A new story from The Psychology Podcast with Scott Barry Kaufman
Automatic TRANSCRIPT
And what's interesting is that some people immediately take to this task and say, oh yeah, I know when my heart is beating and other people are like, what are you talking about? I have no idea what my heart is beating. And it's the same, you know, the heartbeat detection test, the heartbeat is a kind of proxy or stand in for the whole range of intracellular sensations that we feel and across all those many interoceptive sensations people are different in terms of how sensitive they are to those sensations. And it's not entirely clear why those individual differences exist. It may be partly genetic and maybe partly the kinds of messages that people got growing up from their caregivers about how legitimate it was to pay attention to those internal signals and take them seriously. You know, some people were told, you know, you're not hungry, it's not dinnertime yet, or, you know, or we're kind of encouraged to put those internal signals aside. And I think more generally in our society, we don't have a lot of patience for affinity for those internal signals and really taking them seriously. So I think all of us no matter where we stand on that spectrum of introspective attunement can probably benefit from becoming more sensitive to those internal signals and cues. Yeah, is mindful meditation, does that alter interceptive abilities? It seems to it seems to have that effect in particular the activity that is often a part of mindfulness meditation known as the body scan, where you pay objective nonjudgmental accepting, open minded attention to whatever sensations rise up from your body and you might even go part by part like first feeling what's there to be felt in your feet and in your legs and in your hips and in your stomach and then all the way up through the body and.