Study suggests consciousness is shaped by body’s signals & how we experience time

[C C]

https://thedebrief.org/new-study-suggest...ence-time/

EXCERPTS: A growing body of neuroscience suggests that consciousness is not just something that happens in the brain—it is firmly anchored in the body. Now, a new study suggests that how well we tune into our internal bodily signals, combined with how we mentally organize time, may play a central role in molding conscious experience itself.

The research, published in Frontiers in Psychology, offers early evidence for what scientists describe as an “embodied model of consciousness,” linking physical sensations, mental time orientation, and even everyday bodily functions like sleep and digestion into a single, interconnected system.

Researchers, psychologists Olga Klamut and Dr. Simon Weissenberger, argue that consciousness may not emerge solely from neural activity, but from an interactive feedback loop between the body and how we situate ourselves in time.

“Emerging evidence suggests that the ability to sense internal bodily signals, interoceptive awareness, is central to embodied consciousness and adaptive self-regulation,” researchers write. “By linking bodily awareness with temporal cognition, this study provides preliminary empirical evidence for a functional feedback loop that grounds conscious experience in the body and time.”

[...] The study stops short of saying one thing directly causes the other, and the authors acknowledge several limitations, including its reliance on self-reported data and a relatively small sample of participants who were not drawn from a clinical population.

That note of caution is especially relevant in light of another recent study covered by The Debrief, which argued that many efforts to study “pure awareness” may actually be measuring related mental phenomena—such as attention, calm, altered states, or self-monitoring—rather than awareness itself.

From that perspective, this new study is less a direct probe of consciousness in its purest form than an examination of how consciousness appears to express itself through the body, time orientation, and everyday regulatory functions such as sleep and digestion.

That said, it also doesn’t diminish the findings. Rather, it suggests they may speak more to the structure and manifestations of conscious experience than to “pure awareness” itself. Additionally, the results open a new avenue for research that moves beyond studying consciousness as a purely neural phenomenon and instead examines it as an embodied, dynamic process... (MORE - missing details)

[Magical Realist]

A growing body of neuroscience suggests that consciousness is not just something that happens in the brain—it is firmly anchored in the body. Now, a new study suggests that how well we tune into our internal bodily signals, combined with how we mentally organize time, may play a central role in molding conscious experience itself.

That sounds like intuition to me--the deeply feeling-based kind of knowing that goes on in our whole body. It is largely unconscious and visceral, guiding our decisions in life with an inner wisdom and understanding that can see the big picture. And it has something to do with temporality, being a kind of qualitatively-grounded perception of how events unfold and how possibilities arise in the world. Intellectual abstraction reduces the world to a succession of still frame images, each discrete and meaningless in themselves. Intuition is the movement of the whole film thru a projector that restores the lost continuity between the images and reveals meaning and beauty thru the flowing movement of them together.



“To think intuitively is to think in duration. Intelligence starts ordinarily from the immobile, and reconstructs movement as best it can with immobilities in juxtaposition. Intuition starts from movement, posits it, or rather perceives it as reality itself, and sees in immobility only an abstract moment, a snapshot taken by our mind, of a mobility. Intelligence ordinarily concerns itself with things, meaning by that, with the static, and makes of change an accident which is supposedly superadded. For intuition the essential is change: as for the thing, as intelligence understands it, it is a cutting which has been made out of the becoming and set up by our mind as a substitute for the whole. Thought ordinarily pictures to itself the new as a new arrangement of pre-existing elements; nothing is ever lost of it, nothing is ever created. Intuition, bound up to a duration which is growth, perceives in it an uninterrupted continuity of unforeseeable novelty; it sees, it knows that the mind draws from itself more than it has, that spirituality consists in just that, and that reality, impregnated with spirit, is creation.”― Henri Bergson

[Syne]

Evolutionary psychology is likely as much about the body as it is the brain. But I wouldn't call any of it the seat of consciousness.