Embodied Dynamic Causal Modelling: Brain and Cardiac Effective Connectivity

Embodied Dynamic Causal Modelling with the Brainstem Cardiac Network estimates directed effective connectivity across the cortical–brainstem–cardiac axis using a closed-loop neural mass model.

• Why it matters: Brain–body communication is key for interoception and mental health, but existing approaches either collapse interactions into scalar summaries or lack an invertible biophysical model to localize where effects originate.
• What they did: The framework formalizes hierarchical message passing across the brain–body axis and instantiates it for brain–heart interactions with five brainstem nuclei, a viscerosensory thalamic relay, and sinoatrial node dynamics, jointly inverting EEG and ECG during an auditory Go/No-Go task.
• The result: The case study shows the model can arbitrate between competing cytoarchitectural hypotheses and recover time-varying synaptic efficacy with continuous latent neuronal dynamics over anticipation, target processing, and motor inhibition windows.

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