Shaky Ground on Much of Interoceptive Research

Much of what gets written about interoception – including my own writing – needs to be taken with a grain of salt. The fluff stuff is pretty easy to identify: it's strictly anecdotal; it over-promises and gets carried away. Suddenly, everything is the nervous system; or, "the vagal nerve can solve all." Ack!

It is the shoddy science that you need to be most careful about. There are three main problems. First, lumping together all aspects of interoception and then purporting to measure changes in it overall. (This would be like testing whether a hearing aid works by observing how well people do in wine tasting.) Second, trying to make correlations between people with high or low interoception and some other equally undefinable characteristic, such as neurodivergence. If you can't define it, you can't measure it. And if you can't measure it, you can't correlate. And third, if you are dealing with a Complex Adaptive System, then you should not be correlating at all. That's linear-speak. Studying a CAS through a linear lens is nonsense. So, if you are cruising PubMed for the latest interoceptive research, beware. But also know that when I throw something into my theorizing pot, I don't just throw in any old piece of @#!.