Photo: Milad Fakurian / Unsplash

The powers of our digital age seem intent on divorcing human experiences of the world from our bodies, or at best hacking into the body to redirect those experiences, virtual reality and the metaverse being just two examples. But we know so little about embodiment and the mind-body connection. When we ignore our existence as physical animals, do we really know what we might be losing?

We could be sacrificing something crucial to the experience of being human, before we even understand it. The digital age’s erosion of attention isn’t just about our minds; those same minds are attached to our bodies, and when we talk about being unable to focus and how much more distracted we are, the symptoms take place in the body just as much as the brain.

“What if it’s physical just as much as mental?” is a question that often comes to mind when I’m thinking about attention — could our eyes’ inability to focus on one thing at a time, for example, affect our brain’s inability to do the same?— but the reality is that those two things aren’t separate. They might in fact be even more interlinked than we’re aware of.

Recent research has found that interoception, the ability of our brain to read internal information about our bodies’ states, might have strong links to depression, anxiety, and a whole host of other mental issues. It could be part of an intensely interconnect feedback loop that determines an immense amount not just about how we experience the world, but about how we interpret those experiences.

Annie Murphy Paul, in her book The Extended Mind, wrote that

“Research finds that people who are more interoceptively attuned feel their emotions more intensely, while also managing their emotions more adeptly. This is so because interoceptive sensations form the building blocks of even our most subtle and nuanced emotions: affection, admiration, gratitude; sorrow, longing, regret; irritation, envy, resentment.”

While we generally assume that the brain dictates our emotions,

“The causal arrow points in the opposite direction. The body produces sensations, the body initiates actions — and only then does the mind assemble these pieces of evidence into the entity we call an emotion. The pioneering American psychologist William James . . . suggested that . . . we feel fear because our heart is racing, because our palms are sweating.”

While James proposed the body-to-brain causation over a century ago, it feels like this field is still in its infancy, propelled forward by advanced brain imaging techniques.

Neuroscientist Camilla Nord, in an essay for Pysche earlier this year, wrote about how interoception feeds back into our minds:

“Do you feel hungry, or nauseous? Are you sweating from heat, or nerves? To read this uncertain signal, your brain uses clues from other factors: where you are, what you have recently done, what sensations your body has experienced before, and so on. That means that what you feel is a representation in the brain, only partly in response to actual input from the body.”

In Nord’s research, she found that when patients with depression, bipolar disorder, anxiety, anorexia, and schizophrenia are engaged in active interoception, they “all showed ‘abnormal’ activity in one specific brain region called the insula,” the insula being a key player in interoception. It’s involved, she wrote, in pain and emotion processing and has different subregions that perform different tasks.

If the insula is acting abnormally, leading to mental health struggles, what kind of interactions is it having with the state of our bodies — if extensive sitting, for example, is linked to feelings of hopelessness and depression (which Dr. James Levine found in his “chair-release” office and school programs documented in his book Get Up!), is there a way in which sedentary lifestyles are affecting the insula’s function? Or is something else going on? And how does it relate to what our bodies are doing? There are a variety of studies finding that a standard 30 minutes a day, 5 days a week of walking alleviates depressive symptoms and staves off dementia, in addition to other mental-emotional benefits. But why?

“Even when you are very sure your body feels one thing (uncomfortably full, for example), you can never be certain, because none of us has a direct line of communication with our body,” wrote Nord.

“An important implication of this subjectivity is that the different bodily experiences associated with certain mental health disorders might not come directly from what’s happening in the stomach, heart or other internal organ, but rather from how the brain interprets and processes the signals arising from those organs.”

Many people promote a healthy gut microbiome as essential for mental wellness, as well as dietary changes. During an appointment with a neuropsychologist recently, I was told that there is growing evidence that sugar and other simple carbohydrates (along with red dye, found in common candies, which doesn’t bode well for my Jolly Rancher habit) do in fact play a role in issues like depression and anxiety.

Is there some relationship, then, between what’s going on in our guts and miscommunication in our interoception?

Nord’s research is in its early stages. Her study couldn’t determine why the insula is triggered with certain mental conditions, but it provides a starting place for investigation. Further research into interoception, she said,

“can help explain the interconnectedness of physical and mental health — why, when you feel worse mentally, your physical pain might worsen; and why inflammation in your body can make you depressed.”

“According to neuroanatomist and interoception expert A.D. Craig,” wrote Paul in The Extended Mind, interoception “is nothing less than ‘the feeling of being alive.’”

What we need is not escape from our bodies, but a re-found awareness of them, an appreciation for the millions of years of evolution that have gifted us with an ability to experience the world in ways we barely understand. This research feels like it’s only peering at the edges of our interoceptive experience; but in the meantime, maybe today is the day to go for a walk and ask your body how it’s feeling.