1 Introduction Interoception has emerged as a prominent construct in psychology, neuroscience, and medicine, referring to the perception and processing of signals originating from within the body (Craig, 2002; Khalsa et al., 2018). It is thought to play a crucial role in emotional experience, self-regulation, and various clinical conditions (Barrett and Simmons, 2015; Tsakiris and Critchley, 2016). The notion of interoception as a coherent system spanning different bodily domains has gained traction, with researchers typically treating it as a unitary ability. However, mounting evidence challenges this conceptualization. In fact, large variability exists in the accuracy of different interoceptive channels (Vaitl, 1996; Ferentzi et al., 2017, 2018; Harver et al., 1993; Whitehead and Drescher, 1980; Garfinkel et al., 2016, 2017). While the title of this article is intentionally provocative, it serves to highlight a critical issue in the field: namely that the term “interoception” is often used in ways that belie the complexity and diversity of the phenomena it purports to describe. The evidence provided herein focuses primarily on accuracy across different modalities, though we acknowledge that interoception encompasses multiple dimensions beyond accuracy (e.g., sensibility, awareness, attention, intensity). Even within this focused scope, the data strongly suggests that treating interoception as a unitary construct is problematic. Such a monolithic view of interoception mirrors both the tension between categories (i.e., classes of entities grouped by shared features) and concepts (i.e., mental representations capturing a category's essence), reminiscent of the perception of a mosaic: from afar, interoception appears as a cohesive category or single image, but closer inspection reveals it as a complex concept comprising distinct, often unrelated subconcepts—akin to individual tiles. Open access
I think of the body as being a lot of subsystems that evolved from various different sources. Some may have been repurposed far from their original use. So no, I can't think of interoception as a unitary construct. A number of stars in the sky might look like a resting lion if someone told you that's what it looks like, but it's just stars scattered randomly in 3D and have nothing to do with each other.
