Warburg Institute

Is the self already relational in its very bodily foundations? The question of whether our mental life is initially and primarily shaped by embodied dimensions of the individual or by interpersonal relations is debated in many fields, including psychology, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and more recently, cognitive neuroscience. In this interdisciplinary target article, we put forward the radical claim that even some of the most minimal aspects of selfhood, namely the feeling qualities associated with being an embodied subject, are fundamentally shaped by embodied interactions with other people in early infancy and beyond. Such embodied interactions allow the developing organism to mentalize its homeostatic regulation. In other words, embodied interactions contribute directly to the building of mental models of the infant’s physiological states, given the need to maintain such states within a given dynamic range despite internal or external perturbations. Specifically, our position rests on the following three propositions: (1) the progressive integration and organization of sensory and motor signals constitutes the foundations of the minimal self, a process which we have linked to contemporary, computational models of brain function and named “embodied mentalization”; (2) interactions with other people are motivated and constrained by the same principles that govern the “mentalization” of sensorimotor signals in the individual – and hence the mentalization of one’s body can include signals from other bodies in physical proximity and interaction, especially in interaction with particular bodies. (3) Crucially, given the dependency of humans in early infancy, there is a “homeostatically necessary” plethora of such embodied “proximal” interactions, especially as regards interoception. Collectively, such experiences of proximal intercorporeality “sculpt” the mentalization process and hence the constitution of the minimal self, including the progressive sophistication of mental distinctions between “subject-object,” “self-other” and even “pleasure-pain.” Finally, we explore notions of cardiac and more broadly interoceptive awareness as later, cognitive acquisitions that allow us to progressively solidify such distinctions, as well as understand and empathise with other people.

From the fourteenth to the seventeenth century, humanism played a key role in European culture. Beginning as a movement based on the recovery, interpretation and imitation of ancient Greek and Roman texts and the archaeological study of the physical remains of antiquity, humanism turned into a dynamic cultural programme, influencing almost every facet of Renaissance intellectual life. The fourteen essays in this 1996 volume deal with all aspects of the movement, from language learning to the development of science, from the effect of humanism on biblical study to its influence on art, from its Italian origins to its manifestations in the literature of More, Sidney and Shakespeare. A detailed biographical index, and a guide to further reading, are provided. Overall, The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism provides a comprehensive introduction to a major movement in the culture of early modern Europe.

This article reassesses the reasons why Toledo achieved prominence as a center for Arabic-Latin translation in the second half of the twelfth century, and suggests that the two principal translators, Gerard of Cremona and Dominicus Gundissalinus, concentrated on different areas of knowledge. Moreover, Gerard appears to have followed a clear program in the works that he translated. This is revealed especially in the Vita and the “commemoration of his books” drawn up by his students after his death. A new edition of the Vita , Commemoratio librorum and Eulogium , based on all the manuscripts, concludes the article.

According to the social historian, it is difficult to reconcile the expanding outlook and increased involvement in the world of public affairs of a university like Cambridge during the sixteenth century with the conservatism and insularity of the teaching programme which apparently persisted throughout the period. In the present paper I reconsider this question of the integration or lack of integration of the Cambridge curriculum with expanding interests outside the university, taking as the focus for my inquiry the pivotal study of the course, dialectic. I start by looking at the four-year arts course, leading to the first degree of B. A., as a whole.

Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing. The Orientalists and their Enemies (London: Allen Lane, 2006), 410 pp. £25.00, ISBN 0 713 99415 0. Edward Said’s Orientalism appeared in 1978. Its enduring success shows that it said something people wanted to hear. What it said is formu- lated by Robert Irwin with a clarity for which one looks in vain in Said’s book. “Orientalism, the hegemonic discourse of imperialism, is a discourse that constrains everything that can be written and thought in the West about the Orient and more particularly about Islam and the Arabs. It has legitimized Western penetration of

Summary Robert Boyle did not subordinate chemistry to mechanical philosophy. He was in fact reluctant to explain chemical phenomena by having recourse to the mechanical properties of particles. For him chemistry provided a primary way of penetrating into nature. In his chemical works he employed corpuscles endowed with chemical properties as his explanans. Boyle's chemistry was corpuscular, rather than mechanical. As Boyle's views of seminal principles show, his corpuscular philosophy cannot be described as a purely mechanical theory of matter. Boyle's classification of corpuscles allowed him to connect his corpuscular views of matter with chemistry. Boyle did not rule out the possibility of a classification of chemical substances based on their properties: his aim was to reform the received classification.

Interoception, the sensitivity to visceral sensations, plays an important role in homeostasis and guiding motivated behaviour. It is also considered to be fundamental to self-awareness. Despite its importance, the developmental origins of interoceptive sensitivity remain unexplored. We here provide the first evidence for implicit, flexible interoceptive sensitivity in 5 month old infants using a novel behavioural measure, coupled with an established cortical index of interoceptive processing. These findings have important implications for the understanding of the early developmental stages of self-awareness, self-regulation and socio-emotional abilities.

Negative racial stereotypes tend to associate Black people with threat. This often leads to the misidentification of harmless objects as weapons held by a Black individual. Yet, little is known about how bodily states impact the expression of racial stereotyping. By tapping into the phasic activation of arterial baroreceptors, known to be associated with changes in the neural processing of fearful stimuli, we show activation of race-threat stereotypes synchronized with the cardiovascular cycle. Across two established tasks, stimuli depicting Black or White individuals were presented to coincide with either the cardiac systole or diastole. Results show increased race-driven misidentification of weapons during systole, when baroreceptor afferent firing is maximal, relative to diastole. Importantly, a third study examining the positive Black-athletic stereotypical association fails to demonstrate similar modulations by cardiac cycle. We identify a body-brain interaction wherein interoceptive cues can modulate threat appraisal and racially biased behaviour in context-dependent ways.

Liz James, Ruth Webb; ‘To Understand Ultimate Things and Enter Secret Places’: Ekphrasis and Art in Byzantium, Art History, Volume 14, Issue 1, 1 March 199

The sense of body-ownership relies on the representation of both interoceptive and exteroceptive signals coming from one's body. However, it remains unknown how the integration of bodily signals coming from "outside" and "inside" the body is instantiated in the brain. Here, we used a modified version of the Enfacement Illusion to investigate whether the integration of visual and cardiac information can alter self-face recognition (Experiment 1) and neural responses to heartbeats (Experiment 2). We projected a pulsing shade, that was synchronous or asynchronous with the participant's heartbeat, onto a picture depicting the participant's face morphed with the face of an unfamiliar other. Results revealed that synchronous (vs. asynchronous) cardio-visual stimulation led to increased self-identification with the other's face (Experiment 1), while during stimulation, synchronicity modulated the amplitude of the Heartbeat Evoked Potential, an electrophysiological index of cortical interoceptive processing (Experiment 2). Importantly, the magnitude of the illusion-related effects was dependent on, and increased linearly, with the participants' Interoceptive Accuracy. These results provide the first direct neural evidence for the integration of interoceptive and exteroceptive signals in bodily self-awareness.

Although the study of political behaviour has been traditionally restricted to the social sciences, new advances in political neuroscience and computational cognitive science highlight that the biological sciences can offer crucial insights into the roots of ideological thought and action. Echoing the dazzling diversity of human ideologies, this theme issue seeks to reflect the multiplicity of theoretical and methodological approaches to understanding the nature of the political brain. Cutting-edge research along three thematic strands is presented, including (i) computational approaches that zoom in on fine-grained mechanisms underlying political behaviour, (ii) neurocognitive perspectives that harness neuroimaging and psychophysiological techniques to study ideological processes, and (iii) behavioural studies and policy-minded analyses of such understandings across cultures and across ideological domains. Synthesizing these findings together, the issue elucidates core questions regarding the nature of uncertainty in political cognition, the mechanisms of social influence and the cognitive structure of ideological beliefs. This offers key directions for future biologically grounded research as well as a guiding map for citizens, psychologists and policymakers traversing the uneven landscape of modern polarization, misinformation, intolerance and dogmatism. This article is part of the theme issue 'The political brain: neurocognitive and computational mechanisms'.

This article investigates the reasons behind the disappearance of Francis Glisson's theory of irritability during the eighteenth century. At a time when natural investigations were becoming increasingly polarized between mind and matter in the attempt to save both man's consciousness and the inert nature of the res extensa, Glisson's notion of a natural perception embedded in matter did not satisfy the new science's basic injunction not to superimpose perceptions and appetites on nature. Knowledge of nature could not be based on knowledge within nature, i.e., on the very knowledge that nature has of itself; or--to look at the same question from the point of view of the human mind--man's consciousness could not be seen as participating in forms of natural selfhood. Albrecht Haller played a key role in this story. Through his experiments, Haller thought he had conclusively demonstrated that the response given by nature when irritated did not betray any natural perceptivity, any inner life, any sentiment interiéur. In doing so, he provided a less bewildering theory of irritability for the rising communities of experimental physiology.

Today more than ever, we are asked to evaluate the realness, truthfulness and trustworthiness of our social world. Here, we focus on how people evaluate realistic-looking faces of non-existing people generated by generative adversarial networks (GANs). GANs are increasingly used in marketing, journalism, social media, and political propaganda. In three studies, we investigated if and how participants can distinguish between GAN and REAL faces and the social consequences of their exposure to artificial faces. GAN faces were more likely to be perceived as real than REAL faces, a pattern partly explained by intrinsic stimulus characteristics. Moreover, participants' realness judgments influenced their behavior because they displayed increased social conformity toward faces perceived as real , independently of their actual realness. Lastly, knowledge about the presence of GAN faces eroded social trust. Our findings point to potentially far-reaching consequences for the pervasive use of GAN faces in a culture powered by images at unprecedented levels.

Abstract Photojournalistic images shape our understanding of sociopolitical events. How humans are depicted in images may have far-reaching consequences for our attitudes towards them. Social psychology has shown how the visualization of an ‘identifiable victim effect’ can elicit empathic responses. However, images of identifiable victims in the media are the exception rather than the norm. In the context of the Syrian refugee crisis, the majority of images in Western media depicted refugees as large unidentifiable groups. While the effects of the visual depiction of single individuals are well-known, the ways in which the visual framing of large groups operates, and its social and political consequences, remain unknown. We here focus on the visual depiction of refugees to understand how exposure to the dominant visual framing used in the media, depicting them in large groups of faceless individuals, affects their dehumanization and sets off political consequences. To that end we brought together insights from social psychology, social sciences and the humanities to test a range of hypotheses using methods from social and political psychology in 10 studies with the participation of 3951 European citizens. Seeing images of large groups resulted in greater implicit dehumanization compared with images depicting refugees in small groups. Images of large groups are also explicitly rated as more dehumanizing, and when coupled with meta-data such as newspaper headlines, images continue to play a significant and independent role on how (de)humanizing we perceive such news coverage to be. Moreover, after viewing images of large groups, participants showed increased preference for more dominant and less trustworthy-looking political leaders and supported fewer pro-refugee policies and more anti-refugee policies. In terms of a mechanistic understanding of these effects, the extent to which participants felt pity for refugees depicted in large groups as opposed to small groups mediated the effect of visual framing on the choice of a more authoritarian-looking leader. What we see in the media and how it is shown not only has consequences for the ways in which we relate to other human beings and our behaviour towards them but, ultimately, for the functioning of our political systems.

Our target article (“Mentalizing homeostasis: the social origins of interoceptive inference” – henceforth MH for short) drew a relatively large and varied set of responses from the invited commentators. These are a source of both delight and challenge. The delight stems from the fact that our interdisciplinary proposal regarding the social origins of interoception is met with wonderfully constructive, specifying and expansive responses across different fields, thus building a wider basis for a long-overdue dialogue between the fields. The challenge stems from the fact that to do justice to the variety and depth of some of the commentaries would require at least another, long and overloaded, interdisciplinary article. As our response cannot be as long, we selected three central facets of our proposal and discuss them in relation to the points raised by the commentators. In all three instances, we particularly focus on the following question: Does our proposal call for a reconsideration of existing concepts and findings as we and some commentators suggest, or are the phenomena we have highlighted best described by existing conceptualizations in the fields involved, as some other commentators claim? We will start from the most radical aspect of our proposal, namely the cognitive and emotional implications of caregiving at the time of the infant’s motor immaturity, before moving into the issue of embodied versus cognitive mentalization. We will conclude with somewhat lesser issues of terminology regarding the nature–nurture distinction and the self–other distinction.

JONATHAN WOOLFSON; John Claymond, Pliny the Elder, and the Early History of Corpus Christi College, Oxford*, The English Historical Review, Volume CXII, Issue 4

In the Renaissance the discipline of philosophy was based on ancient systems of thought: Aristotelianism predominantly, and to a lesser extent Platonism, Stoicism, Epicureanism and Scepticism. This continued to be the case well into the seventeenth century. As specialists in the study of classical antiquity, humanists were therefore able to make an important contribution to philosophy in this period: rediscovering ancient philosophical texts that had been lost or neglected for centuries and supplying editions, translations and commentaries both for these works and for other classical texts which had been part of the philosophical curriculum since the Middle Ages. Though philosophers and humanists shared an interest in the same texts, their methods of approaching this material differed radically. Humanists believed that philosophical discourse, like all forms of learned communication, should be composed in a Latin style modelled on the best classical authors. The stress they laid on clarity, persuasiveness and, above all, eloquence was a deliberate challenge to the scholastics, who monopolized university teaching of philosophy and who wrote in a technical, jargonladen language, incomprehensible to non-philosophers. More importantly, humanists studied philosophical works in the same manner that they dealt with literary or historical texts, that is, as philologists.

In a recent study, Lush et al. [1] claimed that they found substantial relationships between hypnotizability and experimental measures of the rubber hand illusion (RHI) [2] . The authors proposed that hypnotizable participants control their phenomenology to meet task expectations arising from the experimental paradigm. They further suggest that the RHI may or may not be entirely explained by hypnotic suggestions driven by task expectancies and therefore could reflect top-down control of perception, instead of multisensory mechanisms. However, in reanalyzing their data, we observe no significant relationships between hypnotic suggestibility and the RHI when quantified using a control condition in line with standard practice in the field and the authors’ preregistered hypothesis. Furthermore, we note that the relationships that the authors describe are weak and observed for a visual hallucination control experience and in the control condition, indicating a general influence of hypnotizability on cognition, rather than sensations that specifically relate to the RHI. Overall, the results from our analyses and Lush original paper fit well with the view that the RHI is a perceptual illusion driven primarily by multisensory mechanisms.

Interoception-the perception of internal bodily signals-has emerged as an area of interest due to its implications in emotion and the prevalence of dysfunctional interoceptive processes across psychopathological conditions. Despite the importance of interoception in cognitive neuroscience and psychiatry, its experimental manipulation remains technically challenging. This is due to the invasive nature of existing methods, the limitation of self-report and unimodal measures of interoception, and the absence of standardized approaches across disparate fields. This article integrates diverse research efforts from psychology, physiology, psychiatry, and engineering to address this oversight. Following a general introduction to the neurophysiology of interoception as hierarchical predictive processing, we review the existing paradigms for manipulating interoception (e.g., interoceptive modulation), their underlying mechanisms (e.g., interoceptive conditioning), and clinical applications (e.g., interoceptive exposure). We suggest a classification for interoceptive technologies and discuss their potential for diagnosing and treating mental health disorders. Despite promising results, considerable work is still needed to develop standardized, validated measures of interoceptive function across domains and before these technologies can translate safely and effectively to clinical settings.

Summary This paper reassesses the importance of the Benedictine monasteries of St Benoît of Fleury and St Mesmin of Micy (both on the outskirts of Orléans), and the Cathedral of Chartres for the early diffusion of Arabic learning concerning the astrolabe, and it relates this diffusion to that of the judicial astrology of ‘Alchandreus philosophus’ and the astronomical tables of the Preceptum canonis Ptolomei. Evidence is given for the fact that already, by the turn of the millennium, the elements were in place for a corpus of a new, mathematically based, practical science of the stars, consisting of works partly of Arabic and partly of Greek inspiration. This corpus was progressively revised and inspired, in turn, further translations from Arabic, until it reached its most mature form in the mid-twelfth century. Until recently, scholarship has tended to concentrate on the cathedral schools of North-east France and Lotharingia, and the monastic schools of South Germany, and to see Gerbert d'Aurillac, the Archbishop of Reims, as the pivotal figure. While these schools were undoubtedly important in the diffusion of the new science of the stars in the eleventh century, it is argued that a key role in the initial stages of the diffusion was played by the interrelated centres of Fleury, Micy and Chartres at the beginning of the century, and Gerbert may not have contributed as much as has been believed. Additional sections are devoted to the authorities in this corpus, ‘King Ptolemy’ and ‘Alchandreus’. A reworking of the Arabic material on the construction of the astrolabe by Ascelin of Augsburg was copied into this corpus. The text has previously been known from only one manuscript; a new edition, from five manuscripts, is provided here, together with a translation and commentary.