Can you tune in to your heart beat? Right now, can you count ten steady beats in a row? Or does it get a little fuzzy, a little unclear? This could have implications for your personal fulfillment, your happiness on earth.
The authors of this study suggest that a culture which objectifies female bodies, obsessing over those which meet an arbitrary ideal, puts females at risk for losing touch with their actual flesh and blood.
Women in these cultures are liable to take an outsider’s view of themselves, which dulls their perception of what’s actually going on in the old corpus. To test this, researchers compared women’s self-objectification to their internal awareness.
Interoception, this is called: perception of internal states.
Which comes first — a female’s fixation on her culture’s ideal, or her tuning out of the internal broadcast — isn’t clear. But the link between the two is.
Weird facts from prior studies:
When people with low interoception look at themselves in a mirror — looking at themselves the way others look at them — they’re better at hearing their own heartbeat! Weird, right?
And when you secretly dose a bunch of people with caffeine, those individuals with finer body tuning notice bodily changes that others don’t pay attention to.
Also, people with anorexia are notoriously deaf to their own body states.
And now, this study has concluded that we who see ourselves as objects, and habitually measure ourselves as we think others might see us, are somewhat deaf to our heart beat.
In taking the other’s view of ourselves, we lose ourselves.
