A new study in PLOS One assesses the interoceptive powers of athletes. Interoception, the study explains, is “the detection and perception of stimuli originating from within the body.” I assumed this would be one of those feel-good studies—that, in addition to being smarter and happier and living longer than average, trained runners would also turn out to be masters of tuning into their body’s signals. After all, pacing yourself in a prolonged effort is a fundamentally interoceptive challenge.
But the results turned out to be more complex than I expected. In fact, they raise some interesting—albeit speculative!—questions about whether listening to your body is as important as we think, and whether it might even be counterproductive in some circumstances.
The study was led by Hayley Young, a psychologist at Swansea University in Britain. She and her colleagues compared sprinters, distance runners, and non-athletes in two separate sub-studies. The athletes were further divided into two groups: elite (meaning they were ranked in the top 100 in Britain) and non-elite.
In the first study, 213 subjects filled…
