Interoception and Mental Health: The Roadmap (Khalsa 2018)
The consensus definition of interoception — the brain's moment-by-moment mapping of the body's interior — and why it matters for the body-sensation problem pages.
The question
What is the brain’s map of the body’s interior, and what happens when attention turns toward it? The tradition has its own vocabulary for body sensations in stillness (qi, the felt body loosening); this roadmap is the modern frame for the same territory — stated at its correct strength.
The study
- Design: a consensus roadmap — a large multi-author statement defining interoception, its measurement, and its research directions.
- The definition: interoception is “the process by which the nervous system senses, interprets, and integrates signals originating from within the body” — a moment-by-moment mapping of the body’s internal landscape, across conscious and unconscious levels.
Why the definition matters for this site
- Body perception is constructed. The felt body — its size, edges, weight — is the brain’s ongoing construction from interoceptive signals. This is the modern frame behind the body feels very large and losing body awareness problem pages: felt changes in stillness are changes in the map, not the body.
- Attention changes the map. The roadmap’s core research direction — how attention alters interoceptive processing — is the physiological cousin of the tradition’s claim that stillness changes how the body is felt.
The boundary that matters
- This is a research agenda, not meditation findings. The roadmap does not study Daoist sitting, and this page does not imply it validates any traditional claim.
- The medical boundary stands: the tradition’s texts say nothing about neurological or psychiatric conditions — see the two problem pages above for where the tradition’s frame ends and medicine’s begins.
Why it is here
The site needed a citable, consensus-grade definition of the body-sensing machinery before its body-sensation pages could say anything modern at all. This roadmap is that definition.
Sources
- Khalsa, S. S., Adolphs, R., Cameron, O. G., et al. (2018). Interoception and mental health: a roadmap. Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging, 3(6), 501-513. DOI: 10.1016/j.bpsc.2017.12.004