Researcher at a glance
- Affiliation: Department of Psychology, Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio (Emeritus)
- Orientation: Autonomic psychophysiology; interoception as a reciprocal afferent/efferent circuit rather than an ascending sense; multilevel integration of bottom-up and top-down control
Key contributions
- First author of the Trends in Neurosciences 44(1) anatomical review (Berntson & Khalsa (2021)), the special issue’s account of interoceptive sensors, pathways and circuits.
- Insists on the reciprocity thesis: afferent interoception cannot be described apart from the efferent systems that change the state being sensed, so the unit of analysis is a circuit, not a pathway.
- Author (with colleagues) of ‘Interoception and the autonomic nervous system: bottom-up meets top-down’ (2019), in Tsakiris & De Preester’s The Interoceptive Mind — the framing his 2021 review restates.
- Long career in autonomic psychophysiology; the central-autonomic and cortical-visceral control material in the review is his half of it.
- First author of a lesion double-dissociation of evaluation (Berntson et al. (2010), with Bechara, Tranel and the Iowa group): insula lesions blunt both valence and arousal for both hedonic signs, amygdala lesions selectively blunt negative arousal — the wiki’s causal complement to its correlational valence/arousal evidence.
Key papers
Connections
- Debates: inferential?, Can we know whether other animals have conscious feelings?
- Related researchers: Sahib S. Khalsa, A. D. (Bud) Craig, Frederike H. Petzschner, Hugo D. Critchley, Karen S. Quigley
The wiki’s autonomic psychophysiologist — a tradition it had been drawing on without a representative. Craig supplies the afferent anatomy, Barrett and Seth the theory, Khalsa and Critchley the clinical programme; Berntson comes from the older lineage that measured what the autonomic nervous system does and asked how the brain controls it. His entry here is as first author of Berntson & Khalsa (2021).
The reciprocity thesis
His organizing commitment, and the reason his review is titled “circuits” rather than “pathways”:
Although our primary focus is on interoception, it is difficult to separate afferent interoceptive processes from their reciprocal efferent influences that can change the internal environment and reciprocally impact on interoceptive afference.
Interoceptive regulatory systems are “probably best conceived of as a set of reciprocal afferent/efferent circuits engaged in a continuous circular loop of interaction.” This is a mild-sounding claim with a sharp consequence: a sense whose object is continuously modified by the system doing the sensing is not well modelled as a channel with a signal on it. The wiki has met the same shape from three other directions — the urethral sphincter that bursts to defeat afferent accommodation (Urinary interoception (lower urinary tract)), exhalation-gated vagal stimulation (Bioelectronic medicine), reflexes “enslaved” by descending policy (Central autonomic network) — but Berntson states it as the general form.
Bottom-up meets top-down
The title of his 2019 chapter (in Tsakiris & De Preester’s The Interoceptive Mind, cited as reference 3 of the review; not in raw/) is the position. He does not take a side on inferential? so much as insist the question is empirical and currently open: determining “the relative contributions of bottom-up versus top-down signals to interoception and body regulation is thus an important challenge facing the field.” He then lists the manipulations that could decide it, which is a more useful contribution to that page than another argument would be.
Two positions do show through. He is sceptical that reduction alone will get there, recommending a dynamic systems approach that models components and their interactions — the first serious methodological alternative in this wiki to both read-out and predictive-coding framings. And he treats Cannon’s “autonomic” — acting “automatically, without direction from the cerebral cortex” — as the historical error his field has spent decades disassembling. See Walter B. Cannon.
What he is careful about
Worth recording, because it is unusual in this literature. The review states plainly that there are no animal models of interoceptive awareness; that the role of the NTS’s ascending targets in immune regulation is “unclear”; that the immune section is “a limited view”; and that the human/animal division of evidence (cortex known in humans, brainstem in rodents) leaves the middle of the hierarchy inferred rather than shown. He is describing a field with large holes and says so, which makes the inventory more useful than a more confident one would be.
Placement
Read with Sahib S. Khalsa, his co-author, whose clinical-perturbation and taxonomy concerns account for the review’s awareness sections while the autonomic and cortical-visceral-control material is Berntson’s. He is the natural counterweight to A. D. (Bud) Craig on the afferent side: not a dissenter, but someone for whom the lamina I pathway is one lane among vagal, cranial, sacral, humoral and direct-central-sensing routes rather than the substrate of interoception as such. See Interoceptive sensors.