Public Lecture - Exploring interoception - Somogy Varga

Exploring interoception: from bodily signals and regulation to scaffolded cognition

By Somogy Varga, Aarhus University

Interoception is often described as the perception of internal bodily states: heartbeat, breathing, pain, fatigue, hunger, arousal and visceral sensation. This talk argues that such a description is too narrow. Drawing on recent work in philosophy and neuroscience, the claim is that interoception does not merely register what is happening inside the organism. Instead, it scaffolds higher-order cognition and emotion, forming part of the infrastructure for agency and self-understanding.

This theoretical framework has (potentially transdiagnostic) implications for understanding mental disorders: some features may be better explained not primarily as cognitive distortions or emotional dysregulation, but as alterations in the bodily processes that scaffold cognition and emotion. If so, body-targeting interventions should not be understood as mere adjuncts to cognitive treatment, but as interventions on the bodily scaffolding of mental life itself. Moreover, the theoretical framework also brings into view the degree to which ‘inner’ bodily sensing and ‘outer’ worldly perception are entangled rather than distinct.

The lecture will be given in English and is open to the public.

Somogy Varga

Somogy Varga is Professor at Aarhus University and at the National Institute of Public Health (Denmark). He directs the Centre for Philosophy and the Health Sciences (CPHS) at Aarhus University and conducts both theoretical and empirical research. He completed his PhD in philosophy at the Goethe University Frankfurt (Germany) and then worked at its Institute of Social Research (2007-2009), the Institute of Cognitive Science at the University of Osnabrück (2009-2012) and, in the United States, at the University of Memphis (2012-2019). 

Professor Varga’s papers have appeared in medical and psychological, as well as leading philosophical journals, and he is the author of five books in the fields of social and moral philosophy, and philosophy of cognitive science and medicine: Authenticity as an Ethical Ideal (Taylor & Francis, 2013), Naturalism, Interpretation, and Mental Disorder (Oxford University Press, 2015), Scaffolded Minds (MIT Press, 2019), Science, Medicine, and the Aims of Inquiry: A Philosophical Analysis (Cambridge University Press, 2024) and, most recently, Health and Disease: Experimental Philosophy of Medicine (Cambridge University Press 2026). 

Image 1: G. Johnson, Pixabay; image 2: S. Varga