Respiratory rhythms sustain biological life, governing the homeostatic exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide. Until recently, however, the influence of breathing on the brain has largely been overlooked. Yet new evidence demonstrates that the act of breathing exerts a substantive, rhythmic influence on perception, emotion, and cognition, largely through the direct modulation of neural oscillations. Here, we synthesize these findings to motivate a new predictive coding model of respiratory brain coupling, in which breathing rhythmically modulates both local and global neural (...) gain, to optimize cognitive and affective processing. Our model further explains how respiratory rhythms interact with the topology of the functional connectome, and we highlight key implications for the computational psychiatry of disordered respiratory and interoceptive inference. (shrink)

There is growing attention towards atypical brain-body interactions and interoceptive processes and their potential role in psychiatric conditions, including affective and anxiety disorders. This paper aims to synthesize recent developments in this field. We present emerging explanatory models and focus on brain-body coupling and modulations of the underlying neurocircuitry that support the concept of a continuum of affective disorders. Grounded in theoretical frameworks like peripheral theories of emotion and predictive processing, we propose that altered interoceptive processes might represent transdiagnostic mechanisms (...) that confer common vulnerability traits across multiple disorders. A deeper understanding of the interplay between bodily states and neural processing is essential for a holistic conceptualization of mental disorders. (shrink)

Starting from macroscopic and microscopic facts of cerebellar histology, we propose a new functional interpretation that may elucidate the role of the cerebellum in movement control. The idea is that the cerebellum is a large collection of individual lines (Eccles's : Eccles et al. 1967a) that respond specifically to certain sequences of events in the input and in turn produce sequences of signals in the output. We believe that the sequence-in/sequence-out mode of operation is as typical for the cerebellar cortex (...) as the transformation of sets into sets of active neurons is typical for the cerebral cortex, and that both the histological differences between the two and their reciprocal functional interactions become understandable in the light of this dichotomy. The response of Purkinje cells to sequences of stimuli in the mossy fiber system was shown experimentally by Heck on surviving slices of rat and guinea pig cerebellum. Sequential activation of a row of eleven stimulating electrodes in the granular layer, imitating a of the stimuli along the folium, produces a powerful volley in the parallel fibers that strongly excites Purkinje cells, as evidenced by intracellular recording. The volley, or has maximal amplitude when the stimulus moves toward the recording site at the speed of conduction in parallel fibers, and much smaller amplitudes for lower or higher The succession of stimuli has no effect when they in the opposite direction. Synchronous activation of the stimulus electrodes also had hardly any effect. We believe that the sequences of mossy fiber activation that normally produce this effect in the intact cerebellum are a combination of motor planning relayed to the cerebellum by the cerebral cortex, and information about ongoing movement, reaching the cerebellum from the spinal cord. The output elicited by the specific sequence to which a is tuned may well be a succession of well timed inhibitory volleys the motor sequences so as to adapt them to the complicated requirements of the physics of a multijointed system. (shrink)

The present commentary considers the question of what must be learned in different types of motor skills, thereby limiting the question of what should be adjusted in the APG model in order to explain successful learning. It is concluded that an open loop model like the APG might well be able to describe the learning pattern of motor skills in a stable, predictable environment. Recent research on saccadic plasticity, however, illustrates that motor skills performed in an unpredictable environment depend heavily (...) on sensory (mostly visual) feedback, [HOUK et al.]. (shrink)

Although our idea of sequential input being a key to cerebellar function was taken seriously by most commentators, there were also objections, based in part on experimental evidence that seems to contradict our intuitions and in part on commentators' preferences for different schemes. Several were suspicious of experiments (performed on slices of cerebellar tissue) that may have severed some of the synaptic connections, particularly the inhibitory ones. It is our feeling that a modi-fication of our theory that could satisfy most (...) critics would not have to be very radical. (shrink)

Dilemma one, Between the theoretical concepts and authorial intention -- Dilemma two, Good manners and eristic -- Dilemma three, Between strangeness and familiarity -- Dilemma four, Between scholarly research and faith.