https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/observations/weve-lost-touch-with-our-bodies
Interoception: ‘the somatic mechanism that informs us of all of our internal sensations’
Interoception is the awareness of sensory data from your own biology. It was dubbed the 6th sense in the early 1900s by Psychologists. The reason why interoception, or the ability to give context and make decisions about all the internal sensations and feelings you might have, is to entangled with our modern life is because the tools, technologies, extraneous and irrelevant background noise, is grossly impairing this critical instinct to, again, give context and make effective decisions about all your sensations and the emotional and behavioral effects those might lend.
With the deafening volume of technological advances, our cell phones, and the news, and busy urban and suburban environments, we may struggle to properly hone and develop this essential ability.
With the aid of mindfulness and meditation techniques such as visualization and self-examination of bodily parts and processes, we can become wiser, better decision makers even when and if contextualizing our sensory data in this modern, hectic world.
The act of taking an inventory of your mental world, within the context of therapeutic counseling, confers significant benefit, too. I welcome anyone interested in learning more about how mindfulness techniques are employed in individual counseling sessions to review my services page or contact me directly for a free individualized consultation!
I recommend reading the Cleveland Clinics breakdown of interoception available at https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/articles/interoception with much simpler and understandable examples and how to start.
Our unused and underdeveloped 6th sense, interoception can be understood to be the developmental skills granting an ability to interpret internal sensory data from organs that send messages about you, what you’re feeling, and what you’re perceiving, to the brain.
Interoception is a form of mindfulness meditation that can help you restore your ability to self-examine. It should be used on your own emotional, moment-to-moment thought patterns as well as on your sense of your physical, bodily sensations.
But what is interoception? The “sixth “somatic mechanism is credited to Charles Sherrington in 1906, positing that it “informs us of all our internal sensations.” However this is a somewhat incomplete characterization as it also includes the ability to make decisions and take reasonable actions, given the sensation data.
“Interoception, the sixth sensory system delineated by Sir Charles S. Sherrington in 1906, is the somatic mechanism that informs us of all of our internal sensations. It’s a difficult thing to define in laymen’s terms without appearing like a new-age-nonsense peddler, but the science itself is actually pretty simple. The tiny receptors that reside inside our organs, muscles, skin, and bones are constantly collecting data to send to the brain, which in turn interprets their messages as sensations like hunger, pain, sexual arousal and so on.” (See the whole article at theladders.com)
Unfortunately, as this wonderful article on Interoception points out, our advancements in the field of psychiatric medication and/or constant technological immersion has robbed us somewhat of this innate machinery. In order to process, in the moment, what’s going on with our emotions and our physical sensations, we need to step back and away from constant focus-stealing devices and/or remove our minds from things that dull or make pale the richness of conscious experience.
“Our use of drugs to mask symptoms has contributed to a lack of awareness about our own bodies. So has the emergence of technologies such as computers, smartphones, remotes and game controllers, which only involve our bodies—usually just our fingers—as control inputs.”
One technique to get started with interoception is to anchor your mind to your body. Imagine shutting down various parts of your body as you lay completely still on the floor. You will get better over time, and as you do, you’ll be able to recover sensations that your body has tried to tell your mind, but that your mind perhaps was too busy or too engaged to notice.
Additional readings/resources
The Emerging Science of Interoception retrieved at https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7780231/
Interoceptive Ability and Emotion Regulation in Mind–Body Interventions: An Integrative Review. (2024) Retrieved at https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11591285
“Interoception” retrieved from https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/articles/interoception
We’ve lost touch with our bodies (Scientific American)
The most effective tool against anxiety