The Body in the Mind: On the Relationship Between Interoception and Embodiment

A 2012 Topics in Cognitive Science review by Beate M. Herbert (Tübingen) and Olga Pollatos (Potsdam) arguing that interoception is the bodily foundation of embodiment, and that specific psychopathologies are best understood as failures to translate bodily signals into subjective feeling and self-awareness. Read here for two things it does that its better-controlled sources do not: it explicitly bridges the interoception–emotion literature to embodied-cognition theory, and it supplies the wiki’s most compact statement of the “translation deficit” framing of alexithymia and eating disorders.

The rest of the paper is synthesis of material the wiki already holds first-hand and from primary reports — Craig’s insular hierarchy (craig-2009-anterior-insula), the somatic-marker hypothesis (somatic-marker-hypothesis), Tsakiris’s interoception × body-ownership result (experience-of-body-ownership), and the authors’ own heartbeat-perception programme (pollatos-2005-interoceptive-awareness-erp, pollatos-2007-neural-systems-feelings). So this page is deliberately thin on those, and holds the review as a framing document, not a source of new fact.

The one genuinely distinct move: interoception as the ground of embodied cognition

The wiki’s interoception literature and its embodied-cognition/constructionist literature mostly run in parallel. Herbert & Pollatos join them explicitly. Their argument: theories of embodied cognition (Niedenthal 2007; the Barsalou perceptual-symbols tradition) hold that higher cognition operates on reactivations of the sensory-motor states that occurred during experience with the world; interoceptive representations and their meta-representations are exactly such states for the internal body; therefore interoception, and individual differences in it (IA), should be “profoundly associated with emotional experience and cognitive functions.” They marshal their own and others’ correlational findings — IA predicts emotional intensity, benefits in decision making (Werner et al. 2009), and selective/divided attention (Matthias et al. 2009) — as the embodiment of emotional and cognitive processes in the visceral body.

This is the same interoception→emotion→cognition chain the wiki carries elsewhere, but stated as an embodied-cognition claim rather than a Jamesian or Bayesian one. It sits beside — not inside — the feedforward-vs-predictive-interoception debate: Herbert & Pollatos are read-out theorists in the Craig/Damasio mold, invoking “reactivation of sensory-motor states” rather than predictive inference.

The “translation deficit” framing of psychopathology

The paper’s most reusable contribution. Following Fuchs & Schlimme (2009), it distinguishes the lived/subject body (Leib) from the object body (Körper), and classifies disturbances of embodiment by which is affected. Two clinical cases are worked as translation difficulties — a body that responds but whose signals do not reach conscious feeling:

• Alexithymia is reframed from an emotion-classification deficit to a disturbance in translating bodily signals to conscious awareness. The authors cite their own finding that high alexithymia scores go with low IA on a heartbeat-perception task (Herbert et al. 2010a), and relay Lane et al.’s (1997) “affective agnosia” reading — a present emotional bodily response with a lack of experiencing it as a feeling. This is directly relevant to the causal question tracked on alexithymia: it is one more datum for the Brewer/Bird “alexithymia is a general deficit of interoception” direction, at the belief/questionnaire-plus-heartbeat level.
• Eating disorders (esp. anorexia nervosa) are placed on the object-body side — disturbed body image and explicit body awareness — but with reduced perception of visceral signals (hunger, satiety, and cardiac signals; Pollatos et al. 2008) contributing. Altered autonomic feedback is proposed as a maintaining factor.

See quadt-2018-interoception-health-disease and bonaz-2021-diseases-of-interoception for the wiki’s fuller, later treatment of interoceptive psychopathology, and the alexithymia page for why the “high alexithymia → low IA” heartbeat association splits by measurement level (it holds for believed interoception and vanishes for performed heartbeat counting, per Desmedt et al. 2022).

Time perception, briefly

A short section extends the insular-interoception account to the perception of time: our sense of duration may be constructed from a series of accumulated interoceptive/emotional “moments” processed in the insula (Craig 2009a; Wittmann 2009), with Wittmann et al. (2010) reporting accumulating neural activity in posterior insula that peaks at the end of an encoded interval. Recorded here as a pointer, not developed — none of the primary time-perception sources is in raw/, and the claim is tangential to the wiki’s core threads. It connects naturally to the global-emotional-moment (Craig’s “cinemascopic” stream of sentient present moments).

How the wiki holds it

As a framing review at one remove. Its factual spine is held better elsewhere; its durable value is the embodied-cognition bridge and the translation-deficit vocabulary, both filed onto embodied-selfhood and alexithymia. It is also the wiki’s second first-hand appearance of olga-pollatos (here as review co-author rather than data author) and the first of beate-herbert.