Proprioception
The wiki used this word for several ingests before it had a page, which was a real gap: Payne et al. (2015) name “interoception and proprioception” together as the therapeutic lever of somatic-experiencing without ever saying why those two belong in one phrase, and the answer turns out to be contested.
What it is
The sense of the body’s own configuration: limb position, joint angle, muscle length and tension, and the sense of effort. Its receptors are muscle spindles, Golgi tendon organs, joint receptors and mechanosensitive endings in connective tissue — anatomically internal, below the skin, but reporting the musculoskeletal body rather than the visceral one.
By tradition it is grouped with somatosensation and treated as a sixth exteroceptive-adjacent sense: it tells you where your arm is, which feels more like information about a physical object than like hunger or nausea.
Why it is filed here as interoception
Chen et al. (2021) state it outright: neural activity in subcutaneous tissues including muscles and connective tissues that contributes to proprioception “are a form of interoception” (citing Tuthill & Azim 2018). This follows directly from their represent-not-originate criterion — the sense reports a fact about the organism, not about the world — and it is the same move that pulls the vestibular system inside. See interoception-exteroception-boundary.
Craig (2002) arrived at an overlapping position from anatomy rather than from function, pulling muscular and visceral sensation into interoception along with temperature, pain and itch on the grounds that they share the lamina I route. Craig’s inclusion is narrower — it covers the small-fibre afferents reporting muscle metabolic and mechanical state, not the large-fibre spindle afferents that carry classical position sense — and the difference is worth keeping, because the two are separable clinically and travel by different routes.
So the wiki holds proprioception as interoceptive under the functional criterion, partly interoceptive under the anatomical one, and exteroceptive-adjacent by tradition. This is not a settled matter and should not be written as though it were.
Three places it is already doing work here
As half of a therapeutic lever. somatic-experiencing and Payne et al. treat attention to interoceptive and proprioceptive sensation as the bottom-up route into a dysregulated core-response-network. On Chen et al.’s criterion the pairing is not a pairing — it is one class of signal, and the therapy’s target is coherent. On the traditional classification it is two, and the therapy is combining a visceral intervention with a musculoskeletal one for reasons nobody has articulated. Which reading is right bears directly on what the active ingredient is supposed to be.
As the other kind of body map. cortical-somatotopy exists to keep three things apart: the Penfield homunculus (a cortical map of body surface and musculature), felt sensation maps, and the visceral interoceptive map in the insula. Proprioception is the sense whose map is the first of those, which is why Zeharia et al. is filed here — a whole-body somatotopic gradient in the precuneus, built from moving twenty body parts.
As the integration partner. Chen et al. place the meeting point precisely: primary interoceptive information relayed from the ventromedial thalamus reaches posterior insula, and integration with exteroceptive sensorimotor and proprioceptive information from S1/S2 “most likely takes place within the posterior and central regions.” If that is right, proprioception is one of the inputs that makes the insular representation a whole-body one rather than a visceral one — a specific mechanism for the multisensory-integration claim.
What the wiki does not have
No source in raw/ measures proprioception directly, and no method page covers it. Everything above is definitional or borrowed. If the somatic-therapy thread develops — where proprioceptive attention is doing real explanatory work — this page will need an evidence base rather than a taxonomy.