Inside interoception: The hidden sense of how you feel inside

Researchers are decoding how signals move between body and brain, with implications for how we understand and treat conditions from obesity to anxiety. Yet it knows when the wind lifts the hairs on your skin, when your heart is racing, when your gut tightens with fear. It's also, right now, predicting what you'll read next as your eyes move across this page. It's picking up signals that help it make sense of what's happening around you and prepare you to act if you need to stay safe. You aren't usually aware that your brain is doing all that. Our senses take in information at a staggering rate--roughly 11 million bits flood in every second from our skin, eyes, ears, and more. Only a sliver reaches our conscious awareness. Researchers estimate that our conscious minds can process roughly 10 to 60 bits of information per second, about the rate at which you're reading this sentence. As Moriah Thomason, a neuroscientist at NYU Langone, says, "Thank we're built like this. There's a layer of what we have access to in conscious awareness. And then we have a right-under-the-surface amount. There is only a certain amount we are meant to'hold in mind' in order to function successfully."