Emotional experience is fundamentally rooted in the body's internal states—processed through the insular cortex. It integrates sensory information from every organ system to create what we experience as feelings, urges, and self-awareness. When this integration falters, standard talk therapy is much less efficient.
This course will introduce you to the neuropsychology of the insula and its role in interoception—the perception of internal bodily states. You will learn how insular dysfunction appears across anxiety, trauma, depression, OCD, PTSD, and addiction. You will explore evidence-based techniques that engage this neural circuitry to support emotion regulation and reduce symptom persistence.
Throughout the training, you will:
- Deepen your understanding of how the insula processes cardiac, respiratory, gastrointestinal, and nociceptive signals
- Learn to recognize interoceptive dysregulation patterns in common clinical presentations
- Integrate body-based awareness techniques into your existing therapeutic approach
- Distinguish between neural networks that enable versus block therapeutic change
You will examine the anatomy and connectivity of the insular cortex across its sensorimotor, chemosensory, socio-emotional, and cognitive subdivisions. You will learn how these regions coordinate to create coherent representations of internal experience. The course will present specific interoceptive training methods targeting cardiovascular awareness, respiratory regulation, affective touch, and thermoception.
Insular activation as a mechanism of therapeutic change. A growing body of evidence supports the premise that engaging the insular cortex during psychotherapy is a key driver of clinical change. Interoceptive awareness recruits the anterior and mid-insula and sustains the cognitive control network required for neuroplasticity (Craig, 2009; Farb, Segal & Anderson, 2013; Sridharan, Levitin & Menon, 2008). Mindfulness- and body-based interventions have been shown to modulate insular structure and function and to support emotion regulation (Gibson, 2019; Guendelman, Medeiros & Rampes, 2017; Farb et al., 2015). Interoception-focused interventions have been mapped as active therapeutic targets across psychiatric disorders (Weng et al., 2021; Khalsa et al., 2018; Paulus & Stein, 2010), including trauma (Payne, Levine & Crane-Godreau, 2015), addiction (Naqvi & Bechara, 2009; Angioletti & Balconi, 2021), and depression (Harshaw, 2015; Barrett, Quigley & Hamilton, 2016). These references are highlighted in a dedicated section at the top of the bibliography.
This training will equip you with neuroscience-informed interventions that address the physiological substrate of emotional experience. You will leave with practical tools for engaging the insula in therapeutic work—particularly valuable when traditional approaches have plateaued or when working with treatment-resistant presentations.
