Norman A. S. Farb

Cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Toronto Mississauga, working at the intersection of mindfulness/contemplative practice and predictive-coding models of interoception. The 2015 paper anchoring this wiki’s second ingest (see farb-2015-interoception-contemplative-health) grew out of an April 2013 Mind and Life Institute meeting Farb organized with co-authors spanning neuroscience (Paulus), clinical/complementary medicine (Daubenmier, Price, Mehling, Kerr), and Buddhist/contemplative studies (Klein).

Central theoretical contribution

The simulation-map model: extending Seth’s interoceptive-inference into a dual-route regulatory framework — active-inference (act to change sensation, mapped onto suppression/distraction/reappraisal) vs. perceptual-inference (update priors to match sensation, mapped onto contemplative acceptance/equanimity). Also extends Seth’s presence-and-agency constructs, arguing presence is reachable via perceptual inference and not only active inference as originally proposed.

Clinical/applied focus

Distinct from the more purely theoretical Seth (2013), Farb’s work consistently pushes the predictive-coding framework toward testable clinical and wellbeing applications — see mindfulness-interoceptive-training and interoceptive-training-clinical — while being notably cautious about overgeneralizing benefits (e.g., the explicit warning that interoceptive-awareness training can worsen symptoms in anorexia nervosa absent skillful guidance).