Fig. 1.

The interoceptive-exteroceptive integration: information flux in the neural circuits that may reflect conscious experiences. (1) The processing of information coming from exteroceptive inputs occurs in parallel with (2) the bidirectional communication between the brain and interoceptive channels. (3) The brain integrates the information received from the available sources, exteroceptive and/or interoceptive. The result of these integrations are (4) complex autonomic responses and (5) complex brain responses. An alternative approach to study consciousness is to (6) model possible causal interactions between the complex cardiac activity and brain dynamics.