How good are you at listening to your own body's signals? (Representative image)
At any given moment, your body's internal organs are sending signals to your brain. Usually you are not aware of them, but sometimes they penetrate: for example when you are hungry or when you have to go to the toilet. Our ability to tap into these hidden signals is called interoception – also known as a sixth sense.
In this episode of The Conversation Weekly, we speak with a cognitive neuroscientist and expert on interoception about how new research into this connection between our minds and bodies could lead to breakthroughs in mental and physical health care.
Interoception is defined as the unconscious or conscious perception of internal bodily sensations. The concept was first proposed in the early 20th century by a British neuroscientist named Charles Sherrington, but was largely ignored by researchers until about a decade ago. One of the leaders of this attack is Sarah Garfinkel, professor of cognitive neuroscience at University College London in Britain.
When I first started I Googled it and there were no hits, or very few. Nobody talked about it. I think it's amazing to see how much has changed in those ten years, and I'm excited to see that we're entering an era of neuroscience where we're looking at an integrated system that includes the body and the brain.
Most people are probably not even aware of interoception until they have a problem with it. Garfinkel joked that it wouldn't be very efficient if we were constantly distracted by our beating hearts, or if we constantly had conscious insight into the functioning of our kidneys. “Our brains have developed a tendency to perceive and be aware of the outside world,” she explains. Therefore, our exteroceptive senses such as sight, hearing and touch dominate.
Garfinkel says interoception is important for accurately understanding what's happening in your body — especially for people with conditions like autism, who often have trouble knowing when to eat. But she believes that our ability to read signals from our organs can also shape our emotional experience.
I think of feelings as changes in the physical state and our perception of it. So (I'm) trying to understand how different clinical conditions can have differences, either in the physical signals themselves or in the perception of these changes, and how that can be linked to different emotion profiles.
She gives the example of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), suggesting it could be that increased physical activity, such as increased heart rate, interacts with the brain to increase anxiety in people with PTSD.
Listen to the full episode of The Conversation Weekly podcast to learn more about Garfinkel's research and how she's developing ways to train people's interoception to help them cope with anxiety.
A transcript of this episode is now available.
This episode of The Conversation Weekly was written and produced by Katie Flood, with assistance from Mend Mariwany. The sound design was by Eloise Stevens and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Gemma Ware is the executive producer.
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(Author:Gemma Ware, editor and co-host, The Conversation Weekly Podcast, The Conversation)
(Interviewed: Sarah Garfinkel – Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience, UCL)
(Disclosure Statement: Sarah Garfinkel has received research funding from the Medical Research Council, Wellcome and the MQ Mental Health Research Charity. She holds an unpaid position on the scientific advisory committee for Flo, a women's health app)
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)