I attended The Autism Show’s web seminars for adults yesterday. It was a pretty interesting day, with some fascinating and heartfelt accounts of people’s experiences.
One thing that came up more than once was “interoception”. This is a sense, alongside the traditional five (sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch) and the one related to balance (vestibular) and the sense of self movement and body position (proprioception). Interoception is simply defined as the sense of the internal state of the body and its processes such as heartbeat, digestion, muscular effort, and anything else that is going on inside. Interoception is commonly linked to our sense of wellbeing. In fact, referring back to my last post, it may be the most direct answer to the question: how do you feel? Since I invariably find that a very difficult question to answer, I decided to look more deeply into interception and its relationship with autism.
Now, I should say that my vestibular sense is pretty distorted already due to Ménière’s Disease, which I have had since approximately 2007. Also, I have always had a problem with proprioception. This manifests most obviously as a dislike of large spaces whose corners I cannot see, because I use room corners to position myself. But I was most interested in the extent to which interoception overlaps with alexithymia, which is an inability to recognise and describe one’s own emotions. I am often aware that I am experiencing an emotion, but I cannot tell what it is and how it might be expressed. Does this come from distortions in my interoception?
I have quickly and superficially surveyed the research literature on this topic. It is quite small - a mere handful of papers - but very interesting. The most useful paper is a review of the field which summarizes the various published studies of autism and interoception (DuBois et al. 2016). This finds that “[...] interoception is an aspect of a sensory processing abnormality found in ASD that has not yet received much clinical or neuroscientific attention” (ibid. p. 108) and calls for more research. One key paper distinguishes between interoceptive accuracy, which is objectively measurable, interoceptive sensibility, which is a subjective belief about one’s own internal workings, and metacognitive accuracy, which is one’s own insight into one’s interoception (Garfinkel et al. 118).
It’s clear that this field of research is still developing, so any results are fairly tentative at this stage, but from a purely anecdotal perspective, I would say that my own lived experience tends to confirm their conclusions that there is a difference between these three and that some autistic people experience a “compromised interoceptive channel” (ibid. 123). Well, this one does, at any rate, and so did the majority of the twenty participants in their study. I would say that I have diminished interoceptive accuracy but enhanced interoceptive sensibility, resulting in a dislocation between the two that has consequences for emotional processing. That explains some of the minor but troubling physical problems I have with some body functions and the resulting anxiety that attaches to those.
It makes sense to me that since I have issues in relation to the more familiar senses, I should have similar challenges with regard to this less well-known one too. I’m going to continue researching this, because I think it may become very valuable in trying to figure out ways to self-manage. I don’t hold out much hope that the medical profession will be up to speed on this, but you never know. Perhaps I’ll mention it to my GP next time we have a consultation…
References
Denise DuBois, Stephanie H. Ameis, Meng-Chuan Lai, Manuel F. Casanova,
Pushpal Desarkar, ‘Interoception in Autism Spectrum Disorder: A review’. Int. J. Devl Neuroscience 52 (2016) 104–111.
Sarah N. Garfinkel, Claire Tiley, Stephanie O’Keeffe, Neil A. Harrison, Anil K. Seth, Hugo D. Critchley, ‘Discrepancies between dimensions of interoception in autism: Implications for emotion and anxiety’. Biological Psychology 114 (2016) 117–126.
