{"id":9740,"date":"2026-06-12T12:01:43","date_gmt":"2026-06-12T12:01:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.theck1.no\/?p=9740"},"modified":"2026-06-12T12:01:43","modified_gmt":"2026-06-12T12:01:43","slug":"inside-interoception-the-hidden-sense-of-how-you-feel-inside","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.theck1.no\/?p=9740","title":{"rendered":"Inside Interoception: The hidden sense of how you feel inside"},"content":{"rendered":"
\nKatherine W. Isaacs<\/strong>
\n •
\nJune 12, 2026\n<\/div>\n\n

MIT Technology Review Explains:<\/em><\/strong> Let our writers untangle the complex, messy world of science and technology to help you understand what\u2019s coming next. <\/em>You can read more from the series here<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Your brain lives in the dark space of your skull. Yet it knows when the wind lifts the hairs on your skin, when your heart is racing, when your gut tightens with fear.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also, right now, predicting what you\u2019ll read next as your eyes move across this page. It\u2019s picking up signals that help it make sense of what\u2019s happening around you and prepare you to act if you need to stay safe. You aren\u2019t usually aware that your brain is doing all that.<\/p>\n

Our senses take in information at a staggering rate\u2014roughly 11 million bits flood in every second from our skin, eyes, ears, and more. That\u2019s nearly three paperback novels\u2019 worth of data every second. Only a sliver reaches our conscious awareness.  Researchers estimate that our conscious minds can process roughly 10 to 60 bits of information per second, about the rate at which you\u2019re reading this sentence. That\u2019s a ratio of about one conscious bit to hundreds of thousands of unconscious bits.<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s a mercy. As Moriah Thomason, a neuroscientist at NYU Langone, says, \u201cThank goodness<\/em> we\u2019re built like this. There\u2019s a layer of what we have access to in conscious awareness. And then we have a right-under-the-surface amount. There is only a certain amount we are meant to \u2018hold in mind\u2019 in order to function successfully.\u201d <\/p>\n

What you are<\/em> aware of: Your stomach growling when you\u2019re hungry. Your palms sweating before you speak in public. The breath you just took, if you pay attention to it. Even your heartbeat, which some people can sense from the inside without feeling their pulse in their wrist.<\/p>\n

Scientists have a word for how we sense ourselves from the inside: interoception<\/em>. <\/p>\n

The term was coined in 1906 by the British neurophysiologist Charles Sherrington. For most of the 20th century it remained largely confined to textbooks. Today, thanks to a 2021 Nobel Prize and new tools that can map the interoceptive system across the body, the study of this facility is suddenly quite hot. As researchers decode how signals move between body and brain, a clearer picture is starting to take shape\u2014with implications for how we understand and treat conditions from obesity to chronic pain to anxiety.<\/p>\n

The field began to take off in the 1990s. In 1994, the neurologist Antonio Damasio published a book with a pointed title: Descartes\u2019 Error<\/em>. He challenged the historical separation of thinking and feeling, arguing that our ability to choose and act is driven by feelings, and those feelings in turn are shaped by the body\u2019s signals, such as your gut clenching or your skin going clammy. When we lose that connection between feeling and thinking, as one of Damasio\u2019s patients did after surgery to treat a brain tumor, we may still be able to reason with perfect logic about the pros and cons of traveling on a Tuesday or a Wednesday. But without the emotional signals that help us predict what a choice will feel<\/em> like, our reason spins and circles, and we cannot decide.<\/p>\n

A contemporary of Damasio\u2019s, the neuroscientist Bud Craig, spent his career asking one question: How do you feel?<\/em> He charted how the brain builds an inner map of the body and updates it in real time every moment you are alive.<\/p>\n

Think of the captain\u2019s bridge on the USS Enterprise<\/em>, where a live map displays the status of the ship\u2019s critical systems: oxygen levels, energy availability, hull integrity, shield strength. Another set of indicators senses things outside the ship: asteroid belts, enemy ships, radiation, life signs, and spatial anomalies not yet understood.<\/p>\n

Your brain, only about the size of your two fists pressed together, creates a map like this for your entire body, along with a map of the outside world, from data streaming in through your five senses. Together, they feed into your brain\u2019s working model of you in the world, now and across time\u2014where you are, who<\/em> you are, your expectations for what\u2019s about to happen (based on everything you know), and what all that means for you.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

When someone asks \u201cHow are you doing?\u201d we consult our maps and report back on our status. We might say we\u2019re happy, depleted, anxious, or energetic. These feelings are always a braid of emotional and physical sensations. They\u2019re what your interoceptive navigational system serves up to your awareness when you sense yourself from the inside.<\/p>\n

As we grow up, we learn to interpret what these sensations mean\u2014interpretations that, in turn, can alter our physiology, emotions, and behavior. Research by the psychologist Alia Crum shows that people who embrace a \u201cstress is enhancing\u201d mindset produce more growth hormones than people who have a \u201cstress is debilitating\u201d mindset. They also experience more positive emotions and greater cognitive flexibility.<\/p>\n

Language also matters. We learn words for the textures of our feelings\u2014words that then shape how we feel and act. People low in emotional \u201cgranularity\u201d\u2014as the psychologist Marc Brackett calls the ability to distinguish between closely related feelings\u2014react more impulsively under stress and are less able to find meaning in difficult experiences. <\/sup>But mindsets and emotional intelligence are malleable. We can learn that \u201canxious\u201d is different from \u201cterrified,\u201d and we can even reframe how we interpret our body\u2019s sensations. Instead of thinking of the butterflies in our bellies as annoying, we can welcome them as our body\u2019s way of preparing us for a peak performance.<\/p>\n

Scientists have long understood that the interoceptive information informing these lived experiences travels via two major systems: nerves and humors (blood and lymph). Now they\u2019re actively studying a third system\u2014the \u201cinterstitium,\u201d<\/a> a network of fluid-filled spaces woven throughout the body\u2019s connective fascia that may also play a role in communication.<\/p>\n

But until recently, scientific understanding of this interoceptive system looked like a high-level schematic that left out vital details\u2014how information travels from the outside environment in, how it moves from your body to your brain, and how it is integrated and interpreted within your brain. Researchers are now racing to explore what the neuroscientist Catherine Tallon-Baudry calls this \u201cnew continent of awareness.\u201d<\/p>\n

The wandering highway<\/strong><\/h3>\n

One of the most active areas of research centers on the vagus nerve, the main component of the parasympathetic nervous system and an information highway carrying news from your organs up to your brain and back down to your body. The vagus has become a celebrity nerve, ubiquitous in wellness podcasts and trauma therapy. \u201cTone your vagus nerve.\u201d \u201cActivate your parasympathetic system.\u201d The language suggests a single thing you can target, like a muscle. The reality, as Steve Liberles at Harvard Medical School is discovering, is far more interesting.<\/p>\n

Liberles has spent most of his career mapping what he calls \u201cthe great wide unknown\u201d of one of our largest and longest nerves. He speaks the way he works\u2014methodically, without overselling. But the questions driving him are huge. How do we sense our body\u2019s inner state? What information flows through which channels? And how does the brain decide what to do with it?<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I\u2019m nervous giving a talk in front of a thousand people,\u201d he says, \u201cmy heart might race. I might get butterflies in my stomach. I might get goosebumps on my skin.\u201d We all know what he\u2019s talking about.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s bizarre,\u201d he muses. \u201cYour brain has to send a signal to the gut, and then the gut back<\/em> to the brain, to tell you you\u2019re nervous?\u201d He pauses. \u201cThis just shows there is this intimate connectivity between the brain and the body that\u2019s real.\u201d<\/p>\n

The vagus is often called the calming nerve, because it controls \u201crest and digest\u201d functions that quiet our body after the sympathetic nervous system revs us up with \u201cfight or flight\u201d impulses to handle danger or stress. <\/p>\n

But it is also doing something else: It\u2019s listening to us inside. Anatomists have known for over a century that roughly 80% of its fibers carry information upward<\/em>, from body to brain. Think of it as a two-lane highway with far more traffic headed north. What scientists are just beginning to understand in detail is what those signals are saying. <\/p>\n

Liberles is decoding the vagus with molecular precision and finding that its messaging system is unexpectedly diverse. So far, his research has uncovered dozens of types of vagus nerve cells, each wired to a specific organ. Team Red relays information about the heart; Team Blue, the gut.<\/p>\n

Within those teams, each courier has a unique job that\u2019s different from those all its teammates perform. Liberles found 10 types in the lungs alone. Until then, only one lung reflex had ever been identified, in 1868. One nerve courier carries information about breathing rate; another the stretch of your lungs; yet another information about airway threats, like food going down the wrong pipe.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s super exciting to think about what each of these neurons is doing,\u201d he told me in a conversation last fall, a flash of intensity breaking through the calm. \u201cWhere does it go in the body? What is it sensing? What is it controlling?\u201d<\/p>\n

The doors of the cell<\/strong><\/p>\n

Liberles is mapping the vagus information highways. But highways need on-ramps for signals to enter. For years, one of neurobiology\u2019s biggest mysteries was the molecular on-ramp for our sense of touch.<\/p>\n

Somewhere, something in our bodies was converting physical force into an electrical signal that the nervous system could understand. But no one knew how. <\/p>\n

Solving that mystery required a scientist willing to trust a hunch when the data couldn\u2019t show the way. <\/p>\n

Ardem Patapoutian grew up in Lebanon and fled the country\u2019s civil war at 18, landing in Los Angeles, where he delivered pizzas and wrote horoscopes for a local newspaper before falling in love with science at UCLA.<\/p>\n

In the 1990s, as a postdoc at the University of California, San Francisco, he became fascinated with our sense of touch\u2014the last of the five major senses not yet understood at the molecular level. The lung stretch signal that Liberles\u2019s vagus neurons carry to the brain? No one had ever figured out how that signal began.<\/p>\n

\u201cHow do you feel the embrace of a loved one? How do your fingers distinguish one texture of hair from another?\u201d Patapoutian invites us to wonder in his 2021 Nobel Prize lecture. The problem: Most cellular communication works through chemistry. But mechanical force offers no molecule to bind. How does the body translate physical pressure into the electrochemical language that neurons speak?<\/p>\n

Scientists knew that the answer had to be an ion channel\u2014a protein gate embedded in cell membranes that opens to let electrically charged particles into the cell. But tracking down the one responsible for touch turned out to be absurdly difficult. Ion channels are a hundred thousandth the size of a cell, invisible to ordinary microscopes. Worse, they don\u2019t resemble each other. You can\u2019t recognize one by its shape or its sequence of amino acids. Even with one right in front of you, nothing would tell you it was there.<\/p>\n

At Scripps, where he works now, Patapoutian decided to try an unusual approach. He\u2019d try to find cells that showed sensitivity to touch and destroy their internal genetic blueprint one gene at a time\u2014hunting for the move that would make the cell go numb. It was tedious, expensive, and possibly a dead end. \u201cA lot of people made fun of us,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

Two years in, Patapoutian\u2019s collaborator Bertrand Coste had burned through half his postdoctoral appointment with no results. Patapoutian said: Another 30 genes, and then we decide whether to continue.<\/em><\/p>\n

What kept them going, Patapoutian told me, was informed intuition. \u201cAs you gain more experience, you have this sense of what\u2019s going to work, what\u2019s not going to work. Sometimes the data cannot answer the question of when to stop or when to continue. There has to be another process. If you start trusting it, it gives you an avenue to continue.\u201d<\/p>\n

Coste knocked out candidate gene 72<\/a>. Flatline. The cell had gone numb.<\/p>\n

They\u2019d found it\u2014the mechanism behind something you feel every day.<\/p>\n

They named the protein they identified PIEZO, from the Greek piezi<\/em>, meaning pressure. There are two variations, PIEZO1 and PIEZO2, each responsible for sensing different kinds of pressure in the body. They\u2019re elegant in their design\u2014over 2,500 amino acids folded into a three-bladed propeller-shaped gate embedded in cell membranes. When pressure stretches the membrane, the gate opens and electrically charged ions flood through, translating physical pressure into an electrical signal that the brain can understand\u2014all within milliseconds.<\/p>\n

Patapoutian calls scientific discovery a dream that survives reality. He won the Nobel Prize in medicine in 2021 for his discovery of PIEZO, sharing the award with David Julius of UCSF for his work on how cells sense temperature. Now researchers are finding PIEZO proteins everywhere\u2014skin, organs, blood vessels, and even red blood cells, where they help the cells squeeze through narrow capillaries. They\u2019re how your brain knows where your hand is in space without looking at it, a sense called proprioception. They\u2019re in plants too, enabling roots to sense pressure as they push down into the earth.<\/p>\n

PIEZO was just the beginning. With a $14.5 million grant from the US National Institutes of Health, Patapoutian and his collaborators are now mapping the body\u2019s entire interoceptive system\u2014as many internal senses as he can find, he says.8<\/sup><\/p>\n

Patapoutian has translated his discovery into a unique form of public outreach. At scientific conferences, he sometimes rolls up his sleeve mid-lecture to reveal half his arm covered in ink\u2014a gigantic PIEZO protein in exquisite anatomical detail, its blades spreading across his biceps. Then he flexes. The tattoo flexes with him, the structure bending exactly as the real protein does when pressure opens the gate.<\/p>\n

\u201cAt a pub or a party,\u201d he explains, smiling, \u201chow else would I demonstrate this beautiful structure?\u201d<\/p>\n

Orchestrating the field<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Steve Liberles is mapping a major interoception highway. Ardem Patapoutian discovered the gates of touch. Meanwhile, Wen Chen at the National Institutes of Health is pulling the field together, putting neuroscientists, immunologists, physiologists, and clinicians into the same room. The demand, she says, has been enormous.<\/p>\n

She tested her pitch at a dinner party with NIH colleagues a few years ago. You\u2019re hungry right now\u2014that\u2019s interoception<\/em>. You\u2019re thirsty\u2014that\u2019s interoception.<\/em> Heads nodded as she pointed around the table.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe can\u2019t have just the brain or just the body,\u201d she told me. \u201cWe need to look at the whole person.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 2018 she organized a symposium on interoception where Liberles was one of the invitees, along with researchers and practitioners of meditation and yoga. \u201cIt was not their thing,\u201d she says, laughing as she recalls how uncomfortable some of the researchers looked. But the practitioners were excited to finally meet scientists who were studying the inner mechanisms of what they did.<\/p>\n

That was followed by a series of NIH workshops on interoception that spanned topics from basic science to clinical practice. Patapoutian was the keynote speaker for the first one. <\/p>\n

The NIH began funding scientists to chart the neural circuits of interoception and bringing them together to talk about their findings. Partway through one of these meetings, the equipment failed for an hour. More than 1,000 people stayed online, waiting for it to come back.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe were shocked at the turnout,\u201d she says. \u201cThere was much bigger interest than we could have imagined.\u201d<\/p>\n

Chen is now building infrastructure to match the demand: a formal community, funding mechanisms, a venue where cardiologists and neuroscientists and clinicians can all find each other. And she\u2019s redefining the field as she goes; interoception is not a one-way signal from body to brain but a continuous two-way communication system, each direction shaping the other in real time.10<\/sup>   <\/sup><\/strong><\/p>\n

Liberles\u2019s nervousness on stage is that two-way loop in action. Signals from his racing heart and belly butterflies travel up to the brain, which weaves them into an interpretation: This is anxiety, and this is what to do to handle it.<\/em> His actions produce fresh signals that the brain reads in light of its ongoing predictions about what will happen next. In the body-brain communication loop, each player constantly updates the other.<\/p>\n

I asked Wen what her work on interoception might mean for another inner sense: intuition. \u201cPeople talk about \u2018gut feelings,\u2019\u201d I said. \u201cHow does that relate to interoception?\u201d<\/p>\n

 \u201cIntuition might be the bridge where interoception moves from unconscious processing to conscious awareness,\u201d she answered. \u201cIf that\u2019s true, then intuition is not magic. It\u2019s physiology.\u201d<\/p>\n

But it depends on how we read the signals. Intuition is like pain. It tells you something, but it\u2019s not always clear what. \u201cPerhaps we can treat intuition as a source of data,\u201d she says. \u201cMeaningful, but probably not complete.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cMaybe we can be grounded in both\u2014in feeling and fact.\u201d<\/p>\n

Which raises a more personal question: What do you do with the signals your body is sending?<\/p>\n

One avenue for exploration is therapeutic intervention\u2014both pharmacological and neural stimulation. Vagal nerve stimulation has treated epilepsy and depression for four decades, but as Liberles puts it, it\u2019s like pressing all the keys on the piano to hit one note. Weight-loss drugs like Ozempic act in part through vagal pathways but can cause nausea as a side effect, because the targeting isn\u2019t precise enough. Map the body\u2019s circuits with enough accuracy and you might hit the note you actually want<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Another area of active research is psychological and behavioral\u2014teaching people how to detect and even shape interoceptive signals. Low interoceptive awareness is linked to mental-health disorders and stress-related physical conditions.11<\/sup> But like emotional intelligence, it\u2019s not fixed. Researchers are finding that people can boost their body awareness by, for example, learning to detect their heartbeats from the inside\u2014now a common measure of interoceptive awareness.12<\/sup> Other interventions focus on body-based therapies and conscious activation of the parasympathetic \u201crest and digest\u201d system to improve emotional and physical well-being. The placebo effect is another example of the mind acting on the body through expectation alone.<\/p>\n

The signals we once dismissed as vague feelings\u2014when your gut tightens before you know why, when your body says yes<\/em> or no<\/em> before your mind catches up\u2014those are real. How we interpret them and whether we act on them is another frontier.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s clear that gut feelings play a role in scientific research, especially when the path forward looks foggy. Patapoutian\u2019s informed intuition kept him and his colleagues going long enough to find PIEZO, a reminder that major discoveries often start with a hunch that is later tested against evidence. Chen puts it well: Maybe we can be grounded in both feeling and fact.<\/p>\n

Katherine W. Isaacs <\/strong>is a writer and senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Her teaching and research focus on the intersection of psychology, technology, and innovation. Originally trained as a biologist and later as a social psychologist, she is currently working on a book called Gut Feel, about intuition, interoception, and embodied decision-making.<\/em><\/p>\n

Read the full article →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Katherine W. Isaacs • June 12, 2026 MIT Technology Review Explains: Let our writers untangle the complex, messy world of science and technology to help you understand what\u2019s coming next. You can read more from the series here. Your brain lives in the dark space of your skull. Yet it knows when the wind lifts the hairs<\/p>\n

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