
“Interoception: The Secret Ingredient” With Lisa Feldman Barrett, Ph.D. Transcript of Cerebrum Podcast Guest: Lisa Feldman Barrett, Ph.D., is co-director of the Interdisciplinary Affective Science Laboratory at Northeastern University and Massachusetts General Hospital. She is a University Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Northeastern, with appointments at Harvard Medical School and Mass General. She is also Chief Science Officer for the Center for Law, Brain & Behavior at Harvard University. In addition to the books Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain and How Emotions are Made, Barrett has published over 250 peer-reviewed, scientific papers appearing in Science, Nature Neuroscience, and other top journals in psychology and cognitive neuroscience, as well as six academic volumes published by Guilford Press. She has also given a popular TED talk with over six million views. Host: Bill Glovin serves as editor of Cerebrum magazine and as executive editor of the Dana Foundation. He was formerly senior editor of Rutgers Magazine, managing editor of New Jersey Success, editor of New Jersey Business magazine, and a staff writer at The Record newspaper in Hackensack, NJ. Glovin has won 20 writing awards from the Society of Professional Journalists of New Jersey and the Council for Advancement and Support of Education. He has a B.A. in Journalism from George Washington University. _____________________________________________________________________________ [Intro] Bill Glovin: When I first heard the word “interoception,” I immediately thought of a quarterback in football who throws the ball to the wrong team. Just because I edit a brain science magazine doesn't mean I still don't have an awful lot to learn about brain science. People much smarter than me told me interoception is one of the hottest areas of neuroscience and explained it to me. And rather have me try to explain it to you, we have someone who studies interoception and she can explain it and provide some context to what it means and its potential to help people. Bill Glovin: Hi, I'm Cerebrum editor, Bill Glovin, and welcome to the Cerebrum Podcast, where we explore matters of brain science with leaders in the neuroscience field. Our podcast is sponsored by the Dana Foundation in New York City, and you can find all our content at Dana.org. Lisa Barrett: It's become very apparent that disruptions in interoception are related to many illnesses, are involved in many illnesses, that normally we might think of as mental illnesses like depression, for 2 example, but actually that have a very strong metabolic basis—a very strong basis in the regulation of the body. __________________________________________________________________________________ Bill Glovin: Today, we welcome in Dr. Lisa Barrett, co-author of our Cerebrum magazine feature, “Interoception: The Secret ingredient.” Lisa is co-director of the interdisciplinary affective science laboratory at Northeastern University and at Massachusetts General Hospital. She is a university distinguished professor of psychology at Northeastern, with appointments at Harvard Medical School and Mass General. She's also Chief Science Officer for the Center for Law, Brain & Behavior at Harvard, and the author of Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain and How Emotions are Made. Welcome, Lisa. Our article is “Interoception, The Secret Ingredient.” For people who haven't read the article, can you briefly describe what interoception is, why it's important, and what's so secret about it? Lisa Barrett: Sure. Thank you, Bill. Thanks so much for having me on your podcast. So I guess the best way to describe interoception is really to start with the contrast, which is exteroception. Right now, as our listeners are listening to our conversation, they are receiving changes in air pressure in the part of their ear called the cochlea, which is a sensory receptor for these changes. And their brains are translating or conjuring actually sounds that they hear and the meaning of those sounds based on that exteroceptive input. And actually, really, for your whole life, except for the times when you're sleeping. And even then, there's still some information from the world coming to your brain, through the surfaces of your body, from your eyes, from your ears, from your nose and your tongue and your skin and so on. When we're awake, we're really aware of the consequences of that sense data, not all the time, but most of the time you see what's in front of you, you hear what's around you and so on and so forth. But at the same time, right now, as we're chatting with each other and as our listeners are listening, there's a whole drama really going on inside their bodies, inside our bodies. Blood is pumping. Lungs are expanding and contracting. Their heart is beating against your chest. Your gut is oscillating and contractions, and there's a huge variety of motor changes going on inside your body, which generates sense data. And we call that interoceptive sense data. The really interesting thing about it is that for the most part, we're unaware that it's going on. And we say, Oh, I hope our listeners are unaware because if they're actually aware of all the sensory changes in their own bodies, then 3 they're probably not able to pay attention to anything outside their own skin. We are wired in a sense, not really to be aware of every little tug and gush and contraction that goes inside our own bodies for this reason, actually. Philosophers call it tragic embodiment. That if you were aware of what was going on inside your body, you'll just be overwhelmed by it. Nonetheless it's information that your brain is constantly receiving and your brain really requires that information in order to regulate your body efficiently, which is its major job, really. Brains didn't evolve so that we could think and see and feel and hear, they evolved to regulate the systems of our body and we think and feel, and see and hear in the service of that regulation. So the brain's main job is regulating the body and it needs that kind of constant stream of sense data from the body, which we call interoceptive sense data to do its job. And when it's not doing its job particularly well, when there are problems, manifest themselves as illnesses, physical illnesses or mental illnesses, usually there's a problem with interoception. Bill Glovin: So when we're calling it the secret ingredient, it's because we don't even realize most of these things are going on. So that's the secret? Lisa Barrett: Exactly. That's the secret. The human brain is this really interesting organ that is kind of like the master of deception. It seamlessly creates our experiences and guides our actions in ways that it doesn't really make itself aware of. We're really unaware of what our brains are doing on a moment-to-moment basis. For the most part, we're only aware of a very, very small proportion of the consequences of what our brains are doing. And interoception really falls into that largely unaware proportion of things, I would say. Bill Glovin: I couldn't help, but wonder given the meaning whether or not the word “perception” has any connections. Lisa Barrett: Yes. Well, typically scientists distinguish between perceptions of the internal world, meaning the internal body, what scientists sometimes call the internal mill you of your body that is all of the systems organs and so on. And the perception of the external world, which is called exteroception. So typically they kind of cleave perception into these two domains. And one of the things we talk about in the article is that actually, if you look at the anatomy of the brain and the functioning of the brain, that distinction is really kind of blurry. Bill Glovin: Speaking of the anatomy, is there a part of the brain that regulates interoception? 4 Lisa Barrett: Actually work from our lab and other labs have discovered that there's actually a very large distributed system in the brain that is important for interoception, for constructing and regulating these sensations. And what's really interesting about this discovery is that this very distributed system actually has many, many, many functions. So it's not that it sometimes does interoception and it sometimes does other things, it actually is while it's doing these other things, which include memory and exteroception, and regulating your body and a whole slew of psychological phenomena while it's doing these things, it's simultaneously constructing and regulating the sensations in your body. Bill Glovin: There's quite a good illustration in the article that I guess shows that. Lisa Barrett: We were really surprised. When we did this research, which we initially conducted on over 700 subjects, we replicated this finding with regular scanning procedures. And then we just replicated seven Tesla scanning procedures, which are much more precise, much more high resolution. We were really surprised to discover that there are several, what are called intrinsic networks in the brain that scientists, there may be thousands of articles on these networks, but the system for interoception includes two of these networks and the places in the brain where they overlap. And it's widely distributed across all of the cerebral cortex, all portions and also sub-cortical regions. So it's this very, very pervasive system at the core of your brain. And it's anatomically at the core and functionally it's at the core.
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