Proprioception, defined as “the awareness of the mechanical and spatial state of the body and its musculoskeletal parts” [1], or in plain English, the sensation of inhabiting your body, is an ineffable sense, as [2] states. How do we describe in words the internal physical feelings of our body’s physical state? Not only that, but how do we communicate to create the same physical sensation to another person, when proprioception is an inherently internal sense? [2] points out that other senses like vision and hearing allow for a shared sensory experience between different people, due to the fact that they deal with the external environment. In contrast, proprioception deals with the internal body sensations and is thus individual and excluded from the collective conscious perception [2].
[1] states that “proprioceptive signals include peripheral inputs from muscle spindles, Golgi tendon organs, cutaneous, and joint receptors, along with central inputs from efferent motor commands (i.e., corollary discharges)”. All of these stimuli are then processed by our brains in order to be able to tell what position our body is in, what kind of movement is happening, how much effort is being made by our muscles (and which ones), and how heavy objects we lift are [1].
An important thing to note is that researchers have found is that there are 2 different senses related to how we perceive the position of our bodies, which measure the following, respectively [1]:
- Limb position relative to our bodies [1]
- Limb location relative to the outside world [1]
[1] also introduces the concept of high-level proprioceptive judgements, defined as “judgments made in a different frame of reference.” In this context, the latter refers to the different spatial maps (or mental representations of a person’s physical environment) that the brain can process since each has a distinct frame of reference [1][3]. Some of these maps are enumerated as follows [1]:
- Retinotopic (mapping of the visual world [4])
- Somatotopic (mapping of the body to the central nervous system [5])
- Egocentric (self-to-object [3])
- Face-centered
- Object-centered
- World-centered
Furthermore, [1]’s framework is shown graphically in the following excerpt from the paper, including [1]’s own self-described caption.
Image from [1]
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Sources:
[1] M. E. Héroux, A. A. Butler, L. S. Robertson, G. Fisher, and S. C. Gandevia, “Proprioception: a new look at an old concept,” Journal of Applied Physiology, vol. 132, pp. 811-814, February 2022.
[2] J. C. Tuthill and E. Azim, “Proprioception,” Current Biology, vol. 28, pp. R194-R203, March 2018.
[3] M. Kozhevnikov and J. Puri, “Different Types of Survey-Based Environmental Representations: Egocentric vs. Allocentric Cognitive Maps,” Brain sciences, vol. 13, May 2023.
[4] O. Braddick, “Occipital Lobe (Visual Cortex): Functional Aspects,” International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, pp. 10826-10828, 2001.
[5] K. B. See, D. J. Arpin, D. E. Vaillancourt, R. Fang, and S. A. Coombes, “Unraveling somatotopic organization in the human brain using machine learning and adaptive supervoxel-based parcellations,” NeuroImage, vol. 245, November 2021.
