Neurology on emsenn.net

Interoception

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Interoception is the sense of the body’s internal physiological state. Where proprioception tells you where your body is in space, interoception tells you what’s happening inside it: heart rate, breathing depth, gut motility, bladder fullness, temperature, hunger, thirst, and the diffuse signals of autonomic arousal that underlie what gets called “feeling.” A. D. Craig argued that interoception constitutes the physiological basis for subjective feeling states — it’s how the body knows its own condition [@craig2002].

Pandiculation

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Pandiculation is the neuromuscular pattern of voluntary contraction followed by slow, controlled lengthening. It’s the movement pattern that animals and humans perform instinctively upon waking — the full-body stretch-and-yawn that resets muscular tone after a period of immobility. Thomas Hanna made pandiculation the central technique of his Clinical Somatic Education, arguing that it’s the only reliable method for reversing sensory-motor amnesia (SMA) — the condition in which habitual muscular contraction drops below the threshold of conscious awareness [@hanna1988].

Proprioception

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Proprioception is the sense of body position, movement, and effort. It tells you where your limbs are without looking, how much force you’re exerting without measuring, and whether you’re upright without checking. Charles Scott Sherrington coined the term in 1906, combining the Latin proprius (one’s own) with -ception (perception), to name the sensory system by which an organism perceives itself [@sherrington1906].

Proprioception operates through mechanoreceptors distributed throughout muscles, tendons, joint capsules, and fascia. Muscle spindles detect changes in muscle length and velocity. Golgi tendon organs detect changes in tension. Joint receptors detect position and pressure. Together, these receptors generate a continuous stream of data about the body’s spatial configuration — data that the central nervous system integrates into what amounts to a real-time kinematic model.