I've gone to some length to help you visualize the anatomy of the Vagal system, in its magnificence, as a kind of web, rather than as a system of wires, because its only when you begin to understand the degree to which it penetrates organs and tissues with ultrafine filaments that you can properly grasp what interoception is.

We tend to think of our senses as the five that point outward, and about which most of us were taught in school. Vision, hearing, taste, smell, touch. Each of these sense organs has specialized neural receptors that are highly differentiated: from the rods and cones in the retina of the eye, to the hair cells of the ear, to the tastebuds. Each of these senses relies on a profound refinement of neural architecture that is organized into a differentiated sensory apparatus whose function is to transduce some form of information into signals that we can understand.

Yet most of us were never taught about interoception, which is our sixth sense. Like our five extero-senses it relies on a network of highly specialized and diffentiated neural receptors woven together with a neural processing network. Yet this sense, unlike the extero-senses that are consolidated into a single organ - eye, ear, tongue, nose (note that touch is more broadly distributed) – interoception is distributed throughout the interior of your entire body.

Subcutaneous mechanoreceptors in the skin are structured similarly to the interoceptive receptors of your body.

Interoception is the sixth sense. It is an inward listening sense, and its primary neural architecture is this vast surveillance web of the Vagus: our innernet. Take vision, hearing, and touch as metaphors. Now turn them inward. This is the internal landscape that interoception illuminates, colors, amplifies, and texturizes. Interoception sings the body electric.

Most of us live in a modern culture that for a variety of reasons, some mundane, and some deeply insidious, has lost contact with the felt vocabularies of interiority. Yet as assuredly as vision, hearing, smell, taste, and touch convey information about our surroundings that can be interpreted to help us make sense of our world, information from interoceptive awareness can (and must, for us to thrive) be accurately assembled into meaning.

Some people call this awareness bodily intuition, some people call it the felt sense. It is the intersection of internally oriented sensation, emotion, and memory: the living, present moment embodied flavor of what it feels like to be in our bodies in this moment. If contacted, attended to, and approached with discernment it generates a reliable non-cognitive field of information through which we can experience our lives. It is a doorway to knowing ourselves.

The lakota word anamagoptanye, for example, refers to an awareness that the earth is constantly uploading information to us. It is our interoceptive awareness that receives these uploads. The Yiddish word kishkes, a kind of knowing that comes from our guts, is informed by neuroception in our hara, which, in the medical tradition of Japan, refers to the soft belly, i.e. the area defined vertically by the lower edge of the sternum and the upper edge of the pubis and laterally by the lower border of the ribcage and the anterior iliac crest. The Filipino word pakikiramdam is a kind of knowing beneath thinking that arises from the wordless field of the body. The Korean word nunchi refers to our ability to accurately discern the emotions of others, and its refinement is due to our capacity to resonate with others in, you guessed it, our own interoceptive field.

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