Hearing every beat of the heart
AFEW MONTHS ago, the science journal Nature published a list of rising science stars. Eleven were identified from around the world, and only one was British. When she was first told of her inclusion, Sarah Garfinkel assumed it was some kind of hoax.
Sarah — now Professor— Garfinkel is based at the University of Sussex and works at the cross-section of psychology and neuroscience. She’s a pioneer in a field attracting increasing attention, called interoception. Over the past few decades, researchers have discovered a lot about the operation of our external senses — touch, taste, vision, etc — but we still know very little about our internal senses. Interoception is what might crudely be called gut instinct, the study of the connection between our brains and our bodily signals, how we sense hunger, anxiety, excitement.
Some people are better at noticing their internal signals than others.
Every time your heart beats, it dispatches a signal to your brain. But do you think you can sense when your heart is beating without putting your hand to your chest? Sarah Garfinkel tests this ability in several ways.
One is by asking people to count their heart beats over a period of time and comparing their answer with the actual number. Another is by playing a beating tone and getting subjects to say whether the beat is in sync with their heart.
And here’s the beautiful result. Those who are good at such exercises have been shown in a variety of tests to be more emotionally intelligent than others (they are better at reading the emotions of others) and they also have a more intense emotional life — they are, for example, more likely to be emotionally affected by a movie.
Interoception plays out in other ways. Who knew that snipers instinctively learn to pull the trigger between heart beats? For that’s the moment that they can be most confident of their judgment. Stockmarket traders often claim to rely on gut instinct, and one preliminary study suggests a link between trading success and the accuracy of traders in reading their heart beat. If this is true, then perhaps, in addition to assessing their other qualifications, banks should also test future traders on their interoception.
There may also be important implications of the science of interoception for the understanding and treatment of autism. Autistic people are usually assumed to have low levels of empathy for others, a notion that Sarah Garfinkel would like to overturn. In fact, she argues, many autistic people have heightened empathy; at one level they sense very well the emotions of others (their bodies respond more than people without autism to seeing others in pain — measured, for example, by skin conductance). So they have the physical indicators of empathy. What they lack —many of them — is the ability to comprehend and interpret their own body indicators — and it is this that causes them confusion. Indeed, her research has shown that within the autistic population, those who are least able to detect their own heartbeats are most prone to anxiety.
All of which raises an obvious question. Can they (and the rest of us) be trained to improve our interoception — can we learn how to read our bodies? Watch this space. This is a focus for future research. Having to overcome dyslexia, Sarah Garfinkel’s ascent to the peaks of academia would probably not have been foreseen by her state school teachers in North London. But she’s from a brainy family. Her mother’s side is Syrian, from the now devastated city of Aleppo, and centuries further back from Italy (their surname was Picciotto). They fled following anti-Jewish riots in 1947, settling initially in Manchester: two of her uncles, having arrived without speaking any English, won scholarships to Oxford. The paternal side of the family emigrated from Eastern Europe over a century ago: her father is a London solicitor. The Sephardi and Ashkenazi wings share in common the textile and garment industry, from which, two generations back, they both earned their living.
Although secular, Sarah says she feels deeply culturally Jewish. She will be the expert on whether this identity is driven primarily by brain, or heart.