![]() ![]() Importantly, the impaired interoception and emotional awareness also disrupted their decision making, meaning that they struggled to cope with the simplest choices, such as what meal to pick on a dinner menu. They reported knowing that they should feel shocked or disgusted, but they didn’t actually experience the feelings. If they saw a photo of a horrific car crash, for example, they did not have the slightest physiological response – and this was accompanied by a lack of any emotional feeling either. Interoception lies behind our sense of intuition – when something feels “right” or “wrong” without an explanationĪs evidence, Damasio described the decision making of patients suffering damage to areas such as the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which disrupted the creation of those unconscious bodily reactions. Without the back-and-forth between the brain and the body, the feelings of happiness, sadness or excitement wouldn’t exist. This physiological reaction occurs before you are even aware of the emotion, and it is only when the brain detects the alteration to the body’s internal state, through interoception, that we actually experience the feeling and allow it to shape our behaviour. He proposed that emotional events begin with non-conscious changes in bodily states, called “ somatic markers”: when you see an angry dog, for instance, and your muscles tense or your heart begins to race. This idea stems from the pioneering work of Prof Antonio Damasio at the University of Southern California in the 1990s. “Researchers and clinicians are recognising interoception as a key mechanism to mental and physical health, where understanding our body’s signals helps us understand and regulate emotional and physical states,” says Dr Helen Weng at the University of California San Francisco. ‘There’s a constant dialogue between the brain and the viscera’: Manos Tsakiris. And the ways you read and interpret those feelings will have important consequences for your wellbeing. But many of these sensations – such as tension in your muscles, the clenching of your stomach, or the beating of your heart – should be available to the conscious mind, at least some of the time. Much of the processing of these signals takes place below conscious awareness: you won’t be aware of the automatic feedback between brain and body that helps to keep your blood pressure level, for instance, or the signals that help to stabilise your blood sugar levels. “There’s a constant communication dialogue between the brain and the viscera,” says Tsakiris. Interoception includes all the signals from your internal organs, including your cardiovascular system, your lungs, your gut, your bladder and your kidneys. The origin of emotionįirst, some definitions. It is only by listening to the heart, it seems, that we can take better care of the mind. Importantly, these findings include promising new ways for you to “tune in” to the body and alter your perception of its interoceptive signals – techniques that may help treat a host of mental health problems. “We are seeing an exponential growth in interoceptive research,” says Prof Manos Tsakiris, a psychologist at Royal Holloway, University of London. It is now one of the fastest moving areas in neuroscience and psychology, with academic conferences devoted to the subject and a wealth of new papers emerging every month. ![]()
1 Comment
3/20/2023 12:59:50 am
Thanks for sharing such a informative blog! SUM is luxury branding agency we’ve often been called upon to address the inclusive/exclusive dynamic, and see step one as identifying clearly where a client’s products and their pricing fit into the market as a whole.
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