Hyeongdong Park

Taipei Medical University | TMU · Graduate institute of mind brain and consciousness

The report 'I saw the stimulus' operationally defines visual consciousness, but where does the 'I' come from? To account for the subjective dimension of perceptual experience, we introduce the concept of the neural subjective frame. The neural subjective frame would be based on the constantly updated neural maps of the internal state of the body an...

Spontaneous fluctuations of ongoing neural activity substantially affect sensory and cognitive performance. Because bodily signals are constantly relayed up to the neocortex, neural responses to bodily signals are likely to shape ongoing activity. Here, using magnetoencephalography, we show that in humans, neural events locked to heartbeats before...

Unlabelled: Recent research has investigated self-consciousness associated with the multisensory processing of bodily signals (e.g., somatosensory, visual, vestibular signals), a notion referred to as bodily self-consciousness, and these studies have shown that the manipulation of bodily inputs induces changes in bodily self-consciousness such as...

Why should a scientist whose aim is to unravel the neural mechanisms of perception consider brain-body interactions seriously? Brain-body interactions have traditionally been associated with emotion, effort, or stress, but not with the "cold" processes of perception and attention. Here, we review recent experimental evidence suggesting a different...

Previous research has suggested that bodily signals from internal organs are associated with diverse cortical and subcortical processes involved in sensory-motor functions, beyond homeostatic reflexes. For instance, a recent study demonstrated that the preparation and execution of voluntary actions, as well as its underlying neural activity, are co...

Grid cells in entorhinal cortex (EC) encode an individual’s location in space and rely on environmental cues and self-motion cues derived from the individual’s body. Body-derived signals are also primary signals for the sense of self and based on integrated sensorimotor signals (proprioceptive, tactile, visual, motor) that have been shown to enhanc...

A growing number of studies have focused on identifying cognitive processes that are modulated by interoceptive signals, particularly in relation to the respiratory or cardiac cycle. Considering the fundamental role of interoception in bodily self-consciousness, we here investigated whether interoceptive signals also impact self-voice perception. W...

Surgical treatment of tumors, epileptic foci or of vascular origin, requires a detailed individual pre-surgical workup and intra-operative surveillance of brain functions to minimize the risk of post-surgical neurological deficits and decline of quality of life. Most attention is attributed to language, motor functions, and perception. However, hig...

Voluntary action is a fundamental element of self-consciousness. The readiness potential (RP), a slow drift of neural activity preceding self-initiated movement, has been suggested to reflect neural processes underlying the preparation of voluntary action; yet more than fifty years after its introduction, interpretation of the RP remains controvers...

The heart continuously and cyclically communicates with the brain. Beyond homeostatic regulation and sensing, recent neuroscience research has started to shed light on brain-heart interactions in diverse cognitive and emotional processes. In particular, neural responses to heartbeats, as measured with the so-called heartbeat-evoked potential, have...

Although recent studies on self-consciousness emphasized the importance of bodily processing and multisensory integration, such research has focused solely on bodily signals originating from the outside of the body (i.e., exteroceptive bodily signals) or internal bodily signals from visceral organs (i.e., interoceptive bodily signals) and how each...

Nightmares are characterized by the experience of strong negative emotions occurring mainly during REM sleep. Some people suffer from nightmare disorder, which is characterized by the repeated occurrence of nightmares and by significant distress in wakefulness. Yet, whether frequent nightmares relate to a general increase in emotional reactivity or...

The somatic marker hypothesis proposes that the cortical representation of visceral signals is a crucial component of emotional processing. No previous study has investigated the information flow among brain regions that process visceral information during emotional perception. In this magnetoencephalography study of 32 healthy subjects of either s...

The somatic marker hypothesis proposes that the cortical representation of visceral signals is a crucial component of emotion processing. No previous study has investigated the causal relationships among brain regions that process visceral information during emotional perception. In this magnetoencephalography study of 32 healthy subjects, heartbea...

Research in clinical and human neuroscience indicates that important brain mechanisms of self-consciousness are based on the integration of multisensory bodily signals (i.e., bodily self-consciousness: BSC), including signals coming from outside our body (i.e., exteroceptive signals, such as tactile, auditory, and visual information) and the inside...

Recent research has shown that heartbeat-evoked potentials (HEPs), brain activity in response to heartbeats, are a useful neural measure for investigating the functional role of brain-body interactions in cognitive processes including self-consciousness. In 2 experiments, using intracranial electroencephalography (EEG), we investigated (1) the neur...

People often fail to notice a large change in the visual scene when the change occurs during a brief interruption of the viewing. Since the change is well above perceptual threshold in continuous viewing, the failure (termed change blindness) has been attributed to abnormal visual short-term memory (VSTM). However, it is still unclear where the abn...