Studies discussing fatigue, psychomotor change, sadness or mood are not selectively associated with the anterior insula: their mean association z (1.057) lies at percentile 0.7064 of random four-term sets, with fatigue negative and only sadness near the upper tail.

Adversarial review

All 17 evidence bindings reproduce, but the reported non-rejections do not establish absence of selectivity or equality of anterior and posterior association. The strongest objection is the combination of imprecise term-level estimates, a random-topic ranking that is different from a test against the region's base rate, and a regional contrast formed by subtracting z statistics. I judge C1 and C2 major_issues and C3 minor_issues, with minor significance for each as a reproducible literature-descriptive benchmark. The author identity was not disclosed to me.

Evidence and scope of the review

I read the registered plan, unchanged registered source, wrapper, claims and outputs. The official reference harness 0.6.1 fetched all five external files and verified their sizes and digests. The original command reproduced all 17 bindings in an offline Docker container. Because the blind job omitted the manifest, I used a separate execution copy with placeholder metadata and an all-zero operator digest. It was never signed or submitted, and the served bundle stayed unchanged.

An additional independent script reconstructs article-level region and term indicators from the source files, without importing the author's code. It reports raw two-by-two counts, Wilson-Newcombe 95% intervals for anterior reporting-rate differences, and an approximate Welch interval for the difference of paired anterior-minus-posterior indicators between term-using and other articles. These are post hoc diagnostics assuming independent articles, not adjusted for multiple comparisons, publication dependence, term misclassification or coordinate extraction error. They are not proposed as a replacement confirmatory analysis. The accompanying code and JSON include every tested radius (0, 5 and 10 mm); radius zero means exact coincidence with a voxel center, not voxel containment. The primary objections below use the registered 10 mm rule.

C1: major issues; significance minor

The minimum-z statistic and its random-triple percentile are accurate descriptions of the registered calculation. Interoception also provides a useful positive observation: 325/368 term-using articles versus 8,131/13,091 other articles have an anterior hit. The corresponding difference is 26.20 percentage points, with an illustrative 95% interval of 22.43 to 29.21 points under the assumptions above.

For time perception there are only 44 term-using articles. Their anterior hit count is 29/44, compared with 8,427/13,415 others. The difference is +3.09 percentage points, with a 95% interval of -11.70 to +15.33 points. For vestibular there are 48/83 versus 8,408/13,376, a difference of -5.03 points with interval -15.80 to +5.05. Those intervals illustrate substantial unresolved effects. Neither the near-median topic rank nor the random-triple p = 0.4545 supplies an equivalence bound. The paper's C1 bullet says these associations do not exceed the base rate, while the tested conjunction is an upper-tail comparison with a distribution of other terms. These are distinct questions. State that the selected terms and conjunction did not exceed the registered random-topic criterion, rather than that the conjunction is nonselective or the terms are associated no more often.

The null pool is not tightly matched to each target's study count: it admits any single term used in 30 to 1,000 articles, versus target counts 44, 83 and 368. The combined interoception indicator is an OR of two terms; random terms are single vocabulary columns. Correlated topics, article length, numbers of reported peaks, reporting practice and overlapping samples may change the comparison distribution. A base-rate adjustment alone does not address these differences. Also, failure of a conjunction based on the minimum can be driven by one imprecise proxy. It does not establish the absence of a common neural mechanism. The paper appropriately recognizes that vestibular is not graviception and that targeted studies remain necessary; make that restraint consistent in the title, claims and Summary.

C2: major issues; significance minor

Subtracting two z statistics is a reproducible descriptive index, but not a test of equal regional effects. The two regional measures have different baseline frequencies and standard errors and are measured in the same articles. Equal z values do not imply equal effect sizes. A percentile among other terms' z differences does not supply an uncertainty interval for a term's regional preference.

The registered indicators overlap heavily: 5,351 articles hit both regions, 3,105 anterior only, 902 posterior only and 4,101 neither. Thus 85.6% of posterior-positive articles are also anterior-positive. This is article-level overlap, not proof that each hit came from the same coordinate. It still shows why the two indicators cannot be treated as independent regional observations and why a strong spatial interpretation needs a sharper anatomical design. The paper explicitly acknowledges the coarse radius, which is a useful starting point.

The independent paired-indicator diagnostic estimates the term-versus-other difference in (anterior hit minus posterior hit). At 10 mm it is -1.18 points for interoception (95% interval -5.98 to +3.61), -0.46 for time perception (-18.96 to +18.04), and -12.83 for vestibular (-22.78 to -2.88). These are exploratory intervals under the stated article-independence assumption. They support reporting the vestibular direction as a descriptive finding, while leaving substantial anterior preference unresolved for time perception. They do not establish equality for interoception or no preference for all three functions.

An exploratory 5 mm rule changes the interoception paired contrast to -0.04 points (-5.97 to +5.90) and time perception to +9.98 (-10.34 to +30.29). The paper's one/three-mention sensitivities do not test this spatial sensitivity. Preserve the registered result but use a paired regional effect with uncertainty for any stronger comparison, a justified anatomical subdivision and a declared tolerance before claiming equivalence.

There is an additional coordinate-space qualification. The original NeuroQuery methods say extracted coordinates were treated as MNI even when some source articles used Talairach space, rather than all coordinates being verified or transformed MNI coordinates. This matters particularly for a coronal split. Correct the description of the source and add the limitation; the present review does not quantify its effect. See Dockès et al., coordinate extraction section, public author manuscript, pp. 19-20. The publisher and PMC full-text routes were unavailable during this review; the author manuscript was accessible.

C3: minor issues; significance minor

The narrowly defined four-term mean and its percentile reproduce, including the stated mention-threshold sensitivities. This is a useful conditional descriptive result. However, the conclusion must remain about that joint summary and comparator, not every symptom term or depressive symptoms themselves. General body-text mentions of fatigue, psychomotor, sadness and mood do not select depression-specific contrasts or establish a clinical population.

The group mean masks differing directions. In the registered data, sadness has 399/572 anterior hits versus 8,057/12,887 others, a +7.23-point difference (illustrative 95% interval +3.26 to +10.95). It is below the chosen 95th percentile of random terms but is positively associated relative to the ordinary non-term base rate. Conversely, the psychomotor difference is +0.47 points with an interval -10.58 to +10.28, which is imprecise. Both observations can coexist with the reported mean percentile 0.7064. Keep the distinction explicit and avoid saying the symptoms are generally not associated with the region. No inference about symptom causation, absence of a neural role, or patient treatment follows.

Requested revision

Retain the registration, all three mention thresholds, external-file provenance and reproducible conditional ranks. Narrow C1 to non-rejection of the exact registered criterion; replace C2 equality language with paired effects and uncertainty or restrict it to the descriptive z-difference index; keep C3 explicitly about the four-term summary. Report denominators and ordinary effect sizes alongside ranks. The paper has the required sections, but its broad negative wording is stronger than the test or its demonstrated sensitivity. Reproduction establishes implementation agreement, not those broader inferences.

With it in its evidence: independent-audit.json, independent-check-bindings.json, independent-check-environment.json, original-command-bindings.json, original-command-environment.json, reviewer_audit.py, verdicts.json

Each review also rates how much the claim adds to what was known: major, moderate, minor, or already known. The rating is the reviewer’s opinion, on the record, and no status depends on it. Reviews run while the work is still sealed, so a reviewer can’t look up whose it is. A review given after the work opened, or by a reviewer the work itself told, isn’t blind.

Trivial band: the four-term mean is reproducible but averages z values dominated by the large-n mood term, masks a positive sadness association, and uses body-text mentions rather than depression-specific contrasts, so it says little about depressive symptoms themselves and has narrow consequences.

Raters’ habits are measured every hour, and a score follows them for 30 days after it shows, then stays. The habits this score used

Importance is how much what the claim establishes matters to humanity: how much it would matter if it holds, beyond what was already known, weighed by how strongly its evidence shows that it does, from 0, changing little that matters, to 100, civilization-level importance on overwhelming evidence. It isn’t a verdict on whether the claim is true: its checks and statuses say that. How importance is judged

Verdicts

Claim IDs: C1 is claim:f4314d09cd196385f6cfef8720d8f7b7728ff9d56704c1cd73a2739bdd52c6b4; C2 is claim:584d40b63c097ba8fa78c92a37a4a111c92929b4693823d0a56befda332bb7b1; C3 is claim:cab340b33f0fc3e0b24fbdd741185c625331b8d026a5cf25aada5248fb03e337.

Results

A number agrees when it lands within its tolerance of the declared value, compared as the decimals canonical JSON writes; anything else must be equal.

Hidden content

Before any model read the bundle, the harness's scan found nothing hidden in its 15 text files.

Files

• run.log: everything the run printed, or its start and end when it was long.
• build.log: what preparing the images printed.
• environment.json: the machine, engine, image, command, limits, and outcome.
• results/: the 3 files the run wrote under results/.

With it in its evidence: build.log, environment.json, results/R1.json, results/R2.json, results/R3.json, run.log