The history of cognitive science is marked by a series of revolutions against previous approaches to understanding what minds are and how they work. The current revolution is against the idea that our brains are information-processing computers. These "embodied" and "enactive" approaches are returning our attention to the roles played by the environment, body, and time in efforts to develop non-computationalist accounts for what minds are and how they work. Instead of working like computers that build internal simulations of the external world, these approaches see minds as the result of complex networks of dynamical feedback between brains, bodies, environments, where the minds include other minds. This lecture will introduce these ideas in more detail and give examples of how bodies and environments can contribute more to minds than one might first imagine.

A long-standing challenge in the study of the mind relates to agency. We know from our own experience that it is possible for a system to have its own goals and act to satisfy those goals. But when we make AI or robots, these systems act according to our goals, not their own. Moreover, we have little reason to believe that these systems have many of the other properties that we associate with minds. For example, we humans have perceptual experience. There is something that it feels like to sit in a cafe and read a book, or to walk in a park. Presumably AI and robots do not have this experience. How can we improve our understanding of these things well enough that if we wanted to, we could create an artificial agent? In this lecture I will not resolve all of these topics, but I will present the approach that I find most compelling as a starting point for doing so. This "enactivist" approach argues that "autopoiesis," — the self constructing organization of living systems — is a way to distinguish between agents and non-agents, which is a necessary first step to understanding agency.

The body and the brain are intrinsically and dynamically coupled, our thoughts, feelings and perceptions can be guided by internal bodily signals, such as heartbeats. Interoception is an internal sense, related to the sensing, interpretation and integration of bodily signals, providing a moment-by-moment mapping across conscious and unconscious levels. This talk will describe the assessment of interoception across different hierarchical dimensions, and discuss how different dimensions of interoception can influence a range of different processes, including memory, emotion, decision making, pain and attention.

This talk will focus on clinical applications of interoception. It will first demonstrate how interoceptive processing across different dimensions can be altered in clinical conditions. For example, it will detail altered patterns of heart rate and heart rate variability in a range of different clinical conditions. It will also address how interoceptive signalling may be altered in dissociative disorders. Body-brain integration measures will also be discussed, with a particular focus on how these could provide novel insights to previously medically unexplained symptoms, such as functional seizures. Interoception is also altered in autism, and this will be addressed in relation to anxiety symptomatology. Finally, this talk will detail how novel therapeutic approaches which focus on interoception may be helpful for providing new treatments for different mental health conditions.