How more are you aware of your self? Your brain might tell

Neural systems supporting interoceptive awareness

How much are you aware of yourself?

When I start doing meditation, I often sense my body moving along my pulses. I could even see my leg moving with my heart beat when I am just merely siting with my leg cross. When I tie my hair back, I can feel it straining my head causing headache.

Even without doing any formal psychological test, I know I am a sensitive person. I can sense my mood changing with the amount of sun light. I know I tend to be moody when it's a gloomy day. No matter how hard I try, it's just hard to stay positive all the time.

I am always wondering what I did wrong to make me so sensitive to the external world. Can't I just be like those who don't care other people's responses, those who are so sure about themselves?

It turns out that I might have 'something' in my brain which makes me more 'aware' of myself. Researchers in the Institute of Neurology of University College London had discovered people who have bigger right anterior opercular region and anterior insula / OFC region can have better sense of their heart beat. (details refer to the original research) They also find positive correlation between the Hamilton anxiety scale and heart beat detection task.

What's the relation between senses of physical state and emotion experiences? It is a long standing theory proposed by William James and Carl Lange. It's called James-Lange theory of emotions. Briefly speaking, the theory suggests that our experience of emotion arises from our perception of body responses to external emotive stimuli.

This research is supportive to the James-Lange theory of emotion. It also extends its inference to the "personal emotional tendency". One can't help thinking that maybe we just can't get away the hardware structure of our brain.

There are some questions I would like to ask though:

1. The physical responses related to emotion are not only heart beats but also other responses. For people who are more aware of their heart beats, are they also more aware of other physical responses?
2. In the experiment, there's no emotional cues. Subjects are only asked to attend to their own heart beats. Will there be differences when emotional stimuli with different valence have different activation in the associate areas?
3. However how much is it determined innately? Are those areas developed after social interaction? What's the nature of neural plasticity in those areas?

Below is the abstract of the research

Influential theories of human emotion argue that subjective feeling states involve representation of bodily responses elicited by emotional events. Within this framework, individual differences in intensity of emotional experience reflect variation in sensitivity to internal bodily responses. We measured regional brain activity by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) during an interoceptive task wherein subjects judged the timing of their own heartbeats. We observed enhanced activity in insula, somatomotor and cingulate cortices. In right anterior insular/opercular cortex, neural activity predicted subjects' accuracy in the heartbeat detection task. Furthermore, local gray matter volume in the same region correlated with both interoceptive accuracy and subjective ratings of visceral awareness. Indices of negative emotional experience correlated with interoceptive accuracy across subjects. These findings indicate that right anterior insula supports a representation of visceral responses accessible to awareness, providing a substrate for subjective feeling states.