Neural responses to heartbeats distinguish self from other during imagination.

ABSTRACT: Imagination is an internally-generated process, where one can make oneself or other people appear as protagonists of a scene. How does the brain tag the protagonist of an imagined scene as being oneself or someone else? Crucially, during imagination, neither external stimuli nor motor feedback are available to disentangle imagining oneself from imagining someone else. Here, we test the hypothesis that an internal mechanism based on the neural monitoring of heartbeats could distinguish between self and other. 23 participants imagined themselves (from a first-person perspective) or a friend (from a third-person perspective) in various scenarios, while their brain activity was recorded with magnetoencephalography and their cardiac activity was simultaneously monitored. We measured heartbeat-e

SUBMITTER: Babo-Rebelo M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6503945 | biostudies-literature | 2019 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature