Feel the beat: do classical music affect interoceptive accuracy? A neuroaesthetic study

Sensing and appreciating the beauty of the world is a powerful and moving experience, something that fascinated the human mind over the centuries and stimulated long debates across multiple disciplines, philosophy, religion, biology among the others. Neuroaesthetic is a recent born discipline that uses modern techniques to study the brain and its physiology during aesthetic appreciation. In previous research our research group found attentional enhancement and motor inhibition after that a beautiful stimuli was presented. In the present experiment we wanted to indagate whether the aesthetic appreciation modulate the direction of focus, towards the external world or towards the inner sensation of our body. To do that we created an experiment in which participants had to listen to classical music stimuli, evaluate the subjective appreciation and after we measured and index of interoceptive awareness, the interoceptive accuracy of the heartbeat. The accuracy was measured through the Heartbeat Counting Task (HBC). Accuracy for the most appreciated song was compared to accuracy for the least appreciated, we found a significative difference between the two groups: appreciating a musical piece negatively impact on our ability to perceive our heart beating.