Interoception: When the Body Becomes Noise

Part 4 of Polyvagal Through the Coherence LensYou're running a simulation of your own organs. Sometimes it crashes.The brain does not receive raw data from the body. It generates predictions—models of what the heartbeat should feel like, what the gut should be doing, what the muscles are reporting. Incoming signals are compared against these predictions. Discrepancies trigger updates.When prediction and sensation align, the body feels familiar. Transparent. Yours.When prediction fails—when the brain's model of the body diverges from what the body is actually doing—the body becomes noise. Foreign. Sometimes terrifying.This is interoception: the brain's continuous monitoring and modeling of internal bodily states. It is the foundation of autonomic regulation, emotional experience, and the felt sense of being a coherent self.The Predictive BodyThe brain doesn't passively receive body signals. It actively predicts them.Every moment, the brain generates expectations about heartbeat, breath, gut sensation, muscle tension, temperature, and metabolic state. These predictions flow downward through the neural hierarchy. Incoming signals flow upward. The comparison happens continuously, below conscious awareness.This architecture is efficient. If the prediction is accurate, minimal processing is required—the body is doing what it should. Only mismatches demand attention. Prediction errors propagate upward, triggering model updates or, if the errors are large enough, conscious awareness.Most of the time, you don't feel your body in detail. You feel the summary: comfortable, uncomfortable, hungry, full, tired, energized. The granular signals—each individual heartbeat, each peristaltic wave—are predicted away. They match expectation and therefore don't register.When Prediction FailsAccurate interoception means the brain's body-model matches bodily reality closely enough that errors remain small and manageable. Inaccurate interoception means large, frequent prediction errors that the system cannot easily resolve.Anxiety often involves the body surprising the brain with unexplained arousal. Heart rate elevates. Breathing shallows. The brain's model didn't predict this. It searches for an explanation—a threat that would justify the physiological state—and often confabulates one. The anxious person feels endangered not because danger exists but because their body is doing danger-things and the brain reverse-engineers a narrative to match.Panic attacks are extreme prediction failure cascades. A minor interoceptive signal—a skipped heartbeat, a breath that feels incomplete—triggers alarm. The alarm produces more physiological arousal. The increased arousal produces more alarming signals. The loop escalates until the person is convinced they're dying. The body has become maximally unpredictable to its own brain.Depersonalization is what happens when the body becomes strange. The signals don't match the predictions badly enough to cause panic, but they mismatch consistently enough that ownership erodes. "This doesn't feel like my hand." The interoceptive manifold has drifted from the body-as-experienced.Dissociation takes this further. The body is no longer felt as belonging to the self at all. Interoceptive prediction has either collapsed (numbness, absence of bodily sensation) or fragmented (conflicting, incoherent signals that cannot be integrated).Alexithymia is the failure to identify and name internal states. The signals arrive but cannot be categorized. "Something is happening in my body but I don't know what it is." Emotion happens physiologically but doesn't reach cognition as nameable feeling.The Coherence TranslationIn AToM terms, interoception is coherence at the body-prediction interface.Accurate interoception means smooth curvature across the interoceptive manifold. Predictions match signals. Errors are small. The body-model updates incrementally without destabilizing.Inaccurate interoception means curvature spikes wherever prediction fails. The manifold is steep—small actual changes produce large prediction errors. Each heartbeat might trigger alarm. Each breath might feel insufficient.Collapsed interoception means the manifold has flattened. Not smooth-low-curvature but absent-any-curvature. The system has stopped modeling the body in detail. This is the numbness of dissociation.Fragmented interoception means topological discontinuity. Different body regions are modeled in incompatible ways. Integration fails. The body becomes a collection of unrelated sensations rather than a coherent whole.The Developmental StoryInfants do not arrive with accurate interoception. They arrive with bodies that produce signals and brains that must learn to predict them.This learning happens through caregiving. The infant experiences distress—hunger, cold, discomfort—and cannot resolve it. The caregiver notices, interprets, and responds. Feeding, warming, soothing. The infant's body returns to equilibrium.Over thousands of these cycles, the infant's brain learns to predict bodily states. More importantly, it learns that bodily states are interpretable, that distress is temporary, that signals have meaning and lead to resolution.When caregiving is inadequate—neglectful, chaotic, abusive—interoceptive development falters. The infant's signals were not accurately read and responded to. The brain never learned reliable prediction. The body remains unpredictable to itself.Restoring Interoceptive AccuracyIf interoception can develop poorly, it can also improve.Mindfulness practices train attention to bodily sensation without reactive judgment. Over time, the brain's body-model updates. Prediction accuracy improves. The gap between what the body does and what the brain expects narrows.Somatic awareness exercises focus attention on specific body regions. Body scans. Grounding techniques. Noticing points of contact with surfaces. These train the prediction machinery on low-intensity, controllable signals.Breathwork provides a particularly useful training ground because breath is both automatic and voluntary. You can observe breath without controlling it. You can control breath while observing the effects. This bidirectional access allows calibration in both directions.Therapeutic relationship provides another route. The regulated therapist tracks the client's bodily state and reflects it back—naming what the body seems to be doing, noticing shifts. Over time, the client's own interoceptive mapping improves through the scaffold of another's attention.The Coherence AnchorInteroception matters because the body is the ground of coherence.You cannot regulate what you cannot sense. If the body is noise—unpredictable, foreign, terrifying—regulation becomes guesswork. The system cannot calibrate. It cannot adjust in real time to actual conditions.Accurate interoception provides the feedback loop that makes regulation possible. You feel the early signs of dysregulation. You intervene before the cascade. You know when you're tired, hungry, stressed, activated—and you can take appropriate action.This is coherence at the body-cognition interface: a manifold smooth enough that the brain's predictions track the body's actual state, close enough that small corrections keep the system stable.Next: The Breath-Heart Marriage—evolution left you one lever on the autonomic system. Here's how to use it.Series: Polyvagal Through the Coherence LensArticle: 4 of 15Tags: interoception, bodily awareness, polyvagal, anxiety, dissociation, coherence