Computational approaches to brain-body mechanisms in anxiety and depression (360G-Wellcome-226824_Z_22_Z)

The brain constantly senses and controls internal bodily processes, like heartbeats and breathing. In turn, brain function is influenced by the state of the body at any given moment. These roles of the brain, referred to as interoception, are known to be altered in a wide range of mental health conditions, including anxiety and depression. Interactions between brain and body offer a window into what causes mental health conditions and how we could treat them in the future. In my project, we plan to find out more about brain- body interactions in three different ways: Firstly, training people to sense their heart beating more accurately alleviates their symptoms of anxiety. We aim to determine how this therapy helps and who benefits the most from it. Secondly, we will take brain scans of people while they are focussed on sensing their body to advance our knowledge of how interoception happens in the brain. Thirdly, depression presents so differently between individual patients, that they are probably affected by different types of depression, each with its own causes. Using medical datasets like UK BioBank, we will explore whether taking both the brain and body into account can reveal patterns about types of depression.