Prior neuroimaging studies have supported the idea that the human insular cortex plays an important role in processing and representing internal bodily states, also termed “interoception.” According to recent theoretical studies, interoception includes several aspects such as attention and accuracy. However, there is no consensus on the laterality and location of the insula to support each aspect of interoception. Thus, we aimed to identify the anatomical insular subdivisions involved in interoceptive attention and accuracy; we examined 28 healthy volunteers who completed the behavioral heartbeat counting task and interoceptive attention paradigm using functional magnetic resonance imaging. First, interoceptive attention induced significant activation in the bilateral frontal operculum, precentral gyrus, middle insula, middle cingulate cortex, and supplementary motor area. Then, we compared the activation in anatomically predefined insular subdivisions during interoceptive attention. The highest activation of the middle short gyrus was noted within the insular cortex, followed by the anterior short gyrus and posterior short gyrus, while no significant hemispheric differences were observed. Finally, the interoceptive accuracy index, measured using the heartbeat counting task, strongly correlated with the activity of the right dorsal anterior insula/frontal operculum. These findings suggest that interoceptive attention is associated with the bilateral dorsal mid‐anterior insula, which supports the processing and representation of bodily signals. In contrast, the more dorsal anterior portion of the right insula plays a key role in obtaining accurate interoception.

The pre-doping of Li + ions (pre-lithiation) in graphite anodes, which is needed to improve the initial charging/discharging efficiency of lithium ion batteries, was examined from the viewpoints of lithium metal deposition, surface electrolyte interface (SEI) formation and electrode potential changes in the cathode during the pre-lithiation. Using a cell composed of pre-laminated, through-holed anodes and cathodes, the anodes were pre-lithiated with the perpendicular pre-doping method, as explained in this work, which can effectively enhance the pre-lithiation process in laminated cells. In the pre-lithiation system, Li deposition was not observed on the anode surfaces during pre-lithiation, and the thickness of the SEI layers formed on the anodes did not increase. Moreover, the SEI layer has the same composition as that formed by the electrochemical lithiation (charging) process, even when the pre-lithiation of the anodes is accelerated by throughholes formed on the anode and cathode electrodes. In addition, the electrode potential of cathodes inserted between pre-lithiated anodes does not change during the pre-lithiation process, and the capacity of the cathodes does not degrade upon pre-lithiation. The perpendicular pre-doping method examined in this study is found to be applicable to the production process of lithium ion batteries with high charging/discharging efficiency.

Interoceptive awareness, an awareness of the internal body state, guides adaptive behavior by providing ongoing information on body signals, such as heart rate and energy status. However, it is still unclear how interoceptive awareness of different body organs are represented in the human brain. Hence, we directly compared the neural activations accompanying attention to cardiac (related to heartbeat) and gastric (related to stomach) sensations, which generate cardiac and gastric interoceptive awareness, in the same population (healthy humans, N = 31). Participants were asked to direct their attention towards heart and stomach sensations and become aware of them in a magnetic resonance imaging scanner. The results indicated that the neural activations underlying gastric attention encompassed larger brain regions, including the occipitotemporal visual cortices, bilateral primary motor cortices, primary somatosensory cortex, left orbitofrontal cortex, and hippocampal regions. Cardiac attention, however, selectively activated the right anterior insula extending to the frontal operculum compared to gastric attention. Moreover, our detailed analyses focusing on the insula, the most relevant region for interoceptive awareness, revealed that the left dorsal middle insula encoded cardiac and gastric attention via different activation patterns, but the posterior insula did not. Our results demonstrate that cardiac and gastric attention evoke different brain activation patterns; in particular, the selective activation may reflect differences in the functional roles of cardiac and gastric interoceptive awareness.Significance statementInteroceptive awareness, senses that arise from within the body, play a critical role in adaptive behavior by providing ongoing information on bodily states, such as the heart rate and energy status. Although interoceptive awareness has various functions depending on its source, previous neuroimaging studies have extensively used cardiac awareness (related to the heartbeat). The present study showed that attention to cardiac and gastric (related to the stomach) sensations evoked distinct neural activation patterns by combining mass-univariate analysis with multivoxel pattern analysis using fMRI, indicating that the brain encodes attention to and thus awareness of different bodily organs in different manner. Moreover, the selective brain activation may reflect differences in the functional roles of cardiac and gastric awareness.

The functional roles of interoception or senses that arise from within the body have been thought to guide the agents in adaptive behavior by informing of various bodily states such as a heart rate or energy status. However, direct evidence that the different types of interoception are processed or represented differently in the human brain is still lacking. Here, we directly compared the neural activation for cardiac (awareness related to heartbeats) and gastric (awareness related to stomach) interoception in the same population (N = 31) where the participants were asked to focus on sensations of their heart and stomach in the magnetic resonance imaging scanner. The result showed that neural activation underlying gastric interoception encompassed the sensorimotor and reward-related regions when compared to cardiac interoception, including the occipitotemporal visual cortices, bilateral primary motor cortex, primary somatosensory cortex, left orbitofrontal cortex, and bilateral hippocampal regions. Conversely, cardiac interoception selectively activated the right frontal operculum/insula in contrast to gastric interoception. Moreover, we found that the left dorsal middle insula encoded cardiac and gastric interoception differently but the posterior insula was not by performing multivoxel pattern analysis. Our results demonstrated that cardiac and gastric interoception, different types of bodily awareness, have distinct neural substrates particularly relevant to the functions for each interoception for the first time.

The sense of body ownership, defined as the sensation that one’s body belongs to oneself, is a fundamental component of bodily self-consciousness. Several studies have shown the importance of multisensory integration for the emergence of the sense of body ownership, together with the involvement of the parieto-premotor and extrastriate cortices in bodily awareness. However, whether the sense of body ownership elicited by different sources of signal, especially visuotactile and visuomotor inputs, is represented by common neural patterns remains to be elucidated. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate the existence of neural correlates of the sense of body ownership independent of the sensory modalities. Participants received tactile stimulation or executed finger movements while given synchronous and asynchronous visual feedback of their hand. We used multi-voxel patterns analysis (MVPA) to decode the synchronous and asynchronous conditions with cross-classification between two modalities: the classifier was first trained in the visuotactile sessions and then tested in the visuomotor sessions and vice versa. Regions of interest-based and searchlight analyses revealed significant above-chance cross-classification accuracies in the bilateral intraparietal sulcus (IPS), the bilateral ventral premotor cortex (PMv), and the left extrastriate body area (EBA). Moreover, we observed a significant positive correlation between the cross-classification accuracy in the left PMv and the difference in subjective ratings of the sense of body ownership between the synchronous and asynchronous conditions. Our findings revealed the neural representations of the sense of body ownership in the IPS, PMv, and EBA that is invariant to the sensory modalities.Significance StatementPrevious studies have shown neural correlates of the sense of body ownership in parieto-premotor and extrastriate cortices. However, whether the sense of body ownership induced by different sensory inputs is represented in common neural patterns remains unelucidated. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) with multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA), we investigated neural representations of the sense of body ownership invariant to modalities. Decoding neural patterns for visuotactile and visuomotor modalities revealed successful cross-classification accuracies in intraparietal sulcus (IPS), ventral premotor cortex (PMv), and extrastriate body area (EBA). Furthermore, cross-classification accuracy in PMv was positively correlated with subjective ratings of the sense of body ownership. These findings demonstrate that supramodal representations in parieto-premotor and extrastriate cortices underlie the sense of body ownership.