Why interoception?

Days of coughing brings back pains in my ribs that I haven't had since breaking them some years ago

Nighttime itch

Lying in bed and unable to do much exercise causes the body/mind to return to an awareness of its own surface irritations and the need to scratch an itch

Interoception is defined as the sense of the internal state of the body. (Khalsa & Lapidus, 2016, p. 2) This can be both conscious and non-conscious. I have been looking at how to visualise our internal awareness for a while now and the more I do so the more I believe it is central to our grasp of what it is to be in the world. I have finally gone down with Covid and this is the first day since being taken to my bed that I have been able to type anything. My last post on visualising energy flow was put up just as I was starting to feel ill, then I have had three days when my own energy levels were virtually it felt, non-existent. As I start to rest and have more energy, I'm fully alive to the fact that without all that energy flow I have been thinking about, I can do nothing. My awareness of the importance of energy levels feels a bit like an affirmation for what I have been exploring recently, so as I emerge from brain fog, and attempt the re-insertion of my own body back into the flow of experience, I'm going to attempt to clarify for myself and hopefully for any one still interested, what I'm doing and how an artist like myself can even begin to think that what they are doing is any form of research. 

So a few bits of information that I think are central. The relationship between the mind and the body is now understood to be one of a symbiosis between them. (Fogel, (2013), Varela, Thompson and Rosch (2017), Merleau-Ponty, (1969). For instance our body secretes hormones that change our psychological state in response to physical events. In a fight or flight situation, adrenaline is released so that the heart pumps faster and limbs can move quicker. However any stressful situation does the same, so prolonged periods of stress can lead to over compensation by the body, eventually extra releases of various hormones, (basically chemicals, because hormones are our body's chemical messengers), will cause problems and both the body and mind will suffer because of that. If we look at a few more of these chemicals, we can begin see how and why they are so important. The wrong levels of estrogen can increase the risk of certain cancers, lead to depression, weight gain, difficulty sleeping, headaches, low sex drive, anxiety, and menstrual problems. In particular too little estrogen can cause weakened bones (osteoporosis), menstrual problems, loss of fertility and mood disorders. Testosterone can effect sex drive, fat distribution, muscle strength, bone mass, and red blood cell production in both men and women. Insulin converts glucose (sugar) in the things we eat so that our bodies can use the stored energy, if this is not working properly our energy levels become uncontrollable and one symptom of that is diabetes. If you know someone who suffers from this you will be very aware of how this effects mood swings. Cortisol is a type of steroid hormone and is produced by the adrenal glands. It has many responsibilities that keep you healthy and energetic. Cortisol is responsible for helping regulate metabolism, regulating blood pressure, acting as an anti-inflammatory, and even forming memories. Cortisol is secreted during higher levels of stress; if secreted for extended periods it can cause hypertension, anxiety, sleep loss, and autoimmune problems. Too little cortisol is associated with low blood pressure, weakness, and fatigue. Your thyroid gland's hormones regulate metabolism. An imbalance can cause problems with weight management and energy levels. As you can see from this very basic introduction hormones are central to both how our body works and how our mind operates; lack of drive, fatigue, depression, over anxiety and memory loss are just as much a response to hormone production as weight gain, speed of response, the development of cancers, weak bones and our general health or not as the case may be. 

There are direct feedback loops between our heart and our stomach and our brain. These facilitate deeply embedded types of information processing that our logical, language driven part of the brain often ignores, but which in reality are often far more right about the state of the world. For instance people with aphasia; a loss in language ability resulting from brain damage, appear to have a significant advantage in spotting liars, particular when untruths are given away by changes in body language. You know it in your guts and in your heart. 

As interoception is so important to the day to day regulation of our body and mind, it would therefore seem to myself that as an artist I need to embed my processes of visualisation into an awareness of this fact. 

The central issue in terms of visualisation is metaphor. What can work and how to establish a communicable language? For instance growth hormone triggers are produced in the hypothalamus (these are also hormones). which stimulate the pituitary gland to produce and release growth hormone into the bloodstream, which in turn floods out into the body to control metabolism and growth. In my mind I see various coloured waters, each one carrying tiny bits of chemical information that I represent as grains of undissolved pigment and the capturing of colour blending as one mixture begins to intermix with another. 

Like so: 

or

or

Fluids interacting

The suggestion I am trying to make, is that the movement of fluids carrying various pigmented substances can represent the fact that everything that is being depicted is in constant flow, both inside, (hormones, blood etc.) and outside, (the constant perceptual flow). 

Rodin

If you get a chance to see Rodin's watercolours, many of these have a surface that sits between representation and re-creation. On the one hand a figure in movement is suggested by a pencil line and yet at the same time a spreading, pooling sequence of watercolour marks feels as if it is trying to recreate the situation as a material flow. The eye/mind tik-toks between one reading and another and as it does so, the movement originally perceived by Rodin re-enters my own perception of the image. An image can hold within itself competing and various readings, this very ambiguity allowing it to be more capable of communicating some types of experiences than words. 

A flow of energies between inner and outer embodied worlds

Which brings me back to the other issue that I have been trying to deal with, the problem with verbal language. Language it seems to me is a very controlling way of understanding the world. It sort of fixes it or glues it down. Of course words are brilliant at carrying ideas, without them I wouldn't be able to think about things in the way I do, but words do have a way of turning the solid physicality of experience into something both chimerical and at the same time fixed down by the very words used to describe it. I'll try and explain what I think the problem is. Once something is named it seems to take on a life of its own. Look at countries. The Earth is a physical continuity with no edges or boundaries, but once you put a name to a particular area you can draw a boundary around it and as that area is defined by a name such as England, France, Saudi Arabia or the Ukraine, it begins to evolve a definition of itself separate from all the other bits of the world. In point of fact there is no such thing as a solid object called England, only an idea of one. For the brain, a memory is as real as a perception, an idea as potent as a feeling. A written language can be used to differentiate these things and as it does the separation seems to reinforce meanings that were initially only chimerical but which in terms of how humans make decisions is now central, our need for flight or fight now triggered as much by ideas as perceptions. In fact every perception is in some respects a memory idea, and we know that some people have from their own experience developed world views that blur the distinction between ideologies, facts, fictions and memory. Some studies have demonstrated that language loss improves our ability to spot lying*, which suggests that language is not so much about truth but about conviction or the telling of believable stories. The thing is that these believable stories are told with and about words, as well as without words and not about words but they are acted upon as if they are a reality. The situation is that in many ways words are shaping what we think of as reality. In the world of particle physics it is understood that when you measure a particle the apparatus of measurement is in some way shaping what can be observed of the particle. The reality of the situation being a joint state or compound 'apparatus + particle' system, which is not separable because its parts are not independent of one another. The apparatus of measurement produces an entanglement between the measuring and the measured and language I would suggest operates as a type of very sophisticated apparatus that is also shaping what can be observed. Part of its shaping is the construction of nouns to identify separate things and in doing this the world is atomised into small separate bits and these can of course be owned or categorised or listed. 

In novels there are often stories within stories. In Vasily Grossman's great novel of war and ideological tyranny, 'Life and Fate', Viktor Pavlovich Shtrum is a physicist who when he goes to work can be inspired by a wonderful idea, such as of the universe being an entangled unity. He enthuses over the fact that the new physics rejects the concept of individual entities and acknowledges only aggregates. Grossman puts it like this, "But space - measured by metal rods and rulers - and time - measured by the most accurate of watches - had suddenly begun to bend, to stretch and to flatten. Their stability had turned out not to be the foundation-stone of science, but the walls and bars of its prison." However Viktor also realises that the reality of the life he leads will lead to "doubt, suffering and lack of belief". In his day to day experience the tyranny of words that emanate from the communist party and its various committees, can be like nails hammered down into meaning. Throughout the book people are shown to be capable of the most heinous crimes, their language twisting and reshaping reality to fit whatever power happens to be in place at any one time, only a rare few being able to hold fast to a position of moral certainty within a corrupt world of war and terror. 

The interconnectedness of the perceptual flow that we are immersed into is a key concept in Buddhism: “When there is this, that comes to be; with the arising of this, that arises. When there is not this, that does not come to be; with the cessation of this, that ceases” (Ñāṇamoli and Bodhi 1995, p. 655) The belief that everything is interconnected can obviously be expressed in words, but the problem is that the sentence, "Everything is interconnected" has the same conceptual force or truth weight as the one that states, "The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive." This quote from Donald Trump, epitomises the issue, he operates as if words have their own reality and anything he disagrees with is 'fake news'. Trump has at least made us realise how slippery words are and how we can become trapped by them. Before the written word verbal language simply floated out into the air and what was said was quickly gone, only retaining a sense of permanence via stories that were passed on orally. It was also clear that the stories were just stories, storytelling being an art that ensured important concepts were passed on, legends were created and elaborated over many years of retelling, what would over time become powerful myths. But once written down, words become fixed, and once fixed they start to sit outside of the flow of life. Words as you can see, tend to generate more words, they don't let you go, you keep writing more and more of them, trying to control what it is you are trying to say, but in reality being controlled by the apparatus called writing. Each letter a nail, each noun a rivet and every sentence a straightjacket. 

The body and its immersion in energy fields

I began this post by detailing the effects hormones have on our emotional state. The apparatus that produces them being our bodies. During war or other highly fraught times, stresses are so high that hormone secretion goes through the roof, and the balance between decision making fuelled by good judgement or by instinct begins to break down. Just as I'm arguing language shapes the world, the body shapes the world too. In making images I'm arguing for an area of thinking outside of verbal language to be considered as a way of decoding experience. Interoception begins in the body and as Merleau-Ponty explained in relation to what he called the “flesh of the world” awareness arises as an event, an event where perception and meaning are born, not as a relationship between a constituting subject and a constituted object but as an intertwining or ensemble of being. The image below is my attempt to diagram this situation, adding into the mix the issue of time. For many peoples, past, present and future are events that occur within a simultaneity, just as the body cant be separated out from the mind, or from its environment, the past cant be separated from the present or the future, all are entangled. I have therefore decided to design an enamel badge to represent this, something very small, but which I believe can be used to represent all of the words not just written in this post, but in this blog. 

I hope I have been able to argue a case for the mind's ability to think using clay and ink and paper as well as other materials, and that by thinking in that way outside of the written word, ideas that are less polemic can be opened out, ways of thinking more open to hybridity and constant metamorphosis can perhaps take centre stage, rather than arguments as to what is right and what is wrong. Hopefully thinking with objects and materials concerns us less with constructions of difference and is more about raising awareness of the connections between things.

Finally and forgive the rambling, as I slip in and out of consciousness I'm also reading and the novel, you may already have guessed that has filled most of my Covid time, has been Vasily Grossman's 'Life and Fate'. Throughout the book there are characters arguing, old Mensheviks and Bolsheviks still bringing up differences, even when the German army sits on people's doorsteps; there are the scars left of Stalin's repressive slaughtering of millions of fellow Russians who didn't follow the party line, a reminder of the Holocaust and how a policy of extermination could be 'logically' embarked upon by a society of believers and what seemed to be the worst thing in my half dreaming state, this Jewish Ukrainian writer, who lived through it all, at times seemed to be writing about the Ukraine now. Radio Four reports of mass graves being dug in Ukraine merging with Grossman's stories of people having to dig mass graves for jews and gipsies. The need to burn disinterred bodies in order to destroy evidence of mass slaughter was systematically developed during the later part of WW2 and tales of the collecting of contemporary evidence of supposed genocide now flows into a nightmare state of unease, slaughterhouse images and worry about the evil nature of human beings and their failure to learn. The book asks a question of each and every one of us, "How would I act in similar circumstances?" I was also reminded of an old image of mine from many years ago now. I was walking through a council estate, and came across a group of people standing round watching a group of lads kicking someone. Something had kicked off, but what it was I never knew, but just like at school when boys got into a fight, by magic a small crowd had formed, not to intervene but to watch. I was deeply disturbed, because I realised my own 'me too' moment. I had quickly walked on, I hadn't been brave enough to step in, I was intimidated by the collective, afraid of the consequences of making people aware that I might think differently . It was much easier for me to make an image about the situation after the event than to step in and try and stop it. Society brings us into close physical proximity but fails to bind us together. Our internal worry as to how others might judge us, it appears to me, becomes more powerful in relation to our subjective decision making, than how we judge ourselves. Wondering what other people say or think about us has probably been the reason why many potentially great ideas have never made their way into the full light of day, but far more worrying is that the same internal fear has also allowed the most awful and distressful crimes to be committed on others, because no one stepped in, no one opened their mouth to say no, until it was too late and the situation became irreversible. 

Watching the wheel turn (1990)

*Ref: 

Khalsa, S. S., & Lapidus, R. C. (2016). Can Interoception Improve the Pragmatic Search for Biomarkers in Psychiatry? Frontiers in psychiatry, 7, 121. From: <https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2016.00121/full> accessed on 06. 05. 2022

Massachusetts General Hospital. "Study Shows Language Loss May Improve Ability To Spot Lying." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 15 May 2000. From <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2000/05/000512082608.htm> accessed on 06. 05. 2022

Fogel, A., 2013. Body sense: The science and practice of embodied self-awareness (Norton series on interpersonal neurobiology). London: ww norton & company.

Freund, P.E., 1988. Bringing society into the body. Theory and society, 17(6), pp.839-864.

Merleau-Ponty, M (1969)The Visible and the invisible New York: Northwestern University Press

Grossman, V. (2006) Life and Fate London: Vintage

Ñāṇamoli and Bodhi (1995) The middle length discourses of the Buddha, a translation of the Majjhima Nikāya. Boston: Wisdom Publications.

Varela, F.J., Thompson, E. and Rosch, E., (2017) The embodied mind, revised edition: Cognitive science and human experience. New York: MIT press.

See also:

Using pigments suspended in water

Visualising energy flow

Hybridity and permeability 

Paul Klee and Markov Blankets 

Texture and perception