Farb et al. (2007) — Attending to the present
The founding paper of the dual-mode framework the rest of this wiki’s Farb corpus rests on, and the one the decentering, default-mode-network, embodied-selfhood and every Farb clinical page (2010, 2011, 2022) had been citing secondhand. Read first-hand now the raw/papers/Farb/ exclusion is lifted. It is Farb’s first data paper, with Segal, Mayberg (of subgenual-cingulate/depression fame) and Adam Anderson senior.
The claim
There are two temporally distinct forms of self-reference, and they are neurally dissociable:
- Narrative focus (NF) — the self extended across time, William James’s explanatory “me”: reflecting on what a trait word says about you as an enduring person, allowing elaboration and getting “caught up in a train of thought.” This is the ruminative, self-evaluative mode.
- Experiential focus (EF) — the self in the present moment, James’s agentic “I”: monitoring moment-to-moment experience of thoughts, feelings and sensations without settling on or elaborating any one of them.
The hypothesis, drawn from Damasio, Craig and Critchley, was that momentary self-reference is not just narrative self-reference turned down — it is a distinct mode grounded in “neural markers of transient body states,” in particular right-lateralized interoceptive (insula) and exteroceptive (somatosensory) cortices. See narrative-and-experiential-self-reference, the concept page this study founds.
Design
36 participants recruited on enrolment in an 8-week MBSR course, scanned either before training (16 novices, waitlist) or after (20 trained) — a cross-sectional split, not a pre/post design. In the scanner they read intermixed positive and negative personality-trait adjectives (from Anderson’s 1968 likeableness norms) under one of two instructions: NF (“what does this say about you as a person”) or EF (“monitor your moment-to-moment experience”). 36-second blocks, no overt responses collected during EF (to avoid disrupting momentary awareness).
Results
Narrative self-focus (both groups collapsed) reproduced the standard self-reference map: rostral and dorsal mPFC (BA 8/9/10/32), posterior cingulate, and left-hemisphere language areas (inferolateral PFC, middle temporal gyrus) — the midline self-referential network, consistent with a linguistically-mediated, higher-order mode.
Experiential vs narrative focus is where the groups came apart:
- Novices showed only weak, restricted midline reductions during EF (subgenual cingulate, PCC, a small rostral-mPFC cluster) and a left-lateralized increase in dlPFC/vlPFC/posterior parietal — read by the authors as linguistic and executive effort (resisting mind-wandering), not the neural signature of present-centred awareness.
- Trained participants showed a pervasive mPFC deactivation (both dorsal and ventral) plus reduced left dorsal amygdala, and a marked shift toward a right-lateralized network: lateral PFC, insula, secondary somatosensory cortex (SII), and inferior parietal lobule — the hypothesized viscerosomatic representations of the momentary body.
ROI analyses confirmed these EF effects were significant in the trained group but not the novices (ps > 0.3), so the right-lateralized experiential network is not a subthreshold version of what novices do — it is qualitatively theirs.
The functional-connectivity result is the mechanistic heart of the paper. In novices the right insula was strongly coupled to the vmPFC (R = 0.61) — viscerosomatic signals by default viewed “through the lens of” the medial prefrontal self-model. In the trained group that coupling was abolished (R = 0.06, a large and significant drop) and replaced by strong right insula-to-dlPFC coupling (R = 0.28 → 0.78). Present-moment awareness, on this reading, requires decoupling the automatic vmPFC response to insular activation — freeing the interoceptive signal from the narrative self-model and routing it instead to a lateral, more detached analytic mode.
Why it matters to the wiki
This is the paper that first states, in neural terms, the sensory/experiential vs elaborative/narrative dyad that every later Farb page turns on:
- Farb et al. (2010) shows the same dyad under an emotional challenge (sad film): training reduces midline elaboration and keeps the interoceptive insula online, with insula recruitment tracking lower depression.
- Farb et al. (2011) and Farb et al. (2022) give it a hard clinical outcome: elaborative mPFC reactivity predicts depressive relapse; sensory reactivity protects. The two-factor model is this 2007 dissociation with survival curves attached.
- decentering is the psychological name for what the insula-vmPFC decoupling does: experiencing a bodily/mental event as a transient object rather than as a fact about the enduring self.
The honest boundaries
The authors are unusually candid about the design. Because it is cross-sectional, “the evidence does not support a claim that MT per se allowed for the increased differentiation” — only that trained people differentiate the modes where novices do not; the trait-like-vs-state-like question is left explicitly for a pre/post study (which the later papers partly supply). The “experiential” condition still reads verbal trait adjectives, the least present-centred stimulus imaginable, and NF was rated easier than EF, so effort is not perfectly matched despite the ROI controls.
One evolution worth flagging rather than filing as a contradiction: the 2007 paper treats the right insula/AIC as the seat of viscerosomatic awareness, following Craig, Damasio and Critchley. The author’s own 2013 attention study later shows the insula is a graded posterior→anterior tuning field and the anterior insula is “not an area of pure body awareness,” and Haruki & Ogawa (2023) reach the same deflation — the right AIC may be about arousal rather than the body in general. The 2007 finding stands; its interpretation of which insular subregion does what is the earlier, coarser reading.