Causal Mapping of Bodily Awareness and Mesoscale Circuit Organization in the Human Cingulate and Precuneus

How the human brain generates subjective bodily experience remains a fundamental question in cognitive neuroscience. The cingulate cortex and precuneus (CC/PCu) have been implicated in bodily awareness and self-related processing, yet the functional architecture and causal relevance of these regions and the circuit mechanisms supporting conscious bodily states remain unclear. Here, we combined intracranial electrical stimulation, first-person reports, causal electrophysiological connectivity mapping and large-scale functional network analyses to investigate the human CC/PCu in 63 individuals. Across 660 stimulation sites, we identified a mesoscale functional mosaic in which the stimulation of neighboring cortical populations, separated by millimeters, gave rise to categorically distinct subjective experiences, ranging from localized sensorimotor sensations to complex integrated bodily states. These phenomenological differences were not explained by anatomical location alone, but by distinct causal connectivity profiles. Sensorimotor-responsive sites preferentially exhibited divergent outgoing connectivity, whereas complex bodily sites showed convergent incoming connectivity from distributed networks. Among these pathways, connectivity between the CC/PCu and posterior insular cortex emerged as a critical determinant of whether local stimulation produced a reportable bodily experience: millimeters away, neighbouring sites lacking this connectivity remained silent. We further identified a right-lateralized network architecture supporting bodily experience across both neuroimaging and electrophysiological connectivity measures. Together, these findings reveal that conscious bodily states may be rooted in fine-grained mesoscale circuits embedded within large-scale brain networks, demonstrating that connectivity architecture, rather than anatomical location alone, determines the capacity of human cortical sites to be involved in conscious and subjective bodily awareness.