Table 1.
Summary of the Most Used Definitions of Interoception
| Reference | Definition |
|---|---|
| Sherrington (1906) | The sensory nerve receptors that react to stimuli originating within the body |
| Sherrington (1948) | Body-to-brain axis of sensations concerning the state of the visceral body and its internal organs |
| Ádám (1998) | Processing of information that is picked up by sensory receptors innervating the internal organs and transmitted by ascending pathways of the autonomic nervous system |
| Cameron (2001) | Visceral sensory nervous system impulses connecting body to brain to behavior and thought, with or without awareness |
| Craig (2002) | The sense of the physiological condition of the body at any given time |
| Damasio (2010) | The sensing of the organism’s interior |
| Critchley et al. (2004) | The sensing of the internal state of the body |
| Dworkin (2007) | Sensory visceral receptors that monitor the internal state of the body |
| Barrett & Simmons (2015) | The perception and integration of autonomic, hormonal, visceral, and immunological homeostatic signals that collectively describe the physiological state of the body |
| Ceunen et al. (2016) | A multimodal integration not restricted to any sensory channel or mere sensations but also relying on learned associations, memories, and emotions and integrating these in the total experience, which is the subjective representation of the body state |
| Khalsa et al. (2018) | The overall process of how the nervous system senses, integrates, stores, and represents information about the state of the inner body |
| Oxford English Dictionary (n.d.) | Any form of sensation arising from stimulation of interoceptors and conveying information about the state of the internal organs and tissues, blood pressure, and the fluid, salt, and sugar levels in the blood |