Lena Zhou

Interoception——the perception of internal bodily states such as heartbeat, respiration, and visceral feelings——has long been considered a natural, closed, and pre-reflective dimension of conscious experience. Wearable sensors, biofeedback algorithms, and continuous physiological monitoring are now turning the inner body into a digitally accessible and modifiable object. This article proposes Cyberinteroception as a subdiscipline within the Cyberism framework and argues that digital technologies do not merely measure interoception but re-constitute it by externalising, amplifying, and re-routing internal signals. Three theoretical propositions are advanced and linked to core issues in consciousness research: the Distalisation Thesis (how digital readouts reshape metacognitive access to interoceptive states), the Augmented Regulation Thesis (whether digital feedback loops constitute genuinely new forms of conscious emotional self-regulation), and the Body-Ownership Plasticity Thesis (how artificial interoceptive signals can reshape the minimal self). I conclude that interoception is becoming technically programmable, a development that invites systematic re-examination of bodily self-consciousness in the digital age.

To better determine the history of modern birds, we performed a genome-scale phylogenetic analysis of 48 species representing all orders of Neoaves using phylogenomic methods created to handle genome-scale data.We recovered a highly resolved tree that confirms previously controversial sister or close relationships.We identified the first divergence in Neoaves, two groups we named Passerea and Columbea, representing independent lineages of diverse and convergently evolved land and water bird species. Among Passerea, we infer the common ancestor of core landbirds to have been an apex predator and confirm independent gains of vocal learning. Among Columbea, we identify pigeons and flamingoes as belonging to sister clades. Even with whole genomes, some of the earliest branches in Neoaves proved challenging to resolve, which was best explained by massive protein-coding sequence convergence and high levels of incomplete lineage sorting that occurred during a rapid radiation after the Cretaceous-Paleogene mass extinction event about 66 million years ago.