Depression and obesity are common conditions with major public health implications that
tend to co-occur within individuals. The relationship between these conditions is …

Insula function is considered critical for many motivated behaviors, with proposed functions
ranging from attention, behavioral control, emotional regulation, goal-directed and aversion …

Large-scale intrinsic brain systems have been identified for exteroceptive senses (such as
sight, hearing and touch). We introduce an analogous system for representing sensations …

The theory of constructed emotion is a systems neuroscience approach to understanding the
nature of emotion. It is also a general theoretical framework to guide hypothesis generation …

Interoception refers to the sensing of signals concerning the internal state of the body.
Individual differences in interoceptive sensitivity are proposed to account for differences in …

Objective: Appetite and weight changes are common but variable diagnostic markers in
major depressive disorder: some depressed individuals manifest increased appetite, while …

This paper integrates emerging evidence from two broad streams of scientific literature into
one common framework:(a) hierarchical gradients of functional connectivity that reflect the …

In the mammalian brain, the insula is the primary cortical substrate involved in the
perception of taste. Recent imaging studies in rodents have identified a “gustotopic” …

The anterior insula contains the primary taste cortex, in which neurons in primates respond
to different combinations providing a distributed representation of different prototypical …

Objective: The term interoception refers to the perception of bodily cues. In empirical studies,
it is assessed using heartbeat detection or tracking tasks, often with the implicit assumption …