Visceral Perception

Visceral perception refers to the ways people feel sensations in their bodies. Perceptions of a stomach ache, a racing heart, or the feelings of needing to urinate are common examples of visceral perception. Historically, it was thought that our internal organs reliably sent signals to our brain so that we could accurately detect the states of our bodies. In recent years, however, it has become clear that our ability to read and understand our bodily cues is as complicated as our abilities to perceive sights and sounds from the outside world.

Visceral perception is only one kind of bodily perception, or interoception. While sitting in your chair reading this article, your brain is processing all sorts of bodily signals. Your ability to “know” that you are sitting upright and maintaining your balance is called proprioception. Proprioception requires that signals from your muscles, joints, and even the balance centers from your inner ears are sent to your brain. Both proprioception and visceral perception can occur with or without conscious awareness, just as with perception of events that occur outside the body.

Visceral perception lies at the heart of many psychological and medical issues. For example, our ability to know if we are angry or sad depends, in part, on how our bodies feel. Knowing if you are sick, hungry, or sexually aroused depends on the accurate reading of our internal organs. Indeed, many physicians have become frustrated when patients complain about feelings of irregular heartbeats, shortness of breath, or other symptoms when their hearts, lungs, or other organs have been functioning properly. The problem, then, is that the patients may have distortions in their abilities to accurately perceive bodily activity. That is, their visceral perception abilities have failed in some way.

This entry discusses the sensory bases for visceral perception, limits of the conscious awareness of visceral activity and methods for measuring accuracy in visceral perception, and the value of visceral perception for understanding health problems such as noncardiac chest pain and irritable bowel syndrome.