Listening to the Signals Within

     Disruptions in interoception, the ability to detect and interpret the body's internal state, may underlie anxiety, eating disorders, post-traumatic stress disorder, and many other psychological ailments.

Breathing Rate, for example, can affect how someone perceives the intensity and unpleasantness of pain. 

     Over the years, a growing body of evidence has indicated that interoception plays an important role in shaping both emotions and psychological health. 

     A large chunk of this work has focused on the heart. With every heartbeat, blood rushes into the arteries and triggers sensors known as Barrow receptors, which shoot off messages to the brain, conveying information about how strongly and rapidly the heart is beating.

In one pivotal 2014 study, a neuropsychiatrist at Brighton and Sussex Medical School in England, and his team reported that this process, in effect, a person's sensitivity to fear. 

By monitoring volunteer's heartbeats while they viewed fearful or neutral faces, they found that people detected fearful faces more easily and judged them as more intense when their heart was pumping out blood than when it was relaxing and refilling.

 But participants with the higher levels of anxiety often perceived fear even when their hearts relaxed.

Researchers have also demonstrated that bodily signals such as breathing patterns and gut rhythms can influence emotional reactions. 

People are quicker to react in fear to fearful faces while breathing in than while breathing out. While breathing rate can affect how someone perceives the intensity and unpleasantness of pain.  

In more recent work, some neuroscientists have turned their attention to the gastrointestinal system. 

In 2021, researchers discovered that people given a dose of anti-nausea drug that affects gut rhythms—processes within the stomach that help digestion—were less likely to look away from pictures of feces than they normally would have been. 

Researchers speculate interoception may be relevant to eating disorders, “It's possible that some of these signals contribute to feeling aversions to signals of satiety, making satiety very uncomfortable, a feeling you don't want to feel.” 

A person's interoceptive capabilities might be especially malleable during early childhood or adolescence. 

Understanding the mysteries of interoception may lead to better therapies for illnesses of the mind—and the body. Some researchers believe that understanding interoception may ultimately be helpful for treating physical symptoms as well. 

Researchers are currently evaluating interoception-based treatments for chronic fatigue syndrome, a complicated disorder that causes a range of symptoms, including severe tiredness.

 Interoception has so much relevance to health in general,” according to researchers, “that we can't ignore it anymore.”

Article appearing in Scientific American, January 2026, pp. 50-57.