Interoception

Following Craig (2002), interoception is “the sense of the physiological condition of the (entire) body” — Craig’s crucial widening from the narrow “visceral sense” of Sherrington’s taxonomy to include temperature, pain, itch, sensual touch, muscular/visceral sensation, hunger, thirst, and air hunger. On this view interoception is the afferent side of homeostasis, carried by the lamina-i-spinothalamocortical-pathway and represented in the insular-cortex (a posterior→anterior gradient from objective primary mapping to subjective re-representation). See ad-craig.

Interoception is the common substrate underlying every paper in this wiki:

• For 2009), interoception is the homeostatic afferent system whose cortical re-representation in the anterior insula is the foundation of feeling, emotion, and self-awareness — the anatomical bedrock the rest of the field builds on.
• For Seth (2013), interoception is the domain to which predictive coding is extended — emotions become interoceptive-inference.
• For Friedman (2010), the visceral/autonomic feedback that James held to be the emotion is the interoceptive channel, and the question of whether emotions have distinct visceral signatures is the autonomic-specificity debate.
• For the classic theories, James–Lange makes interoceptive (visceral) feedback causally primary; Cannon–Bard denies it sufficient resolution; Schachter–Singer treats interoceptive arousal as undifferentiated raw material awaiting cognitive labeling.

Key open question in this cluster

Is interoception feed-forward (bottom-up accumulation of visceral evidence, the classical assumption) or predictive/inferential (top-down generative models of visceral causes)? This is the crux of feedforward-vs-predictive-interoception. It is measured behaviorally via interoceptive-sensitivity (e.g., the heartbeat-detection-task).