How the Brain Turns Down the Volume on Your Noisy Body

Every minute of every day, your body makes noise. You inhale and exhale. Your joints creak. Many of your own actions, generate sound, but thanks to your brain, you likely hear little of it. 

The brain’s ability to recognize and tune out sensory stimuli produced by the body’s own actions — to distinguish ‘self’ from ‘other’ — is a long recognized, yet poorly understood, biological phenomenon. Nathanial Sawtell, PhD, a principal investigator at Columbia’s Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute, focuses his research on uncovering how it works. Read the full article