Meditation and Interoception – the Eighth Sense
A recent article in The Guardian and a BBC4 radio interview explore interoception – and the growing evidence that signals sent from our internal organs to the brain play a major role in regulating emotions and reducing anxiety and depression.
Listen to your heartbeat, become aware of your pulse and your heart and lungs pumping oxygen around your body – this is interoception. It is the sensory system that provides information about the internal state of the body, including physical sensations like hunger and thirst – but also emotional sensations. It might be referred to as the “eighth sense” and is crucial for self-regulation and understanding how we feel.
Interoception is the neural process underlying aesthetic appreciation – how the brain responds to emotional experiences like art and music. Art appreciation is not just visual, it relates to how stimuli interact with internal bodily states.
Neuroaesthetics and interoception are intertwined fields investigating how the brain responds to external stimuli, like art, and how it processes the internal bodily signals. Interoception, the sense of our internal bodily state, plays a crucial role in aesthetic experiences and mental health.
Interoceptive dysfunction in people who have difficulty sensing or interpreting internal bodily states has been linked to mental health issues and eating disorders.
Research continues to study how immersive audiovisual experiences can be used to enhance bodily awareness and reduce anxiety through sensory regulation.
Therapeutic interventions are being developed for a variety of conditions. Sound art is being trialled in a neuro aesthetic studio. Monitoring sensory interoception in a person linked to a monitor showing different colours for different energies demonstrated that different music created different colours – the monitor showed different colours relating to the response to the music – as the music changed – the colours changed. The process was then reversed and the the machine played the soundtrack of the patient’s sensory system. The sound produced was quite remarkable, atmospheric, haunting even – and it sounded incredibly similar to some of our healing tracks (like the one below)!
Neuroaesthetics and interoceptive principles can be used to enhance bodily awareness and reduce anxiety through sensory regulation. There is potential to use neuroaesthetics and interoceptive technologies to create therapeutic interventions for a variety of bodily disorders.
Do you ever really hear your own heartbeat?
#Interoception #neuroaesthetics #meditation #healingmusic