Interoception, contemplative practice, and health.

Norman Farb,Cynthia J Price,Tim Gard,Wolf E Mehling,Jennifer Daubenmier,Catherine Kerr,Anne Carolyn Klein,Barnaby D Dunn,Martin P Paulus

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00763

Abstract

Interoception can be broadly defined as the sense of signals originating within the body. As such, interoception is critical for our sense of embodiment, motivation, and well-being. And yet, despite its importance, interoception remains poorly understood within modern science. This paper reviews interdisciplinary perspectives on interoception, with the goal of presenting a unified perspective from diverse fields such as neuroscience, clinical practice, and contemplative studies. It is hoped that this integrative effort will advance our understanding of how interoception determines well-being, and identify the central challenges to such understanding. To this end, we introduce an expanded taxonomy of interoceptive processes, arguing that many of these processes can be understood through an emerging predictive coding model for mind–body integration. The model, which describes the tension between expected and felt body sensation, parallels contemplative theories, and implicates interoception in a variety of affective and psychosomatic disorders. We conclude that maladaptive construal of bodily sensations may lie at the heart of many contemporary maladies, and that contemplative practices may attenuate these interpretative biases, restoring a person’s sense of presence and agency in the world.

Highlights

Introducing Interoception Interoception is the process of receiving, accessing and appraising internal bodily signals
As interoceptive signals inform emotional experience, contemplative practice may promote a cycle of awareness of the contingencies between environmental triggers, bodily responses, cognitive appraisals, and emotional experiences, knowledge which can be leveraged to regulate cognition and behavior in the service of emotional well-being. We argue that this process optimally occurs when interoception is viewed as foundational to emotional experience, and interoceptive attention becomes a basis for engaging in emotional processing, enhancing awareness, and regulation of rapidly escalating emotional responses to stress
Interoception has in many ways been a hidden sense, perhaps due to the challenges involved in measuring and manipulating interoceptive signals

Summary

Introduction

Introducing Interoception Interoception is the process of receiving, accessing and appraising internal bodily signals. Overt active inference is a process by which an organisms acts to confirm/disconfirm attributed causes of unexpected interoceptive sensation, whereas perceptual inference acts to reduce the surprising nature of the sensation by broadening sensory expectations, reducing their inferential weight on the simulation layer In many ways, this distinction is analogous to the difference between modern psychological and contemplative accounts of emotion regulation. If current goals lead one to value regulation over accuracy of the interoceptive signal, priors at lower layers will be updated with an inferred explanatory cause (the posterior probability) from the discrepant layer that suggests overt active inference to address this cause In this situation, surprise is minimized by down-weighting discrepant sensory information in favor of acting to restore a previously expected state (Figure 1B). Research is needed to better understand what difference variations in the particular foci of interoceptive attention make toward promoting salutary effects

A Caveat on the Primacy of Interoceptive Processing

Concluding Remarks