Abstract
This column attempts to describe the characteristics of current cyberpsychology research in Europe. In particular, CyberEurope aims at describing the leading research groups and projects running on the other side of the Ocean.
Interoception and Well-Being
Interoception—the perception of our internal bodily sensations—plays a critical role in shaping an individual's emotions, decision making, self-awareness, and well-being. 1 Recently, interoceptive processes have been linked to a variety of conditions in both healthy and clinical populations. 2 Nevertheless, the interoceptive domain is still underexplored, as most recent scientific advances have focused primarily on how to assess interoception rather than how to change, enhance, and shape our interoceptive perceptions to improve our daily lives. In this context, the development of technological solutions capable of artificially modifying an individual's internal bodily sensations may lead to novel methods of enhancing well-being and treating a wide range of conditions. 3
Just as multisensory stimulation technologies, such as virtual reality, can create immersive visual and auditory experiences capable of altering our perception of reality, interoceptive technologies could use methods such as noninvasive stimulation of mechanoreceptors, targeted sound frequencies, and tactile feedback systems to create a customized synthetic internal bodily experience. By manipulating the perception of internal bodily states and creating these synthetic experiences, 4 these technologies can potentially improve emotional regulation, modulate behaviors related to the interoceptive system, enhance the perception of our bodies, reduce the effects of stress, and even alleviate the symptoms of various clinical conditions. 5
INSIDE-OUT: The Goals of the Project
As the interoceptive system is a core component and gateway to our health, a technology capable of accessing and manipulating this system would be a major breakthrough, with unprecedented potential to promote human health and well-being. However, these technologies remain largely unexplored. 6 To address this lack of technological solutions, the INSIDE-OUT project, which involves researchers from two different institutions in Milan, Italy—the Applied Technology for Neuro-Psychology Laboratory at the Istituto Auxologico Italiano and the Humane Technology Laboratory at the Catholic University of Milan—proposes the development of an innovative sound technology for modifying interoceptive signals.
Although academic and professional institutions have been slow to recognize acoustics as a technological science, there has been progress in the field, and more and more people are learning about sound and vibration. Sound and vibration are two very closely related physical phenomena that can affect the human body and its health. This happens through mechanoreceptors, which are receptors that can sense mechanical forces and translate sensory input into different somatosensory experiences based on how sensitive they are to vibration. Research has also shown that different sound frequencies can activate the insula network in different ways. 1
Because of the importance of the insula network in interoceptive processing—the Insula Hierarchical Modular Adaptive Interoception Control model 7 suggests that the insula plays a key role in being aware of feelings and bodily states—the project hypothesizes that stimulating the insula with low-frequency sounds will be able to alter interoceptive processing at the cortical level, causing a chain of effects on the interoceptive system.
According to this interpretation, the primary goal of the project is to create a wearable device that can generate and modulate low-level bone-transmitted frequencies to create a variety of synthetic click trains. The duration and variety of frequencies will be able to be adjusted via the device's interface. It will be possible to alter one's experience of internal states, emotions, and feelings by using these noninvasive techniques to stimulate the insula selectively. The lack of adequate technology to train interoception has been repeatedly highlighted, and dysfunctional interoception is now seen as a crucial aspect of mental health. According to this theory, interoceptive technology will allow scientists to explore further the roots of interoception and multisensory integration.
The interoceptive technology developed for this project will also serve as a useful therapeutic resource for the assessment and treatment of mental health conditions. The research and application of the proposed interoceptive sound technology could lead to effective noninvasive treatments for mental health conditions associated with impairments in interoceptive processing.
This could have profound implications for individuals suffering from conditions in which interoceptive processing is impaired, such as anxiety disorders, chronic pain, and eating disorders. 8 In addition, targeted activation of the insula could potentially enhance the efficacy of therapeutic interventions that focus on improving interoceptive awareness and self-regulation. The INSIDE-OUT project aims to develop and test a new noninvasive technology that uses sound and vibration to activate the insular network selectively to modulate interoceptive processing. As technology continues to advance, the development of sonoceptive systems designed to modify our internal body perception has the potential to revolutionize the way we approach health and well-being.
INSIDE-OUT: Research Plan
The first goal of the INSIDE-OUT project is to develop a new noninvasive, wearable, bone-transmitting technology that can use sound and vibration to alter insula activity selectively. The second goal is to test this technology in a series of controlled studies that will examine how insula stimulation affects behavior and cognition, interoceptive processing, and cortical activity. In addition, and on a larger scale, the INSIDE-OUT project will study the effects of the technology on clinical populations (such as people with chronic pain) and aims to learn more about the biological effects of stimulation at the autonomic level in healthy populations.
Behavioral and cognitive experiments
Because the insula is so important for processing emotions and determining how important a stimulus is, it is a key target for the INSIDE-OUT project. By using specific sound frequencies to activate the insula selectively, the project hopes to find out how it might affect cognitive control, emotion regulation, and the ability to distinguish one emotion from another in young, healthy volunteers. To achieve this goal, the project will use an emotional go-no-go task, a common type of experiment used to measure how emotion processing and cognitive control interact.
In this task, participants must respond quickly to target stimuli (such as neutral faces) while inhibiting their response to nontarget stimuli (such as disgusted faces), or vice versa, depending on the experimental condition. In the INSIDE-OUT project, participants will perform the emotional go-no-go task in a within-subject design, that is, they will be exposed to both right and left insula stimulation in separate experimental sessions. By comparing how participants perform in these different situations, researchers will be able to see how selective activation of the insula may affect emotional processing and cognitive control, with a focus on motor control inhibition as a proxy for impulsive behavior.
Interoceptive processing experiment
The relationship between heart-evoked potentials (HEPs) and interoception is an important part of understanding how the brain processes signals from inside the body. HEPs are thought to be a physiological marker of interoceptive processing. The insula, which is the most important part of the brain for processing information from the sense of touch, plays a key role in the production of HEPs.
By using specific sound frequencies to stimulate the insula selectively, the INSIDE-OUT project hopes to find out if it is possible to alter the neural mechanisms involved in interoceptive processing artificially. Exploring this relationship could provide useful information and show us how targeted insula stimulation could be used to improve interoceptive accuracy, emotional regulation, and well-being. In this case, people will participate in a series of experiments to find out how selective stimulation of the insula affects HEPs. By studying how selective insula stimulation affects HEPs, the project hopes to learn more about the neural mechanisms behind emotion regulation and cognitive control. It will also investigate whether targeted insula stimulation could be used to improve the way the body processes its own signals.
Neuroimaging experiment
The INSIDE-OUT research will use resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) to confirm the effectiveness of sound stimulation on the insula cortex by identifying the specific areas of activation in response to this type of noninvasive stimulation. At several points in the experiment, including before and after insula stimulation, subjects will undergo a series of rs-fMRI scans to monitor brain activity. The goal of this study is to identify the underlying neural networks involved in interoceptive stimulation by examining resting-state brain activity and connectivity patterns in response to targeted insula stimulation. The aim of the project is to confirm hypotheses about the neurological basis of interoceptive stimulation and to further our understanding of this phenomenon by examining the effects of selective activation of the insula via sound frequencies on connectivity within the interoceptive brain network.
Conclusions
The main goal of the INSIDE-OUT project is to develop a new, noninvasive technology that uses sound waves to change the activity of the insula in a specific way. Through a series of controlled experiments, the project hopes to find out how stimulating the insula affects behavior and thinking, interoception, and brain activity. In this way, the project will help us to understand how emotions are controlled and how interoceptive information is processed. This will pave the way for new ways to improve emotional and mental health in both healthy and clinical individuals.