Leah Banellis
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leahbanellis.bsky.social
Leah Banellis
@leahbanellis.bsky.social
1.2K followers 650 following 84 posts
🏳️‍🌈 Postdoc at the Embodied Computation Group. Interested in brain-body interactions, interoception, consciousness, & mental health
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leahbanellis.bsky.social
Leah Banellis @leahbanellis.bsky.social · Jul 30
Got Butterflies in your Stomach? I am super excited to share the first major study of my postdoc @the-ecg.bsky.social - Now out in @natmentalhealth.nature.com! We report a multidimensional mental health signature of stomach-brain coupling in the largest sample to date www.nature.com/articles/s44...
Reposted by Leah Banellis
thomasandrillon.bsky.social
Out now in @commsbio.nature.com!

We studied brain-heart interactions during mind wandering and mind blanking.

Mind blanking is associated with a greater heart/brain decoupling, complicating the idea of an attentional switch between external & internal environments!

🧠🔄🫀🧪
November 25, 2025 at 10:01 AM
Reposted by Leah Banellis
tahnee-engelen.bsky.social
So happy this paper is now out in @plosbiology.org! We investigated whether fluctuations in MEPs can be explained by phasic influences from internal bodily rhythms, and whether this might happen independently per organ system.
#interoception #neuroskyence
plosbiology.org PLOS Biology @plosbiology.org · 12d
How do internal bodily rhythms influence #brain activity & motor function? @tahnee-engelen.bsky.social &co show that #cardiac, #respiratory & #gastric rhythms independently modulate motor excitability, revealing distinct #interoceptive profiles across individuals @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/4nMtpLT
Top: Experimental set up. Single pulses of TMS were applied to the hand area of the right primary motor cortex with an inter-pulse interval randomized between 6 and 10 s. Simultaneously, the neuronavigated coil position (yellow), electrocardiogram (red), respiratory signal (blue), electrogastrogram (green), and electromyography from the left hand (gray) were recorded. The figure shows traces of a 20-s time segment from one participant of the cardiac (raw), respiratory (filtered), gastric (filtered), and EMG (raw) signals. The experimental measure was the Motor Evoked Potential amplitude measured on a hand muscle (first dorsal interosseous), analyzed against the phase of the cardiac, respiratory, and gastric rhythms. Note that the three rhythms have very different periods (~1 s for the heart, ~ 5 s for respiration, and ~20 s for the gastric rhythm). Bottom: Artwork illustrating how rhythms of the internal organs interact with the moment-to-moment fluctuations observed in corticospinal motor excitability. Image depicts an outline of a brain with representations of the three rhythmic organs influencing the motor system: the heart, lungs, and stomach. Image credit: Tahnée Engelen.
November 13, 2025 at 11:01 AM
leahbanellis.bsky.social
The hard problem is solved - Thanks @naddenmark.bsky.social !
November 3, 2025 at 6:55 PM
Reposted by Leah Banellis
skhalsa.bsky.social
Even after recovery, relapse is heartbreakingly common in anorexia nervosa. Could the answer lie in the gut’s hidden signals? 🧵
September 22, 2025 at 8:14 PM
Reposted by Leah Banellis
martinasaltafossi.bsky.social
I'm thrilled to share that our new paper is now published in Psychophysiology (Open Access):
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

@zacndr.bsky.social @teamlabuda.bsky.social @fraferri.bsky.social @danlikesbrains.bsky.social
September 26, 2025 at 8:31 AM
leahbanellis.bsky.social
Thank you to @psypost.bsky.social for featuring our @natmentalhealth.nature.com research on stomach–brain communication and worse mental health symptoms
www.psypost.org/scientists-d...
Was also shared on X but with weirdly more hair colour comments 🌈 than the science itself 😅:
x.com/OwenGregoria...
Scientists discover surprising link between gut-brain interactions and mental health
Every emotion has a physical side, but one organ has been curiously overlooked in brain-body research. Now, scientists are turning their attention to the stomach—and discovering signals that may chang...
www.psypost.org
October 1, 2025 at 8:02 AM
Reposted by Leah Banellis
jmbh.bsky.social
Two new preprints on multilevel HMMs! Time series data is now pervasive in psychology and new methods are needed to model the dynamics in such data. Hidden Markov Models (HHMs) are powerful models for dynamics in which a system is switching between a number of discrete states.
September 22, 2025 at 11:10 AM
Reposted by Leah Banellis
tahnee-engelen.bsky.social
That’s a wrap! Thanks to the speakers @leahbanellis.bsky.social @tschreiner.bsky.social and Anke Karabanov and co-organiser @danlikesbrains.bsky.social for a great symposium 💪
September 19, 2025 at 11:37 AM
Reposted by Leah Banellis
danlikesbrains.bsky.social
Finally, we'll have the Brain-Body States Symposium on Friday morning, featuring @tahnee-engelen.bsky.social @leahbanellis.bsky.social @tschreiner.bsky.social and Anke Karabanov.
Friday's poster session will also feature the lab's recent work on respiration and active sampling.
September 15, 2025 at 1:39 PM
leahbanellis.bsky.social
Incredibly impressed with the calibre of research by Ye Ella Tian showing the importance of multi-organ bodily health including immunometabolics (at Adriatica Summer School 🏖️)
#teamlab #mambolab #psychologywellbeing_ch #fraferri_78 #erasmus_uda
September 10, 2025 at 8:31 AM
leahbanellis.bsky.social
So thrilled to see this Spotlight. Thank you @dalmaijer.bsky.social! Homes in on the complexity of the role of interoceptive signals with mental health, a 'one size fits all' is clearly not appropriate for interoception (sometimes showing that ‘being in touch with your body’ is not always preferred)
September 9, 2025 at 1:35 PM
Reposted by Leah Banellis
micahgallen.com
New preprint! We are pleased to share our Hierarchical Bayesian framework for Interoceptive Psychophysics! Implemented in rstan, we provide a complete suite of tools spanning model comparison, parameter recovery, multifactor designs, power analysis, and more! 🎯 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
September 2, 2025 at 8:09 AM
Reposted by Leah Banellis
nbkroemer.bsky.social
New preprint...and this one is truly EPIC 🚨.

Using a large group of patients with depression and healthy controls (N>800), we show differences in the functional segregation of insular subnetworks. And we can use it to classify!
Led by @glassybrain.bsky.social #neuroskyence 🩺
osf.io/preprints/ps...
Graphical summary of the analysis pipeline Decreased similarity within the anterior insula cortex drives group differences between patients with MDD and healthy control participants. This difference is illustrated by shift functions and compared to control regions in the temporal cortex. Patients with depression can be robustly classified based on functional connectivity profiles, and the accuracy improves with increasing symptom severity.
August 30, 2025 at 8:30 AM
Reposted by Leah Banellis
anilseth.bsky.social
👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼
micahgallen.com Micah G. Allen @micahgallen.com · Aug 27
Are interoception and mental health linked? Many assume so, with interoception even described as a psychiatric “p-factor.” But in our latest preprint, we were surprised to find little evidence for such a connection. www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1... 🧵 Thread with our reflections on the matter 👇
Interoceptive Ability is Unrelated to Mental Health Symptoms: Evidence From a Large Scale Multi-Domain Psychophysical Investigation
Interoception-the sensing and perception of the internal viscera-is widely cast as a transdiagnostic mechanism linking brain-body interaction to mental illness. Prevailing models propose that altered ...
www.medrxiv.org
August 27, 2025 at 8:32 PM
Reposted by Leah Banellis
fluffycyborgii.bsky.social
Excellent thread - explaining a (highly surprising) negative result, but also going into the ecological validity of the experiments performed and possible strategies to address those validity issues.

This is what we need in experimental cog sci !
micahgallen.com Micah G. Allen @micahgallen.com · Aug 27
Are interoception and mental health linked? Many assume so, with interoception even described as a psychiatric “p-factor.” But in our latest preprint, we were surprised to find little evidence for such a connection. www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1... 🧵 Thread with our reflections on the matter 👇
Interoceptive Ability is Unrelated to Mental Health Symptoms: Evidence From a Large Scale Multi-Domain Psychophysical Investigation
Interoception-the sensing and perception of the internal viscera-is widely cast as a transdiagnostic mechanism linking brain-body interaction to mental illness. Prevailing models propose that altered ...
www.medrxiv.org
August 27, 2025 at 5:40 PM
Reposted by Leah Banellis
dalmaijer.bsky.social
Very interesting set of null findings! TL;DR: no direct link between rigorously tested interoception across various domains and mental health. Read the whole thread (and/or preprint!) for nuance behind why there might be a null effect here.
micahgallen.com Micah G. Allen @micahgallen.com · Aug 27
Are interoception and mental health linked? Many assume so, with interoception even described as a psychiatric “p-factor.” But in our latest preprint, we were surprised to find little evidence for such a connection. www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1... 🧵 Thread with our reflections on the matter 👇
Interoceptive Ability is Unrelated to Mental Health Symptoms: Evidence From a Large Scale Multi-Domain Psychophysical Investigation
Interoception-the sensing and perception of the internal viscera-is widely cast as a transdiagnostic mechanism linking brain-body interaction to mental illness. Prevailing models propose that altered ...
www.medrxiv.org
August 28, 2025 at 6:11 AM
Reposted by Leah Banellis
nbkroemer.bsky.social
Wow, this is the kind of evidence we need to move ahead in the field. I'll go out on a limb here: I guess it is more about the gut than cardiac and respiratory domains. Huge effort by @leahbanellis.bsky.social @micahgallen.com and the entire team 👏
medrxivpreprint.bsky.social medRxivpreprint @medrxivpreprint.bsky.social · Aug 27
Interoceptive Ability is Unrelated to Mental Health Symptoms: Evidence From a Large Scale Multi-Domain Psychophysical Investigation https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.08.25.25334366v1
August 27, 2025 at 3:36 PM
Reposted by Leah Banellis
micahgallen.com
Are interoception and mental health linked? Many assume so, with interoception even described as a psychiatric “p-factor.” But in our latest preprint, we were surprised to find little evidence for such a connection. www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1... 🧵 Thread with our reflections on the matter 👇
Interoceptive Ability is Unrelated to Mental Health Symptoms: Evidence From a Large Scale Multi-Domain Psychophysical Investigation
Interoception-the sensing and perception of the internal viscera-is widely cast as a transdiagnostic mechanism linking brain-body interaction to mental illness. Prevailing models propose that altered ...
www.medrxiv.org
August 27, 2025 at 4:17 PM
leahbanellis.bsky.social
I am ridiculously excited about this! We made the cover!! (online-only... but still 😂). Love the philosophical twist to this Editorial at Nature Mental Health featuring our research.
August 7, 2025 at 9:24 AM
leahbanellis.bsky.social
Absolutely loved discussing our recent @natmentalhealth.nature.com paper on IhmCurious
YouTube channel (www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDTv...), thank you for having me! & to
@micahgallen.com @brainandstomach.bsky.social & the @the-ecg.bsky.social team for all their hard work 🧠
July 31, 2025 at 8:50 AM
Reposted by Leah Banellis
glassybrain.bsky.social
The way we feel affects the way we think. Can we find evidence for this in real-world mood and cognitive performance? For a few weeks, we followed people through their daily lives on their smartphones to answer this question! 📱🌍🧠 #neuroskyence

osf.io/preprints/ps...
OSF
osf.io
June 19, 2025 at 11:18 AM
Reposted by Leah Banellis
micahgallen.com
I’m elated to share our latest publication - out now in @natmentalhealth.nature.com! www.nature.com/articles/s44... - tour de force by @leahbanellis.bsky.social @brainandstomach.bsky.social and the rest of the VMP team!
Stomach–brain coupling indexes a dimensional signature of mental health - Nature Mental Health
Using a relatively large and diverse sample of mostly young adults, this study by Banellis, Rebollo and colleagues examines associations between regional stomach–brain coupling and mental health and i...
www.nature.com
July 30, 2025 at 10:25 AM
leahbanellis.bsky.social
Got Butterflies in your Stomach? I am super excited to share the first major study of my postdoc @the-ecg.bsky.social - Now out in @natmentalhealth.nature.com! We report a multidimensional mental health signature of stomach-brain coupling in the largest sample to date www.nature.com/articles/s44...
July 30, 2025 at 9:49 AM
leahbanellis.bsky.social
Loving that my #ASSC conferences keep aligning with pride 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️ (left #ASSC28 in Heraklion Crete, right ASSC in New York). Can we keep this up for Chile? @assc28.bsky.social
July 14, 2025 at 8:52 AM
leahbanellis.bsky.social
Loved presenting our Brain-Body tutorial🫀🫁🧠 at #ASSC28, great initiative & brilliant talk from @brainandstomach.bsky.social & awesome talks as always from @danlikesbrains.bsky.social & @marieloescher.bsky.social. Looking forward to the rest of the conference!
July 6, 2025 at 1:45 PM