Interoception is essentially our body’s way of telling us how we feel, and as we grow and develop, we learn which sensations require attending to – some of the most obvious examples might be knowing when to use the toilet if we feel the sensation of needing to pee, or eating food if our stomach is rumbling. Attending to these needs can allow us to enter homeostasis, where our body is operating as it should within a state of balance.
But this requires a lot of work when our bodies are so complex – our brains are essentially running a budget through our entire system, ensuring that the right amount of resources, such as salt, water, and glucose, are reaching the cells that need them the most. This is more related to another process in the body known as allostasis, which is predictive in its nature and attempts to meet the needs of the body before they arise. This is different to homeostasis, which is a reactive process that seeks to restore balance and return to a set point after some disruption.
Similarly to how we sense and predict things outside of the body (exteroception), interoception operates within a predictive framework. The relationship between our brain and the rest of our body allows this process to function in a mutual way: the brain is issuing motor commands to adjust the insides of the body and predicting the sensory consequences of those movements, while the different sensory surfaces inside your body (including dozens of cells) send back signals to your brain.
We have ‘interoceptors’ inside our neurons that can detect these various signals, where they are changed into electrical, hormonal, or non-neuronal signals that can be interpreted and integrated by the brain. The location of these receptors has an impact on whether or not the signals are transmitted through the peripheral nervous system, or via a non-neuronal system, such as the circulatory or lymphatic systems. Classic neuroendocrine systems such as the hypothalamic-neurohypophyseal system (HNS), the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, the hypothalamic-pituitary-gonadal axis (HPG), and the hypothalamic-pituitary-thyroid axis (HPT) also offer examples of interoception communication via non-neural systems.
When it comes to the peripheral nervous system, our mechanical interoceptors directly detect signals in local organs and transmit interoceptive information through these neural pathways to the brain. A distributed brain network is involved in the processing of different signals, where they pass through the thalamus, which then relays information to different parts of the brain. One key area is the insular cortex, which sends information to your body about you, such as hunger, pain, and fatigue, as well as being linked to emotion, self-awareness, and cognitive function.
There might be a spectrum of responses regarding our level of interoception when it comes to mental health problems such as anxiety or depression. For example, someone with a diagnosis of anxiety might be hyperaware of what’s going on inside their body, while a depressed individual may report being able to feel absolutely nothing at all.
These links to emotion and self-awareness might provide some opportunity to explore the benefit of psychedelics from an interoceptive perspective, where we take more of a holistic approach to see where there might be benefits from managing things like chronic pain, depression, or anxiety. This way of looking at the benefits of psychedelics can allow us to see where the whole body is being impacted, rather than just looking at what’s going on inside our brains. In recent years, the brain has become a central focus of Western approaches to understanding the impact of psychedelics – but what if indigenous approaches could allow us to understand psychedelics from more of a whole-body perspective?
share your toughts
Join the Conversation.
Try reading old Mesoamerican prehispanic pictographs and steles and get into a pantheistic monistic view of reality instead of a western cartesian dualistic narrative of reality.