Humans are unique in their ability to think about themselves and carry a more or less clear notion of who they are in their mind. Here we review recent evidence suggesting that the birth, maintenance, and loss of the abstract concept of ‘self’ is deeply tied to interoception, the sense of internal physiological signals. Interoception influences multiple facets of the self-concept, cutting across its material, social, moral, and agentive components. Overall, we argue that interoception contributes to the stability of the self-concept over time, unifying its layers and constraining the degree to which it is susceptible to external influences. Hence, the core features of the self-concept are those that correlate more with inner bodily states. We discuss the implications that this may have for theories of embodied cognition as well as for the understanding of psychiatric disorders in which the concept of self appears fragmented or loose. Finally, we formulate some empirical predictions that could be tested in future studies to shed further light on this emerging field.

人类在思考自己的能力方面是独一无二的，并且或多或少地清楚地知道自己在脑海中是谁。在这里，我们回顾了最近的证据，这些证据表明“自我”这一抽象概念的诞生、维持和丧失与内部感受、内部生理信号的感觉密切相关。内感受影响自我概念的多个方面，跨越其物质、社会、道德和能动因素。总的来说，我们认为随着时间的推移，内部感受有助于自我概念的稳定性，统一其层次并限制其易受外部影响的程度。因此，自我概念的核心特征是那些与内在身体状态更相关的特征。我们讨论了这可能对具身认知理论以及对自我概念出现支离破碎或松散的精神障碍的理解的影响。最后，我们制定了一些可以在未来研究中进行测试的实证预测，以进一步阐明这一新兴领域。