iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Micah G. Allen @micahgallen.com · 12/09/2026

Spending my Saturday making some hyldebærmjød (elderberry mead!)

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Micah G. Allen @micahgallen.com · 30/08/2026

Sometimes being two professors in the same field pays off! @francescafardo.bsky.social and I are enjoying a family beach trip at the Adriatica Brain Body and Well-Being summer school. The well-being aspect cannot be understated.

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Micah G. Allen @micahgallen.com · 24/08/2026

It's that time of year again! Grinding apples for some lovely fruited ciders and cysers.

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Micah G. Allen @micahgallen.com · 20/07/2026

2kg of delicious solbaer picked, cleaned, and frozen for future mead and cider fermentation projects! But not before we made some excellent muffins.

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Micah G. Allen @micahgallen.com · 02/06/2026

Exciting symposium on computational neuroscience and neuromodulation starting now at Aarhus! Pretty great line up.

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Micah G. Allen @micahgallen.com · 27/05/2026

Flyer for our Maastricht symposium on cannabis, starting soon!

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Micah G. Allen @micahgallen.com · 07/05/2026

Fishing and camping trip on the Julsø!

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Micah G. Allen @micahgallen.com · 10/04/2026

You can install with just "pip install gastropy", see our documentation for interactive tutorials and sample data including my very own brain's fMRI data.

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Micah G. Allen @micahgallen.com · 10/04/2026

GastroPy is now out in early beta! Please to share our Python toolbox for electrogastrography and stomach-brain coupling analyses. It includes tools for cleaning, visualising, and analysing EGG data, plus fMRI stomach-brain coupling workflows. Docs, code, and preprint below. osf.io/preprints/ps...

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Micah G. Allen @micahgallen.com · 26/03/2026

New paper in PNAS! When the mind wanders, it often drifts to the body. We call this "body-wandering". These thoughts are often negative, but are associated with reduced ADHD & depression symptoms, driven by a distinct interoceptive-allostatic brain signature. pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2520822123

Graphical abstract showing four panels. Panel 1: a person in an MRI scanner with blue cognitive thought bubbles drifting from their head and pink body thought bubbles from their torso, with organs glowing inside. Panel 2: blue bubbles for cognitive items (Self, Words, Focus, Images, Future, Past) are larger than pink bubbles for body items (Breathing, Movement, Stomach, Heart, Skin, Bladder), with arrows showing body thoughts link to more negative and less positive emotion. Panel 3: physiological traces (EGG, ECG, respiratory) show higher arousal with body-wandering; a bar chart shows cognitive items (Past, Future, Repetitive, Vivid) correlate with more ADHD and depression symptoms while body items (Breath, Stomach, Skin, Heart) correlate with fewer.
Panel 4: medial brain with thalamus, somatomotor cortex, and interoceptive regions highlighted, plus a chord diagram showing connectivity between these three regions.

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Micah G. Allen @micahgallen.com · 23/03/2026

5/ What might drive this? Familiarity. Familiar foods were judged as more nutritious AND less caloric, biasing nutritional judgements in opposing directions. Once familiarity was accounted for, liking had no independent effect.

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Micah G. Allen @micahgallen.com · 23/03/2026

4/ This isn't just a confidence bias. Hierarchical M-ratio modelling confirmed that metacognitive efficiency was genuinely higher for calorie judgements, indicating a real insight deficit for nutritional quality.

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Micah G. Allen @micahgallen.com · 23/03/2026

3/ The key dissociation: participants were more accurate at judging nutritional quality, yet reported higher confidence for calorie judgements. Sensitivity (d') was significantly higher for NRF, while confidence went in the opposite direction.

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Micah G. Allen @micahgallen.com · 23/03/2026

2/ 32 participants compared foods on caloric density or nutritional quality (NRF 9.3 index) in a 2AFC task with adaptive difficulty. We measured trial-level and block-level confidence to assess metacognitive monitoring across multiple levels.

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Micah G. Allen @micahgallen.com · 23/03/2026

1/ New preprint led by @kellyhoogervorst.bsky.social - Introducing MetaBites, a novel task measuring metacognition in nutritional judgements. Why does nutritional knowledge fail to predict dietary behaviour? Could metacognitive biases explain the gap? #psychscisky 🧪 osf.io/preprints/ps...

⏺ Graphical abstract for the MetaBites study. Three-panel layout flowing left to right. Left panel poses the research question: why does nutritional
knowledge fail to predict dietary behaviour, testing caloric density versus nutritional quality (NRF 9.3). Centre panel shows the MetaBites task: a
two-alternative forced-choice between two food plates with a confidence slider, measuring sensitivity, confidence, and familiarity ratings in 32
participants across 300 trials. Right panel presents key findings: a faceted bar chart showing higher sensitivity for nutritional quality judgements
(d'=1.19 vs 1.10) but higher confidence for calorie judgements (68.2 vs 65.2); overlapping M-ratio distributions confirming higher metacognitive
efficiency for calories (1.03) than NRF (0.80); and a familiarity bias diagram showing familiar foods are judged as more nutritious and less caloric.
Conclusion states that a familiarity heuristic may partially explain why metacognitive insight for nutrition lags behind calories.

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Micah G. Allen @micahgallen.com · 19/03/2026

Is there a single "interoceptive sense"? Our new study in @commspsychol.nature.com says: probably not. In 241 participants, cardiac and respiratory interoception were completely uncorrelated — only subjective confidence was shared across domains. www.nature.com/articles/s44... #psychscisky 🧪

Graphical abstract showing three panels. Left panel, "Multiorgan Interoception Measures," depicts a translucent human body
silhouette with anatomically rendered heart (red) and lungs (blue), accompanied by schematic icons for three
psychophysical tasks: the Respiratory Resistance Sensitivity Task (RRST), Heart Rate Discrimination Task (HRDT), and an
auditory control condition. N = 241 participants. Center panel, "Psychophysical Modelling and Individual Differences,"
shows a fan of overlapping sigmoid psychometric curves in blue-to-red gradient representing individual variation in
perceptual threshold (α) and precision (β), a hierarchical Bayesian model diagram, and icons for metacognitive bias and
M-Ratio efficiency. Right panel, "Key Finding: No Cross-Modal Relationship," displays a scatterplot of cardiac versus
respiratory sensitivity with a flat regression line (r ≈ 0, BF₀₁ > 6), a compact Bayes Factor heatmap with mostly blue
null-supporting cells and one orange cell indicating that subjective confidence is shared across modalities (r = 0.51***).
Takeaway: interoceptive ability is modality-specific.

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Micah G. Allen @micahgallen.com · 07/03/2026

Kind of in love with these 'dark mode' spider plots. Forthcoming work i'm presenting in Berlin next week on using AI to decode interoceptive experiences across drug classes and trip qualities.

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Micah G. Allen @micahgallen.com · 07/03/2026

Work in progress poster for next week's Berlin Mind Brain Body conference - using LLMs to label 2.2 million sentences from 40k Erowid trip reports. We find interoceptive signatures spanning trip quality and social context. Cardiac sensations 2.5x more likely in bad trips!

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Micah G. Allen @micahgallen.com · 27/02/2026

We're releasing this at an early alpha stage because we want the community involved from the beginning. The roadmap includes: - Multi-site validation study - New conditions (box breathing, oddball, ramp) - Gamification for pediatric samples - Expanded analysis toolkit

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Micah G. Allen @micahgallen.com · 27/02/2026

Borrows from visuomotor adaptation research: the visual breathing trace can be secretly amplified or attenuated, letting you study how people recalibrate their respiratory control when feedback is distorted.

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Micah G. Allen @micahgallen.com · 27/02/2026

Today I am excited to introduce respyra - an open-source Python toolbox for respiratory tracking experiments in interoception research! Now on PyPI (pip install respyra) with a preprint on PsyArXiv: osf.io/preprints/ps... GitHub: github.com/embodied-com...

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Micah G. Allen @micahgallen.com · 25/02/2026

@francescafardo.bsky.social, Camilla E. Krænge & colleagues on evidence accumulation in temperature perception. Distinct roles for spatial summation and lateral inhibition. Really nice work, great collab: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

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Micah G. Allen @micahgallen.com · 25/02/2026

Sneak peak of something new! More soon...

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Micah G. Allen @micahgallen.com · 23/02/2026

Happy to see this collaboration out - fun project led by Lorena Desdentado, Olga Pollatos, and colleagues using our heart rate discrimination task. "Cardiac interoception in action: Modulation after a stress induction with a speech task" www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... #neuroskyence

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Micah G. Allen @micahgallen.com · 20/02/2026

Just about done for the evening!

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Micah G. Allen @micahgallen.com · 20/02/2026

This is coming along very nicely. Fascinating hemispheric and areal differences in response to high and low frequency heart rate variability. My favorite brain region, at long last!

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Micah G. Allen @micahgallen.com · 19/02/2026

can't wait for this to finish running on all 300 participants. soon!

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Micah G. Allen @micahgallen.com · 19/02/2026

all these years suffering in spm when I could have just built my own html results interface...

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Micah G. Allen @micahgallen.com · 19/02/2026

build me a big beautiful design matrix

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Micah G. Allen @micahgallen.com · 24/12/2025

Some action carving photos. The tenderloin was mind blowing good.

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Micah G. Allen @micahgallen.com · 24/12/2025

Stage one is complete. 5.9kg bone in beef florentine. Roasted to internal 42c, resting 1h, then finished with oven sear. Christmas Eve dinner for 15 is on track!

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Micah G. Allen @micahgallen.com · 12/12/2025

has predictive processing jumped the shark yet? me thinks yes...

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Micah G. Allen @micahgallen.com · 10/12/2025

My face: 3/10 wobble dobble 6/10 jimmy jam Gang I think we discovered a new construct here!

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Micah G. Allen @micahgallen.com · 10/12/2025

A jar of pickle beetroot: 2/10 wobble dobble 4/10 jimmy jam My inner cynic says this has about as much construct validity as the average psychological rating scale…

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Micah G. Allen @micahgallen.com · 27/11/2025

many classic psychology examples. Kingdom and Prinz give some good examples when discussing appearance based approaches.

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Micah G. Allen @micahgallen.com · 27/11/2025

TIL that Sherrington believe there was no conscious access to visceral stimuli - from Breners "Visceral Perception". www.researchgate.net/profile/Jasp...

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Micah G. Allen @micahgallen.com · 26/11/2025

Fab visit here in Maastricht- was a joy to catch up with many friends. The cannabodies study is ready to go! With special thanks to @nlmason.bsky.social and @melinavejloe.bsky.social - our tasks are setup and ready to begin!