DPD symptomatology is mainly characterised by emotional numbing (i.e., “de-affectualisation" 1, 2, 3), together with a feeling of detachment from one's own body 4. Finally, our simulation shows that repeated exposure to similar situations over time will lead the agent to increasingly disengage from bodily responses even in the face of a less triggering situation, explaining how a single episode of depersonalization can lead to chronic DPD.ĭepersonalisation disorder (DPD) is a psychopathological condition characterised by a persistent and distressing alteration in the quality of a person's subjective experience of themselves (depersonalisation), which can be accompanied by a modified perception of one's surroundings (derealisation). Such interoceptive silencing would force the agent to over-rely on exteroceptive information and would ultimately lead to the DPD phenomenology. The simulation showed how a similar condition, if perceived as inescapable, would result in a downregulation of interoceptive signals, whilst leaving the exteroceptive ones unaffected. We simulated the behaviour of an agent subjected to a situation of high interoceptive activation despite the absence of a perceivable threat in the external environment. Specifically, we describe DPD as arising from disrupted interoceptive processing at higher levels of the cortical hierarchy where the interoceptive and exteroceptive streams are integrated. Here we present a computational and neurobiologically plausible model of DPD within the active inference framework. However, the precise mechanisms that drive this ‘interoceptive silencing’ are yet to be clarified. Depersonalisation disorder (DPD) is a psychopathological condition characterised by a feeling of detachment from one's own body and surrounding, and it is understood as emerging from the downregulation of interoceptive afferents.
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