Interoception

Interoception is the sense that helps us understand and feel what is going on inside our body.

It concerns with the ability of the brain to receive, integrate, process, be consciously aware of the physiological signals from the body like heart beat, breathing, etc.

Interoceptive accuracy was measured by asking subjects to count their heartbeats, without feeling any part of their body, over a unspecified interval which was validated against their recorded pulse rate.

Interoceptive awareness was estimated using the correlation between their subjective confidence about their estimation of heart rate and their actual accuracy.

Interoceptive prediction error was computed as the difference between normalised interoceptive accuracy and body perception questionaire (BPQ) score which the subjects also completed.

Higher the baseline heart rate lower volume of blood is pumped in each beat and lesser is the ability to feel the heart beat (& vice versa). This implies that people with higher heart rate will have poor interoceptive ability. So we had hypothesised to see a negative correlation.

From data recorded in 187 subjects, I found that baseline heart rate was negatively correlated with interoceptive accuracy.