The Body in the Mind: On the Relationship Between

Interoception and Embodiment: summary

1. Embodiment
a. Perception of feelings related to one’s body’s internal and external states
b. Provide a sense of our physical and physiological condition
c. ‘I have a body’
d. Bodily responding and perception: key processes in the construction of
emotions
i. Also, effects on psychological functions, such as decision-making or
cognition (recent research)  BEYOND EMOTIONS
2. Interoception and interoceptive awareness
a. Interoception perception forms
i. Proprioception (signals from skin and musculoskeletal apparatus)
ii. Visceroception (signals from the inner organs)
b. Conventional view: visceroceptional signals are less distinct (not cool
anymore)
c. Interoception includes sensing physiological condition of your body,
representation of that condition within context, motivation to
homeostatically regulate the internal state
d. Significant individual differences on interoceptive awareness (IA)
i. Heartbeat perception & individual sensitivity for cardiac signals (can
you tell whether the melody is in tune with your heartbeat?)
ii. Individual degree of IA = trait-like sensitivity toward one’s visceral
signals (cardiovascular perception (sensitivity) can be trained)
iii. IA (as cardiac awareness)  greater sensitivity to emotional
responding and cardiovascular autonomic reactivity in different
situations evoking autonomic changes  cardiac awareness can be a
result of a ‘visceral’ learning process
1. Depends on greater autonomic reactivity during different
situations (changes in autonomic activity, greater repetitive
activity in relevant ‘interoceptive’ areas of the brain)
iv. Different signals from different organs converge into IA, but research
is insufficient 
3. Interoception as a basis of embodied processes
a. Evidence from neuroanatomy
i. Interoceptive neural network (somatosensory and somatomotor
cortices, the insular cortex, cingulate cortex (ACC), and prefrontal
cortices) is relevant for monitoring the internal emotional and
viscerosensory state, emotion processing, self-regulation of feelings
and behaviour
ii. Insular cortex and ACC are relevant for ALL subjective human feelings
(e.g., time perception) and things like touch and hunger
 iii. Better at perceiving your heartrate  higher activation in the network
iv. Different portions of the insula are involved in different and
successive steps of neural processing
v. Posterior-to-anterior progression:

Global
emotional
moment

vi. Global emotional moment: ultimate representation of all one’s

feelings, constituting the ‘sentient self’ in the immediate present
vii. Neural representation of the physiological conditions of the body is
the basis for awareness
viii. Homeostatic neural construct for a feeling from the body is the
foundation for the encoding of all feelings
b. The role of interoception for decision-making, emotions, and behaviour: signs
of embodiment
i. James (1884): experience of emotion could be defined as the
perception of bodily responses
ii. Neural representation of physiological conditions of the body are the
basis for emotions
iii. Activation of interoceptive representations and meta-representations
of bodily signals supporting IA is associated with emotional
experience and cognitive functions  IA is crucial for the intensity of
emotional experience
iv. Accuracy in IA (cardiac signals) is associated with more beneficial
decision-making
v. IA is crucially associated with behavioural self-regulation
vi. Somatic markers: feelings in a body associated with emotions
vii. Relevance of ‘gut feelings’ in decision-making increases in uncertain
situations where you can choose your own actions
viii. Greater IA  greater attention allocation (visceral embodiment of
emotions)
 ix. Most research is only correlational  (future studies have to
manipulate interoceptive signal processing)

c. Embodiment of time perception

i. Assumption: physiological states and emotions associated with
changes in physiological states affect time perception
ii. Common neural system
4. Disturbances of embodiment
a. Subject body (Leib) vs objective body (Körper)
b. Types of disturbances:
i. Primarily affecting the subject body (e.g., schizophrenia)
ii. Related to the body image or explicit body awareness (e.g., eating
disorders)
c. Disturbance in embodiment is related to affected perception of bodily
processes
d. Alexithymia
i. Inability to identify, describe, regulate, and express one’s emotions
ii. Considered a continuous personality trait
iii. Redefined as ‘affective agnosia’
1. Present habitual response with a lack of recognizing or
experiencing this response pattern as an emotional state
iv. High alexithymia is associated with low IA
e. Eating disorders
i. IA (measured by cardiac awareness) was decreased in patients with
anorexia nervosa
ii. Problems in recognizing certain visceral sensations related to hunger
and satiety
iii. Affection on level of the physical body (Körper)  assumption that
main disturbances of embodiment are related to the body image or
explicit body awareness
f. Implications for our ‘self’
i. Interoceptive states and emotions are directly related and
fundamental to self-awareness and the ‘self’
ii. Representation of bodily signals & meta-representation of the state of
the body in the brain give a subjective mental image of the ‘material
self’ as a feeling
iii. Neural network (especially the right AIC and the ACC) give an abstract
presentation of oneself