overview

A persistent, LLM-maintained research wiki on interoception, the sense of the internal physiological condition of the body, and its role in emotion, selfhood, and clinical and wellbeing applications.

How to read this wiki

• Studies are one page per source (immutable raw sources live in raw/).
• Concepts, methods, debates, researchers, applications, and synthesis are consolidated cross-source pages.
• Each page opens with an “at a glance” card generated from its frontmatter, so the key fields (findings, limitations, links) can be scanned before the prose.
• Everything is cross-linked with double-bracket wikilinks. Contradictions between sources are flagged explicitly rather than smoothed over.
• On debate pages, the my-take fields are reserved for the human curator.

Current scope

As of 2026-09-23 the wiki holds 106 studies, 127 concepts, 55 methods, 20 debates, 61 researchers and 6 applications (no synthesis pages yet). The full syllabus has been ingested, Weeks 2 to 12 (classic theories, anatomy, development, survival circuits, discrete emotions and body maps, somatic markers, interoceptive cues, appraisal, trauma, the absence of emotion, cultivating positive emotion), plus the thematic folders on adaptiveness, aging, health, body maps, Polyvagal Theory, the TICS 2021 special issue, and a curated set of the curator’s own papers.

Major clusters:

• Measurement validity. Whether heartbeat tasks measure a real ability (Heartbeat detection task, Is the heartbeat-counting task a valid measure of cardiac perception?), whether interoception is one sense or many (Interoceptive taxonomy (Farb et al. Box 1), Is interoception domain-general or organ-specific?), and the reliability of brain-body coupling and physiological indices such as Heart rate variability (HRV).
• Predictive and interoceptive inference. Predictive coding, Interoceptive inference and active inference, from Seth and Friston through computational models of breathing and anxiety.
• Insula anatomy. Craig’s posterior-to-anterior hierarchy, lesion evidence, and the parcellation literature (Insular cortex).
• Clinical. Anxiety and panic (Cognitive model of panic, Anxiety sensitivity), depression and relapse, trauma (Traumatic memory), autism (Interoception in autism (ASD)), Alexithymia, and the transdiagnostic view (Interoceptive psychopathology).
• Polyvagal debate. Porges versus Grossman, and three RSA/HRV meta-analyses (Polyvagal theory, Respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA)).
• Interventions. Mindfulness and contemplative training ( body-focused contemplative training), Mindful Awareness in Body-oriented Therapy (MABT), Somatic Experiencing (SE), yoga, slow breathing and bioelectronic medicine.

The organizing question

The material still pivots on the hinge set up in Week 2: how much of emotion is bodily signal, and how much is interpretation of it?

• William James (1884): the bodily change comes first, and the perception of it is the emotion. Requires distinct visceral signatures (Autonomic specificity of emotion).
• Walter Cannon: arousal is undifferentiated and central; feelings and bodily responses are independent outputs.
• Schachter & Singer (1962): arousal is raw material; cognitive appraisal supplies the label (Cognitive appraisal (of emotion)).
• Anil Seth (2013): the dichotomy dissolves into Interoceptive inference, where signal (prediction error) and interpretation (top-down prediction) are two directions of one hierarchy.

Later weeks recast the question as whether more bodily awareness is better, whether feelings are constituted in the insula or in cognitive workspaces, and whether appraisals cause emotion or describe it.

Entry points

• Start with the Interoception Wiki for the full catalog.
• For what the field has not yet answered: Research gaps, ranked by reader votes. For where sources disagree: the contradictions register.
• To compare sources at a glance: all studies and all methods as sortable tables.
• For the theoretical spine: Interoception → Interoceptive inference → Predictive coding.
• For the historical spine: William James → Walter B. Cannon → Stanley Schachter → Anil K. Seth.
• The most central debates (by inbound links):
  • Is more interoceptive awareness better?: does more bodily contact help, or can less be better?
  • inferential?: bottom-up read-out or top-down inference?
  • Is the heartbeat-counting task a valid measure of cardiac perception?: is the field’s foundational number a valid measure?
  • Is interoception domain-general or organ-specific?: one interoceptive sense, or channel-specific abilities?
  • Do discrete emotions map onto distinct brain regions or networks?: dedicated emotion regions or domain-general networks?
  • contemplative training increase objective interoceptive accuracy?: does contemplative training raise objective accuracy?
  • Do basic emotions have distinct autonomic signatures?: do basic emotions have distinct autonomic signatures?
  • Is Polyvagal Theory scientifically valid?: two functionally opposite vagal sources, or one?