Martina Saltafossi
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martinasaltafossi.bsky.social
Martina Saltafossi
@martinasaltafossi.bsky.social
700 followers 800 following 7 posts
PhD student at @bodybrainbehaviour.bsky.social | IBB (University of Münster)
fascinated by body-brain coupling, interoception, neuropsychiatric disorders, M-EEG
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martinasaltafossi.bsky.social
Martina Saltafossi @martinasaltafossi.bsky.social · Sep 26
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
Reposted by Martina Saltafossi
carlottabarkhau.bsky.social
New paper out! 🚀

Using a differentiable implementation of the reduced Wong–Wang model, we optimized whole-brain simulations for 1444 subjects.

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...
November 17, 2025 at 8:59 AM
Reposted by Martina Saltafossi
plosbiology.org
This Perspective from @danlikesbrains.bsky.social @martinasaltafossi.bsky.social @janafehring.bsky.social @jgross.bsky.social & Teresa Berther argues for the need for mechanistic insight and construct validity for developing effective body-based health interventions. plos.io/47VjLRn
Beyond the buzz: Grounding interoceptive interventions in mechanisms of brain–body coupling
The field of interoception research is growing at a rapid pace. This Perspective highlights why establishing both mechanistic insight and construct validity will be critical prerequisites for…
plos.io
November 14, 2025 at 10:17 AM
Reposted by Martina Saltafossi
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
Reposted by Martina Saltafossi
danlikesbrains.bsky.social
Really enjoyed thinking about things a little differently together with @martinasaltafossi.bsky.social @janafehring.bsky.social @jgross.bsky.social and nonskyer Teresa Berther. Back into the data we go, much more to come soon.
November 14, 2025 at 7:39 AM
Reposted by Martina Saltafossi
danlikesbrains.bsky.social
New perspective paper out now in @plosbiology.org with a few thoughts on #interoception: What it is (or rather is not), how it can inform therapeutic interventions, and where (we think) the field of brain-body #neuroskyence has yet to find more solid ground to build on.

doi.org/10.1371/jour...
Beyond the buzz: Grounding interoceptive interventions in mechanisms of brain–body coupling
The field of interoception research is growing at a rapid pace. This Perspective highlights why establishing both mechanistic insight and construct validity will be critical prerequisites for developi...
doi.org
November 14, 2025 at 7:39 AM
Reposted by Martina Saltafossi
plosbiology.org
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 10:17 AM
Reposted by Martina Saltafossi
torgedellert.bsky.social
👂🧠NCC in an auditory no-report fMRI study 🧠👂
now out in @currentbiology.bsky.social @cellpress.bsky.social !

www.cell.com/current-biol...

Using inattentional deafness, we show that awareness of task-irrelevant sounds mainly activates stimulus-specific sensory brain areas.
Neural correlates of consciousness in an auditory no-report fMRI study
Dellert et al. use functional magnetic resonance imaging and inattentional deafness to identify the neural basis of conscious auditory perception in humans. Their results reveal a dominant role of sti...
www.cell.com
November 6, 2025 at 4:21 PM
Reposted by Martina Saltafossi
corticalpete.bsky.social
Do you like RSA analysis, M/EEG and Bayes? Then you'll love Variational RSA for M/EEG, by recently completed PhD student @alexlepauvre.bsky.social from Lucia Melloni's group. It's a method and SPM toolbox for multivariate analysis of M/EEG data. arxiv.org/pdf/2511.01784 . 🧵 [1/4]
A figure with 3 panels. Top: A plot of log-evidence for an experimental effect over peristimulus time, as inferred using vRSA. Bottom-left: a condition-by-condition matrix of regression parameters. Bottom-right: condition-by-condition matrix estimated by the vRSA model.
November 6, 2025 at 2:03 PM
Reposted by Martina Saltafossi
diegocandiar.bsky.social
More on the link brain-heart axis and sensorimotor function, relevant for BCI research 🤖: Different bodily rhythms are coupled with cortical regions at rest. Here we show that motor imagery triggers a decoupling of cardiac dynamics with motor cortex functional connectivity 🧠🫀 doi.org/10.1101/2025...
Imagined movement increases the segregation of brain-heart networks
Understanding the mechanisms of motor imagery, the mental simulation of movement without execution, is key for the development of neurotechnologies. For instance, for detecting covert motor intent in ...
doi.org
November 4, 2025 at 1:28 PM
Reposted by Martina Saltafossi
mjmoglie.bsky.social
Proud to have contributed to @gaiabianchini.bsky.social and @flor-iacaruso.bsky.social new paper on how the superior colliculus temporally integrates multisensory information
Functional specialisation of multisensory temporal integration in the mouse superior colliculus - Nature Communications
Whether and how anatomically distinct regions of the superior colliculus (SC) exhibit specialisation in multisensory temporal integration to facilitate different behavioural responses are not fully un...
www.nature.com
November 3, 2025 at 9:17 AM
Reposted by Martina Saltafossi
martager.bsky.social
Happy also to chat about our Brain-Body Analysis Special Interest Group (BBSIG) pipelines for preprocessing and analysing ECG, PPG and respiration (soon), openly available and ready-to-use with BIDS data as Jupyter Notebooks 🫀🫁

Work of +20 wonderful collaborators! ✨

📑 Documentation: www.bbsig.de
October 16, 2025 at 3:17 PM
Reposted by Martina Saltafossi
ashleytyrer.bsky.social
1/ To explore or to exploit? I’m excited to share my new preprint with @tobiasuhauser.bsky.social and @micahgallen.com, correlating variations in cortical microstructures with individual differences in exploration-exploitation behaviours, using a gamified task! 🧵 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
October 15, 2025 at 11:57 AM
Reposted by Martina Saltafossi
tahnee-engelen.bsky.social
Neural sensitivity to the heartbeat is modulated by fluctuations in affective arousal during spontaneous thought
Neural sensitivity to the heartbeat is modulated by fluctuations in affective arousal during spontaneous thought
Spontaneous thoughts, occupying much of one’s awake time in daily life, are often colored by emotional qualities. While spontaneous thoughts have been associated with various neural correlates, the re...
www.jneurosci.org
October 13, 2025 at 7:09 AM
Reposted by Martina Saltafossi
danlikesbrains.bsky.social
This takes care of the usual autocorrelation issues in the surrogates and computes cluster mass based on complex representations in the polar plane so we can reliably control error rates in phase-related analyses. Putting together a quick tutorial paper plus open GitHub repo right now, more soon!
October 9, 2025 at 8:02 AM
Reposted by Martina Saltafossi
danlikesbrains.bsky.social
Together with Teresa Berther, @martinasaltafossi.bsky.social, @eliobalestrieri.bsky.social, and @ualsbombe.bsky.social, we have developed a pipeline which uses IAAFT-based respiration time series surrogates to then adapt gold-standard cluster permutation testing for circular (phase-binned) data.
October 9, 2025 at 8:02 AM
Reposted by Martina Saltafossi
danlikesbrains.bsky.social
Stats on #bodybrain #neuroskyence data can become non-trivial pretty quickly: Anything beyond t-tests on 'systole vs diastole' or 'insp vs exp' will include some form of phase binning, so we need adequate surrogates for robust permutation stats. Plus, these are not available for circular data.
October 9, 2025 at 8:02 AM
Reposted by Martina Saltafossi
biorxiv-neursci.bsky.social
Menstrual cycle phase alters corticospinal excitability and spike-timing-dependent plasticity in healthy females https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.30.679456v1
October 2, 2025 at 6:15 AM
Reposted by Martina Saltafossi
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
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
Reposted by Martina Saltafossi
camillanord.bsky.social
What drives the bidirectional relationship between metabolic and mental ill-health?

Read our new metabolic psychiatry paper, “An interoceptive model of energy allostasis linking metabolic and mental health” www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... led by @saramehrhof.bsky.social @hugofleming.bsky.social
An interoceptive model of energy allostasis linking metabolic and mental health
Interactions between metabolic interoception and regulation may drive comorbidity between mental and metabolic ill-health.
www.science.org
September 25, 2025 at 9:48 AM
Reposted by Martina Saltafossi
cp-trendsneuro.bsky.social
'Brain–body states as a link between cardiovascular and mental health'

by Arno Villringer, Vadim Nikulin & Michael Gaebler @mbe-lab.bsky.social @michaelgaebler.com @mpicbs.bsky.social sky.social

www.cell.com/trends/neuro...
Villringer et al. Figure 1. Conceptual framework for brain–body states Villringer et al. Figure 2 Brain–body micro-, meso-, and macro-states can be distinguished on the basis of their duration and reversibility
September 23, 2025 at 8:13 PM
Reposted by Martina Saltafossi
sirileknes.bsky.social
Please RT
2 new positions in the lab as postdoc & PhD!

Interested in stress, pain, or reward? This project has it all!

We are a friendly but ambitious group. Oslo is a capital city on the fjord & bordered by forest, great urban & outdoors opportunities: 💃 ⛷️ 🚣 🎭 🎶

www.jobbnorge.no/en/available...
Postdoctoral Research Fellowship (286516) | University of Oslo
Job title: Postdoctoral Research Fellowship (286516), Employer: University of Oslo, Deadline: Wednesday, October 15, 2025
www.jobbnorge.no
September 24, 2025 at 12:22 PM
Reposted by Martina Saltafossi
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
Reposted by Martina Saltafossi
danlikesbrains.bsky.social
On Wednesday, non-Bluesky PhD student Teresa Berther will share her poster on gut-brain interactions.
September 15, 2025 at 1:39 PM
Reposted by Martina Saltafossi
danlikesbrains.bsky.social
On Tuesday, @martinasaltafossi.bsky.social will present her poster on respiration and E:I balance in temporal lobe epilepsy.
September 15, 2025 at 1:39 PM