
your hidden thoughts and then
simultaneously it also has represented
in its activity the moment-to-moment
fluctuations and signals that are coming
from your internal visceral organs so as
you sit here listening your brain is
activating with each heartbeat and it’s
not just your heart you have represented
in the neural activity of your brain
signals from the other organs as well so
you also have for example the slow wave
of the stomach also being represented in
your brains right now thus our minds and
our bodies are intrinsically and
dynamically coupled our thoughts
feelings and behaviors are shaped by
imparts the internal signals that arise
from our body and this is important
because the signals from our body are
informative our hearts do not just beat
regularly and in fact our hearts have
these beautiful patterns of activation
and flutters and curves of increasing
and decreasing activity and these
different signatures are associated of
different states for example if you’re
sitting here waiting in anticipation
then your heart does this classic
slowing down and this will happen when
you’re waiting at the traffic lights and
other day-to-day activities and you also
have these patterns of acceleration and
the acceleration curves that occur with
different emotional states and if you
model these cardiac changes and brain
and see which areas are Co activated you
have areas involved in a motion that
corrective a with changes in the heart
and this helps observe this
there that our feelings derived from
this dynamic relationship between brain
and body and our senses thus fall into
different categories you have X
reception which is sense in the outside
world and this occurs through
traditional senses such as sight and
also touch these can be contrasted from
the proprioception which is sensing the
position of your body and space and this
too then can be contrasted to
interception which is sensing the inside
world such as your internal visceral
organs such as your heartbeats
and if you were to come to my lab then I
would sit you down and I would test how
accurately you can detect when your
heart is beating and we can do this with
different tests for example I will
attach the pulse oximeter your finger
and I might simply get you to count the
number of heartbeats while you’re at
rest and see how accurate you are or I
might play you tones and sync an outer
sync with your heart and see how well
you can make these super nasty judgments
and these are classic happy detection
tests but my work shows and that people
don’t necessarily have insight into how
good or poor they are so you might think
you’re guessing on every trial but
actually you might be performing
perfectly at these tasks and thus we can
characterize individual differences in
interceptive accuracy and interoceptive
awareness and then see how these
individual differences they’re map on to
the way in which you experience emotion
and the role of the body in emotion has
long been known William James in 1884
theorized that it’s the sensing of
internal bodily sensations that gives
rise to emotional experience that you’re
not afraid because you you run or you’re
afraid it’s the act of running which
gives rise to the sense of fear because
it’s the feeling of the pounding of your
heart which gives rise to this feeling
of fear and we were able to look at this
in the lab doing experiments to test the
way in which the detection of
sensations might increase your emotion
so those individuals who are more
interceptive Li accurate willful
emotions of a greater intensity and as
modern-day Nero scientists were also
able to look at the nearest circuitry in
the brain that underlie this so if I put
you in a scanner and get you to focus on
your heart then you’ll see you activated
this area called the anterior insula and
the degree to which this is activated
predicts how good you are at detecting
your heart so the more intercepted lis
accurate you are the more activity you
have in this particular region and if I
also get you to be emotional in the
scanner and see which areas are
underlying emotion processing in general
you also have this area activated and in
a conjunction analysis of both emotion
processing and cardiac monitoring
particularly shows up this area giving
rise to the idea that this area is
integrating bodily signals to give rise
to the experience of emotion thus our
hearts are able to guide our emotional
experiences detecting these signals can
influence the intensity with which we
experience emotions but what I really
want to speak to you about today is the
fact that our hearts tell us not just
about how we’re feeling but our hearts
can also be informative about how other
people around us are also feeling so for
example in this particular experiment by
conv Ling cartel they monitored the
hearts of people who are undergoing
particular rituals in this case a
firewalking ritual where people need to
walk over burning embers and coals and
they monitored the heart of the person
undergoing this and then they also
monitored the hearts of all taneous lis
to a relative or a spouse or unrelated
observer and what they were able to see
that for the related person or the
person marry to the individual in
question undergoing this you have these
beautiful trappings of heart rate that
happen between the individual and the
related observer thus the cardiac
changes that were occurring
in the person going over the burning
embers and coals were also expressed in
the observer and it’s not just our
hearts that can represent the states of
other it can also happen in other
physiological signatures such as the
eyes and one of my favorite experiments
by Neil Harrison and he really was they
monitored the eyes of people and they
also got people to look at faces and
these faces depicted all their
formations happy and sad and then they
manipulated the pupil size of the faces
and they found that small pupil size was
particularly associated with sad faces
and if a sad face had a smaller pupil
size then people judged those faces of
sadder but then what I think is so
beautiful is that when they were
monitoring the pupil size of the
observer their own pupil size got
smaller as well and this happens
specifically sad faces thus this
physiological signature is sadness which
is a smaller pupil size then happens in
the observer such that they’re not just
saying or feeling sad for the person
that seemed to embody and feel that
feeling themselves their body is
adopting the physiological signature of
sadness such that they experience it too
and in our search to understand these
mechanisms are underlie emotion we can
see how maybe populations and
individuals who process emotions
slightly differently may have different
channels of information and a lot of my
work at present is working with people
with autistic spectrum conditions and
people with autism and can have trouble
sometimes understanding their own
emotion and the emotions of others and
my work where these individuals show
that they’re also impaired in their
capacity to really detect internal
bodily signals such as their heartbeats
we’re focusing on this gives you part
the story which has potentially this is
the mechanism through which a motion
processing is potentially impaired in
these individuals but it’s only part of
the story and actually if you monitor
their body and monitor their body while
other people are experience emotions or
pain then people with autism have a body
response which shares the emotions with
others so for example buit all didn’t
experiments where people um had pain
stimuli applied to them and people watch
this occur and people with autism had an
embodied skin conductance response that
the represented pain of the other person
in them so that they were having an
embodied empathetic response but not
being able to detect these signals
accurately also comes with a cost so
some of our work is also looking at
anxiety and showing their errors and
interceptive processing predicts higher
anxiety symptomatology but we’re working
now to create software platforms to make
people more introspectively accurate
such as heart rate and heart rate a
clinical and we’re giving people tours
to be more precise in detecting their
internal bodily signals and showing that
this can increase the accuracy and also
potentially decrease their anxiety so
your heart is a wonderful thing if you
perceive it accurately it can help you
have lower anxiety levels providing you
just notice it’s your heart and this
precision of detecting internal bodily
signals can also help you experience
motions more intensely but the thing
that I really want to stress today is
that your heart can inform you not only
about your own emotions but also about
the emotions of those people around you
that our hearts and our bodies can
represent other people’s joy
less than fear within ourselves so in
the search for utopia and in trying to
understand how we build communities I
believe that we build communities by
building bonds between people and one of
the ways this can happen is through our
physiological signals representing the
emotions of others so pay attention to
your heart it will help tell you how
you’re feeling will help you experience
at other people as well thank you
[Applause]
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