Editorial: Interoception, Contemplative Practice, and Health

Abstract

Interoception, Contemplative Practice, and HealthWell-being is deeply rooted in the body, a continuous flow of feelings denoting comfort or distress.Interoception, the representation of the body's internal state, is a growing target of scientific research, buoyed by a growing respect for contemplative traditions relating interoceptive awareness to the cultivation of well-being.An emerging interoception literature cuts across studies of neurophysiology, somatic anthropology, contemplative practice, and mind-body medicine.Key questions include: How is body awareness cultivated?What role does interoception play for emotion and cognition across the lifespan as well as in different psychopathologies?What are the neurophysiological effects of interoceptive training in Yoga, mindfulness meditation, Tai Chi, and other embodied contemplative practices?What categories from other traditions might be useful in this investigation?How might the cultivation of interoceptive awareness improve resilience in chronic health conditions?Such questions have historically been ill-addressed by Western science, which is still influenced by a 400-year Cartesian tradition that treats cognition as something fundamentally distinct from sense-perception.This segregation limits consideration of interoception as the very context that situates and motivates cognition.And yet in therapeutic domains, attention to such context is critical, as the integration of interoceptive signals constrain the scope through which cognitive appraisals of well-being occur.This idea is not entirely novel to the literature-in 1974 Zanna andCooper (1974) found elevated anxiety appraisals following caffeine pill ingestion when participants did not know they had consumed caffeine, as compared to when they did.Analogously, ignorance of the causes and consequences of our own myriad visceral feelings does not prevent them from coloring our interpretations of self, others, and the world.A strong version of this idea is that a failure to appreciate the causes and influences of interoceptive signals on cognition is to allow cognition to be determined by these signals.It is still unknown how to comprehensively assess the quality of interoceptive integration.We know little about how to formally distinguish between adaptive and maladaptive interoception, or the consequences of dysregulated interoception on cognition and behavior.The complexity of these questions calls for the creative integration of perspectives and findings from related but often disparate research areas including clinical research, neuroscience, cognitive psychology, anthropology, religious/contemplative studies, and philosophy.In recognition of the growing interest in such questions, we worked with Frontiers in Psychology to foster dialogue and collaboration in this emerging field.The numerous contributions stand as testament to a burgeoning interest in interoception, although direct demonstrations of interoceptive integration as a determinant of health were rare.Even rarer were empirical articles specifically addressing interoceptive reconditioning, in contemplative practice or beyond.Thus the role of interoceptive training in the context of wellbeing and health remains a relatively unexplored