Lectures and seminars Cognitive Neuroscience Club with Mateo Leganes-Fonteneau, University of Amsterdam and UCLouvain

Abstract

Addiction research has yielded detailed mechanistic accounts of the development, maintenance, and prognosis of addictive disorders, yet prevailing models remain largely centred on cognitive and neural processes. I argue that interoception, the brain’s processing of bodily signals, should be integrated into these dominant frameworks, as bodily states fundamentally shape cognitive, motivational, and behavioural dynamics relevant to addiction.  In this talk, I will outline how core aetiological processes of addiction can be reinterpreted through an interoceptive lens and illustrate this with existing and emerging work spanning physiological measures, cardiac synchrony, cardioception, respiroception, and subjective bodily mapping, combined with classical addiction paradigms and pharmacological manipulations. I will then present plans for my upcoming ERC Starting Grant project, BodyCrave, which examines the interoceptive basis of craving in controlled laboratory studies of tobacco smoking and alcohol self-administration, and extends this approach to clinical populations via ecological momentary assessment, network analysis, and an idiographic intervention targeting craving-related bodily sensations in a randomized controlled trial. Bringing interoception into addiction theory promises a more complete account of etiological and clinical mechanisms and offers new leverage for experimental design and therapeutic innovation.