SCT: A Word You Should Learn: Interoception

You have senses all over your body
that keep your internal organs
balanced even under stress

Reprinted from Science & Culture Today

Interoception: An Emerging Design Concept in Biology
by David Coppedge
Science & Culture Today, December 1, 2025

We’ve heard of proprioception, the awareness of our limbs in space and time (see “Living in a 3-D World”), but there’s another sense that is lesser known: interoception. Interoception is a companion sense with separate signals and pathways that helps us maintain organ homeostasis. Both senses cooperate to give us awareness of our internal and external states. One might say proprioception gives us awareness of the external self, and interoception gives us awareness of the internal self. Every organism needs both, and both are semi-automatic, resulting in responses tending to bring stability in a fluctuating environment. Research on interoception is trending, promising whole body health.

Watch for It

The word interoception is not yet found at Dictionary.com, but it is appearing more frequently in scientific literature, so it is good to become familiar with the concept. One might think of it as “internal perception” or how the brain perceives the state of the body’s internal organs. As we shall see, there are design implications. Meanwhile, Darwinians are going to encounter worse headaches explaining what amounts to a “system of systems” arranged hierarchically in a functionally coherent way.

The Cell Press journal Trends in Neurosciences gave a worthy introduction to interoception in an open-access review paper, “The Emerging Science of Interoception: Sensing, Integrating, Interpreting, and Regulating Signals within the Self.” Lead author Wen G. Chen with 12 co-authors led a special issue in the journal on “The Neuroscience of Interoception,” exemplifying the rising tide of interest in the subject….

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