Interoception and Neuroception

Interoception and Neuroception

All these words, huh? Neuroception, interoception. Yikes. All of them end with -ception. Which is the same ending (suffix) as perception. ‘Ception’ can best be translated, from the latin, via middle french, as layers of understanding. Intero- means interior, as contrasted with extero-, meaning exterior. (Sensory perception, e.g., vision, hearing, taste, smell, touch, is technically classified as extroception.). So interoception would be rendered as interior layers of understanding.

Interception refers to the inwardly-oriented sensory awareness of the interior of the body. Why is this so important? When Dr. Porges and I wrote the Polvyagal poster, we spent a lot of time on the first paragraph. In the first paragraph, we explain that the Autonomic Nervous System is the neurological architecture of the mind-body connection. The information conveyed to us through the vagal system is what allows us to feel ourselves. In the poster, we put in an asterisk, and pointed out that immediately here we ran into a problem with the English language. Romance languages have a verb construction that is called ‘reflexive’ which points the action of the verb back towards its subject. If I say, in French, that I dress myself, the myself is part of the verb. In French, there is therefore a way to say ‘I feel myself’ that conveys a sense of the feeling being oriented inwardly back to the subject doing the feeling. We can’t say this in English. We don’t have a simple way to say, “I feel my own body from the inside.” It’s actually problematic, at a linguistic level, because this is a pretty elementary concept. The failure of language to map it is significant. And so we have to use this other word: interoception. That’s all it means: I feel my own body from inside.

Feeling my own body from inside means that I am going to be in contact with sensations. An ache in my belly. Pressure behind my eyes. A headache. It means I’m going to be in contact with emotions. A quiver of joy in my heart. A feeling of amusement. I can only feel my body from inside in the present moment. It sounds so obvious, but this is deeply significant. Interoception always happens in the now.

Interoceptive awareness can and should be cultivated. AC 'Bud' Craig, one of the world's leading neuroscientists in this areas, says

We heal to the extent that we can interocept. We interocept to the extent that we feel safe.

We can develop interoception by attending to feeling our own bodies from inside. What we sense inside is also fundamentally shaped by another process that Dr. Porges described. For this process he coined the word neuroception. Neuroception is the moment-to-moment detection of safety versus threat by the embodied nervous system. This sense is shaped by our entire lived experience: what it feels like to be living in the body that we are wearing. And this is shaped by all the experiences of our lives, our history, our ancestry, our lineage, and our social locations: race, gender, sexual orientation, gender presentation, age, class, religion, geography, ability. And by how each of these parts of our identity comes into contact with the humans and culture(s) and society and civilization around us.

Deficits in interoception are often linked to traumatic stress. We can work with our own neuroception and our own interoception to increase our experiences of liberation, co-liberation, and wellbeing. There are many many practices in this model that develop this capacity. We can work with our interoceptive experience by directly training in meditative practices that involve scanning the body, and scanning the emotions. We can work with our neuroception and interoception by bringing ourselves into deeper relationship with communities where we experience a felt sense of safety, and where we feel that we can be our authentic selves.