Andrew Huberman· PhD
Now, earlier, I said that interoception is on the opposite end of a continuum with exteroception, but it also is on the opposite end of a continuum with dissociation. We can provide some better definitions perhaps to make this crystal clear, and here, I'm actually reading from an upcoming review. I feel comfortable reading from it because I'm an author on the review. But nonetheless, interoception refers to a process by which your nervous system, meaning your brain and connections with your body, senses, interprets, integrates, and regulates signals originating from within the body, and thereby provides a moment-to-moment mapping of your internal landscape at both a conscious and unconscious level. Okay, that's a lot of words to describe basically the process of perceiving what's happening at the level of the surface of your skin or inward. Dissociation can be thought of as the opposite of interoception. It's a lack of bodily awareness or a removal of one's conscious experience from one's bodily experience and awareness. Again, this is most often talked about in the context of something traumatic, but really, if we think about health and mental health and physical health, the optimal place to reside on the continuum between interoception and dissociation is somewhere in the middle. We don't want to be dissociated from life's experiences, but we also don't want everything that happens in the world to profoundly impact our heart rate and our breathing. We'd be yanked around by every experience.