The Thought That Starts in the Body
Before a talk, a thought says: my heart is pounding. It says it with confidence, as if the heart were being read off a dial. KTT counts that as a thought, noticed or not, even when it arrives as a squeeze in the chest and no words at all. The question for researchers is how often such a thought is right. The sources read for this article are summaries and abstracts of a 2015 study and later work on the same tasks.
The test
In a classic task, a person sits still and counts their own heartbeats over a set interval without feeling for a pulse. The count is compared with the recorded heartbeats. The method goes back to Rainer Schandry in 1981. The score is called interoceptive accuracy, which means how well a person can detect signals from inside the body.
Three different things
In 2015, Sarah Garfinkel and colleagues proposed that what people call knowing their own heart is really three things. One is accuracy, the objective score on the heartbeat task. The second is sensibility, how sensitive a person says they are. The third is the match between a person’s confidence and their score, which the authors treat as a metacognitive judgment. In 80 participants, the three were distinct. Self-reported sensibility did not predict accuracy. Confidence tracked accuracy only among people who scored high on accuracy.
So the thought “my heart is pounding” can be right, wrong, or confident for no reason that the body supplies.
Two tasks, different results
The same study used two heartbeat tasks, counting and discriminating. The two make different demands. A meta-analysis found that the link between them is weaker than expected: a 2016 study reported a correlation of 0.35, while Garfinkel’s own reported 0.71. A person can look good on one task and not on the other.
What is not known
Whether the thought about the body comes before the feeling, or follows it, is not known. The studies measured accuracy and confidence, not the order.
Whether a confident bodily thought changes what a person does is open. None of the sources read here tested that.
How these results look in a real moment of strain, and not at a lab desk, is also open.