Sensory integrity, connection, and coherence: Markers of health

Sensory integrity, connection, and coherence: Markers of health

Associate Professor Johanna Lynch from The University of Queensland explores a whole-person framework for sense of safety in policy and practice. Human beings experience themselves as whole, not as a collection of separate parts. In ordinary, unthreatened conditions, a person can take in many streams of information at once: their physical surroundings, their bodily state, the people around them, their memories and expectations — and integrate all of this into a single, coherent sense of what is happening and how to respond. This integrative capacity, referred to here as ‘sensing’, is not limited to the five traditional senses. It includes interoception (awareness of internal bodily states), (1) proprioception (awareness of body position and movement), and the automatic, often unconscious neurological appraisal of safety or danger that underlies emotion, attention, and decision-making (neuroception). (2,3)