Interoception

Interoception is the term contemporary affective neuroscience uses for the sense the body has of itself — the afferent signaling from the internal organs, the vascular system, the muscles and viscera, integrated in the insular cortex and forming the somatic substrate of what is subjectively experienced as feeling. A. D. (Bud) Craig’s work at the Barrow Neurological Institute, Antonio Damasio’s somatic-marker research, and the recent work of Hugo Critchley and Sarah Garfinkel have established the field.

For the Seba lineage, interoception is the modern name for what the ancient Greek tradition called thumos and [[splanchna|splanchna]]: the body’s affective knowing, the feeling as seated in the organs rather than in the head, the somatic-affective faculty that discerns value. This is load-bearing for Seba because it returns the feeling-function to its ancient seat — the classical understanding of feeling as embodied-intelligent was not superseded by neuroscience but confirmed by it in a different idiom. See craig-how-do-you-feel and body-as-psychic-substrate.

Relationships

• thumos
• feeling-function
• body-as-psychic-substrate