Abstract
Interoception and homeostatic/allostatic control are intertwined branches of closed-loop brain-body interactions (BBI). Given their importance in mental and psychosomatic disorders, establishing computational assays of BBI represents a clinically important but methodologically challenging endeavor. This technical note presents a novel approach, derived from a generic computational model of homeostatic/allostatic control that underpins (meta)cognitive theories of affective and psychosomatic disorders. This model views homeostatic setpoints as probability distributions (“homeostatic beliefs”) whose parameters determine regulatory efforts and change dynamically under allostatic predictions. In particular, changes in homeostatic belief precision, triggered by anticipated threats to homeostasis, are thought to alter cerebral regulation of bodily states. Here, we present statistical procedures for inferring homeostatic belief precision from measured bodily states and/or regulatory (action) signals. We analyze the inference problem, derive two alternative estimators of homeostatic belief precision, and apply our method to simulated data. Our proposed approach may prove useful for assessing BBI in individual subjects.
Highlights
Biological organisms face the fundamental challenge of ensuring homeostasis: their physical states have to be kept within certain ranges in order to avoid violating boundary conditions of life
In order to estimate homeostatic belief precision, we present a novel approach that is based on a generic framework of brain-body interactions (BBI) and homeostatic/ allostatic control, the “Bayesian Allostat" (BA) model by Stephan et al (2016)
We introduce two methods for estimating homeostatic belief precision from measurements of both bodily states and regulatory signals. (In the Supplementary Material, we present full derivations and variations of our approach that only require information about bodily states or reg ulatory signals.) we illustrate the performance of our methods using simulated data
Summary
Biological organisms face the fundamental challenge of ensuring homeostasis: their physical states have to be kept within certain ranges in order to avoid violating boundary conditions of life. It has been suggested that deciphering the mechanisms of BBI is important for understanding the physiological aspects of homeo static/allostatic regulation, but that human cognition is grounded and constrained by the fundamental necessity of ensuring bodily homeostasis (Stephan et al, 2016; Turner, 2019; Ziemke, 2016). For this reason, BBI play a key role in theories of mental and psychosomatic disorders It is possible that the same interoceptive dysfunction may be present in multiple clinical conditions (Smith et al, 2020)
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