Inside interoception: The hidden sense of how you feel inside

**Matt Honan** (0:00)
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**SPEAKER_2** (0:22)
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**Katherine W. Isaacs** (0:33)
Katherine W. Isaacs writes, Inside introception, the hidden sense of how you feel inside.
Your brain lives in the dark space of your skull, yet it knows when the wind lifts the hairs on your skin, when your heart is racing, when your gut tightens with fear. It's also, right now, predicting what you'll hear next as your ears listen to my voice. It's picking up signals that help it make sense of what's happening around you, and prepare you to act if you need to stay safe. You aren't usually aware that your brain is doing all that.
Our senses take in information at a staggering rate. Roughly 11 million bits flood in every second from our skin, eyes, ears, and more. That's nearly three paperback novels worth of data every second. Only a sliver reaches our conscious awareness. Researchers estimate that our conscious minds can process roughly 10 to 60 bits of information per second about the rate at which you're listening to this sentence. That's a ratio of about one conscious bit to hundreds of thousands of unconscious bits. And that's a mercy. As Mariah Thomason, a neuroscientist at NYU Langone, says, thank goodness we're built like this. There's a layer of what we have access to in conscious awareness. And then we have a right under the surface amount. There is only a certain amount we are meant to hold in mind in order to function successfully. What you are aware of. Your stomach growling when you're hungry. Your palms sweating before you speak in public. The breath you just took if you pay attention to it. Even your heartbeat, which some people can sense from the inside without feeling their pulse in their wrist. Scientists have a word for how we sense ourselves from the inside. Interoception. The term was coined in 1906 by the British neurophysiologist Charles Sherrington. For most of the 20th century, it remained largely confined to textbooks. Today, thanks to a 2021 Nobel Prize and new tools that can map the interoceptive system across the body, the study of this facility is suddenly quite hot. As researchers decode how signals move between body and brain, a clearer picture is starting to take shape, with implications for how we understand and treat conditions from obesity to chronic pain to anxiety. The field began to take off in the 1990s. In 1994, the neurologist Antonio DiMasio published a book with a pointed title, Descartes' Error. He challenged the historical separation of thinking and feeling, arguing that our ability to choose and act is driven by feelings, and those feelings in turn are shaped by the body's signals, such as your gut clenching or your skin going clammy.
When we lose that connection between feeling and thinking, as one of DiMasio's patients did after surgery to treat a brain tumor, we may still be able to reason with perfect logic about the pros and cons of travelling on a Tuesday or a Wednesday. But without the emotional signals that help us predict what a choice will feel like, our reason spins and circles, and we cannot decide.
A contemporary of DiMasio's, the neuroscientist Bud Craig, spent his career asking one question. How do you feel? He charted how the brain builds an inner map of the body and updates it in real time every moment you are alive.
Think of the Captain's Bridge on the USS Enterprise, where a live map displays the status of the ship's critical systems, oxygen levels, energy availability, hull integrity, shield strength.
Another set of indicators senses things outside the ship, asteroid belts, enemy ships, radiation, life signs, and spatial anomalies not yet understood.
Your brain, only about the size of your two fists pressed together, creates a map like this for your entire body, along with a map of the outside world, from data streaming in through your five senses. Together, they feed into your brain's working model of you in the world, now and across time, where you are, who you are, your expectations for what's about to happen based on everything you know, and what all that means for you. When someone asks, how are you doing? We consult our maps and report back on our status. We might say we're happy, depleted, anxious, or energetic. These feelings are always a braid of emotional and physical sensations. They're what your interreceptive navigational system serves up to your awareness when you sense yourself from the inside.