Body Sense: The Science and Practice of Embodied Self-Awareness (Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology)

the similarities and the differences between normal absorption (flow) and dissociation. In both cases, there is a total focus on the activity and a loss of peripheral awareness. While normal absorption is inherently pleasurable, however, dissociation is a loss of body sensation so as to avoid pain.

This is why we often need someone else to guide us in and out of this state. With practice, we become better able to maintain ourselves there, but ultimately the full exploration of new emotional territory requires help from a coregulating other.

Embodied self-awareness involves interoception—sensing our breathing, digestion, hunger, arousal, pain, emotion, fatigue and the like—and the body schema—an awareness of the movement and coordination between different parts of the body and between our body and the environment. Conceptual self-awareness is engagement in a thought process of categori

one that can “go with the flow” and shift in a dynamic and adaptive way to changing circumstances and body states.

We can assume that the horror was a spontaneous and emergent emotion as Sacks connected—in the subjective emotional present of embodied self-awareness—his change in body schema to his interoceptive self-awareness. He graciously admits to us that he could not stay in that emotional present: the horror was too disturbing.

In the short term, suppression can be an effective means of homeostatic self-regulation because it alerts the body to activate defensive and protective means against the perceived stressor. Over the longer term, however, it is not an effective strategy and its continued use can begin to erode the very psychophysiology that makes normal self-regulat

The ability to recognize and respond to threats to our safety is a fundamental design feature of our physiology. Threat is the felt sense of fear that a person or her or his property or significant others are under attack and in danger of physical or psychological harm. The threat may originate from outside of ourselves or from inside our bodies.

Neural learning is reflected in physiological changes in the nerve cells and their connections. Practice leads to the growth of an increasing number of interconnecting fibers that can synapse between cells. The more synapses between adjoining cells, the more likely there will be a direct communication between them, and the stronger the neural netwo

“The True Self comes from the aliveness of the body tissues and the working of body-functions, including the heart’s action and breathing” (1960, p. 148). The False Self is our conceptual self-awareness in the condition that it becomes divorced from the regulating reassurance of embodied self-awareness. It is the story we tell about ourselves that