Sahib S. Khalsa
The wiki’s first convener rather than combatant. Where the other researchers here are on record with a thesis someone else disputes, Khalsa’s signature act is organizing the field to agree on terms: he is first author of Khalsa et al. (2018), the roadmap that came out of the Interoception Summit 2016 he ran at the Laureate Institute for Brain Research. His own scientific stance shows through the consensus prose in a few places.
Perturbation over rest
Khalsa’s methodological conviction, visible throughout the roadmap, is that interoception is best measured by perturbing the body under controlled conditions, not by asking a resting subject to count heartbeats. His own contribution here is the bolus isoproterenol method (Khalsa et al. 2009) — a titrated adrenergic push that produces reliable, objectively indexable cardiac interoceptive signals — and the roadmap’s recurring recommendation of an interoceptive “cardiac stress test” is his logic generalized: stress the system to reveal dysfunction that rest conceals. This is a quiet but real position on is-the-heartbeat-counting-task-valid: the resting counting task appears in the roadmap as standard practice, but the paper’s bet on where the biomarkers live is elsewhere, in perturbation.
Interoception for psychiatry
With Rachel Lapidus, Khalsa argued (2016) that interoception could improve the “pragmatic search for biomarkers in psychiatry” — the seed of the roadmap’s interoceptive-psychopathology and biomarker sections. He also mapped the pathways of interoceptive awareness in a rare bilateral-lesion patient (Khalsa, Rudrauf, Feinstein & Tranel 2009), and — with Feinstein — is behind the Floatation-REST work the roadmap files under treatments on the horizon.
Placement
Read as the field’s organizer: the person whose contribution is less a single claim than a shared vocabulary and a research agenda. He sits with the LIBR cluster — martin-paulus (his senior colleague and the roadmap’s senior author) and Justin Feinstein — and connects outward to hugo-critchley and olga-pollatos as co-authors. His disclosures in the roadmap are modest (NIH/NIMH and Warren-Foundation grants; a NARSAD Young Investigator award), which is worth noting given the heavier conflicts elsewhere on that author list.