Interoception’s influence on creativity, Pt I
In less than 24 hours, I’ve come across — and read — three articles about interoception. So: to the blog it is!
Interoception, noun: the sense of the internal state of the body.
The (first) five senses
The senses you know and love — smell, taste, sense, hearing, touch — are all straightforward, first-layer senses. Hopefully my non-science brain will explain this at least ballparkily correct. Okay, so, like: Your eyeballs, like, bounce back to your brain. Sight-bounce-brain. So do receptors in your skin (touch-bounce-brain), cochlea in your ears (sound-bounce-brain), taste buds in your tongue (taste-bounce-brain). The one exception is smell; smell goes straight from sensors to your brain. Smell-brain, no bounce needed.
But then comes interoception. And the idea of ‘What is a sense?’ gets weird, in a more involved third-layer sort of way. (See why I love this stuff?)
A gut reaction
When you see a horrifying situation unfold on the news or you wind up in a humiliating situation or you feel that first sense of falling in love, that instantaneous ‘gut’ reaction is interoception. Sometimes it’s almost imperceptible — the slight quickening of your heart rate or sweat on your skin, or your body flushing while you physically cringe and want to hide. Your body is screaming as loud as it can, and even if you can’t perceptibly 'hear’ it, trust that your brain and emotions can.
In fact, I recently fired a brand-new therapist because of my Fitbit. We' were in only our third appointment when she grilled me about not standing up for myself when I was a child. ‘Why didn’t you … ??’ ‘Why weren’t you …??’ My mind realized I was feeling uncomfortable, but it wasn’t until my Fitbit monitor chimed its celebratory ‘you’ve exercised for five minutes!’ alarm that I realized my heart rate had been above 120 for five straight minutes. While sitting.
Our creativity comes from our emotions, which comes from our senses
Our emotions, thoughts and feelings come from our body’s cues more than we are even close to realizing — your hormones, organs, your senses, etc. Psychology is in the midst of a replication crisis, so we don’t know the extent of how our interoception influences behavior, but, for instance, sitting in hard chairs potentially cause students to give criminals ‘harder’ sentences.
Take away someone’s interoception — or dial it up far too high — and their sense of self gets distorted. An underactive sense of interoception is connected to depression, and an overactive one is a common occurrence with anxiety. Dissociation, psychosis, schizophrenia — yep, you guessed it. Each one has an under- or over-developed sense of interoception. And, by the way, the word ‘interoception’ is stillso new, it gets a little red squiggly misspelling line underneath it as I type it now.
The Sixth Sense
Some folks in the know about neuroscience-y and psychology-y things are rallying for interoception to be added as a sixth sense. In fact, the difference between interoception and our other five senses is why I created The Third Layer.
Interoception isn’t related to one single body-brain connection. It’s more multi-layered and hard to pinpoint. You can point to a taste bud, a cochlea, skin receptors or an eyeball. You can’t point to an ‘interoception receptor’. So far, interoception is talked about in the usual circles: either neuroscience and physiology as a hard science, or woo-woo hippie stuff like the sixth sense, intuition, gut feelings or the mind-body connection.
Pay attention
Speaking of my Fitbit, it changed my interoceptive life. I ‘borrowed’ my partner’s first Fitbit in 2017 for a ‘week’, and he’ll have to pry it out of my cold, d— wait, no, he bought one a week later. (Phew.)
I had a pretty good sense of what made my heart go really wonky before my Fitbit. For instance, my heart and nervous system is so sensitive to caffeine that I can’t even use skin care products where it sits on my skin. (Caffeine affects us so much topically, there’s even a caffeine soap!) But after having a Fitbit, I started finding hidden caffeine in things like shampoo, just by my heart rate going all wonky. Finland, my country-in-law, is amazing for my resting heart rate, as is camping outside. With my Fitbit, I’m now a walking scientific experiment.
The mind-body connection is just the vagus nerve
Researchers are starting to posit that the mind-body connection is literal: the vagus nerve is the only nerve that runs from your brain to all of your organs, including your heart and gut. When you exercise your body, you strengthen your ability to soften interoceptive responses (a jump in temperature or heart rate can happen without your brain going into overdrive). When you exercise your brain, you strengthen your ability to interpret those small jumps.
In 2012, my house and bedroom caught on fire as I was laying in bed, sick. Part of the reason I was able to get out in a shockingly calm manner (with a laundry basket of some quickly grabbed valuables, to boot) was because I’d been meditating like a mofo for two years. My interoceptive cues exploded, of course (house in ON FIRE!). But my brain was able to hear them and acknowledge them, but not let them hijack my critical thinking skills.
Exercise your interoception
You can tap into interoception through the vagus nerve. My physical therapist has me do what feels like the easiest exercise in the world, but it calms me down in seconds. I literally stretch my eyeballs. Yeppers. Try it.
Vagus nerve exercise
Lay down, on the floor or your bed.
Lace your fingers behind your head so there’s just enough pressure to know you have a back of your head.
Look as far as you can to the right. Feel your eyeballs kind of stretch and exercise their connection to your brain.
After a few seconds, you’ll probably get a sense of having to breathe in deeply, or yawn or sigh.
Now, look as far as you can to the left. The second side will take a bit longer, but continue the stretch until you feel the need to breathe in, yawn or sigh.
That’s it. You’re done. You’ve just tapped into your vagus nerve and activated the calming parasympathetic response (I think). Next time, while you’re doing the same exercise, pay interoceptive attention. Can you feel your heart slowing as you breathe in?
Interoception and Creativity
Hmm. This is already too long, and I haven’t even started to talk about interoception and creativity. Ooh! I haven’t done a Part I and II blog post yet. (Click here for Interoception and Creativity, Part II. And here for Interoception and Creativity, Part III.)