Sahib S. Khalsa
The wiki’s first convener rather than combatant. Where the other researchers here are on record with a thesis someone else disputes, Khalsa’s signature act is organizing the field to agree on terms: he is first author of Khalsa et al. (2018), the roadmap that came out of the Interoception Summit 2016 he ran at the Laureate Institute for Brain Research. His own scientific stance shows through the consensus prose in a few places.
An earlier, hands-on Khalsa
The convener framing is the 2018 Khalsa. The wiki’s second first-hand Khalsa paper, Khalsa, Rudrauf & Tranel (2009), is nine years earlier and a different figure: a University of Iowa MD/PhD trainee doing hands-on cardiac psychophysiology in the Damasio-lineage neuropsychology group (Daniel Tranel, senior author; David Rudrauf, imaging/modelling). That paper — the wiki’s only first-hand evidence that objective heartbeat-detection accuracy declines with age (30% of the variance across 22–63 years) — shares its methods with Khalsa et al. (2008), the meditators study the wiki already cites on interoceptive-sensitivity and does-mindfulness-enhance-interoceptive-accuracy for the finding that experienced meditators do not detect their heartbeats better. So before the perturbation-and-consensus programme, Khalsa was running the resting discrimination task carefully across populations (aging, meditators, a bilateral-lesion patient) — which makes his later bet against the resting task all the way to isoproterenol perturbation a considered turn, not an outsider’s dismissal. He knows the resting task from the inside.
Perturbation over rest
Khalsa’s methodological conviction, visible throughout the roadmap, is that interoception is best measured by perturbing the body under controlled conditions, not by asking a resting subject to count heartbeats. His own contribution here is the bolus isoproterenol method (Khalsa et al. 2009) — a titrated adrenergic push that produces reliable, objectively indexable cardiac interoceptive signals — and the roadmap’s recurring recommendation of an interoceptive “cardiac stress test” is his logic generalized: stress the system to reveal dysfunction that rest conceals. This is a quiet but real position on is-the-heartbeat-counting-task-valid: the resting counting task appears in the roadmap as standard practice, but the paper’s bet on where the biomarkers live is elsewhere, in perturbation.
Interoception for psychiatry
With Rachel Lapidus, Khalsa argued (2016) that interoception could improve the “pragmatic search for biomarkers in psychiatry” — the seed of the roadmap’s interoceptive-psychopathology and biomarker sections. He also mapped the pathways of interoceptive awareness in a rare bilateral-lesion patient (Khalsa, Rudrauf, Feinstein & Tranel 2009), and — with Feinstein — is behind the Floatation-REST work the roadmap files under treatments on the horizon.
The convening continues (2021)
The pattern holds three years on. Khalsa is senior author of Petzschner et al. (2021) — the Trends in Neurosciences special issue’s computational review — and a co-author across that issue’s other articles (he co-authors the neural-circuits piece with Berntson). The 2021 special issue is recognizably the same organizing instinct as the 2016 Summit: assemble the people, agree the map, publish the map. His scientific fingerprint on the computational review is the translational frame — the argument that models earn clinical standing only by clearing a drug-development-style pipeline, which is his perturbation-and-biomarkers conviction restated for theorists. Note the acknowledgement that the whole 2021 review traces to an NIH Blueprint workshop on interoception (Bethesda, April 2019): a second convening, with the same purpose.
The pattern is now four first-hand papers deep. Berntson & Khalsa (2021) — the same issue’s anatomical review, anticipated in the paragraph above — is the fourth, and it is the one where the convener’s instinct is most visible as inventory: a survey of sensors, pathways, circuits and gaps, ending in four Outstanding Questions rather than a thesis. His half of it is recognizably the awareness material (a seventh version of his own taxonomy, the perturbation-reveals-what-rest-conceals logic restated as “conscious perceptions usually arise when homeostasis is perturbed”, the sex-difference-in-angina-detection example) while Berntson’s is the autonomic and cortical-visceral-control anatomy. Two admissions in it are worth attributing to him specifically, given how much of the wiki’s measurement apparatus he convened: that interoceptive sensitivity does not generalize across channels (Ferentzi et al. 2018), and that there are no animal models of interoceptive awareness at all. See interoceptive-taxonomy.
The perturbation bet, tested sideways (2023)
Wilzok, Adamic, Khalsa & Croy (2023) is the fifth first-hand paper and the first in a while where he is a middle author on somebody else’s instrument — a Dresden/Jena collaboration (Ilona Croy’s group) with his LIBR trainee Emily Adamic, extending Paulus’s inspiratory-breathing-load lineage into two channels and two new anticipation paradigms.
Its interest for his own position is oblique but real. Khalsa’s signature conviction is that interoception must be perturbed to be measured, and the wiki files that on is-interoception-domain-general as the strongest available defence of a general interoceptive faculty: the cross-channel nulls are all from resting healthy participants, so a common factor could exist and be invisible at rest. This study perturbs both channels aversively — and finds a large cross-modal correlation (r = 0.57) in the anticipation–experience gap where the resting literature finds nothing.
He does not make that argument in the paper, and the wiki should not make it for him without the brakes recorded on discrepancy-awareness: the correlated quantity is a difference between two self-reports rather than a psychophysical threshold, shared scale use explains it equally well, and there is no exteroceptive control task of the kind that made Banellis’s confidence result decisive. It is a consistency with his position rather than a test of it. But it is the first datum in this wiki that points that way, and it is his own perturbation logic that predicts it.
Placement
Read as the field’s organizer: the person whose contribution is less a single claim than a shared vocabulary and a research agenda. He sits with the LIBR cluster — martin-paulus (his senior colleague and the roadmap’s senior author) and Justin Feinstein — and connects outward to hugo-critchley and olga-pollatos as co-authors. His disclosures in the roadmap are modest (NIH/NIMH and Warren-Foundation grants; a NARSAD Young Investigator award), which is worth noting given the heavier conflicts elsewhere on that author list.