Kate Murphy

And when you ask a question, you're kind of invested in the answer because you've asked it.

And you also have to pay attention to come up with a question in the first place.

So it kind of gets rid of the extra distractions in your head if you start focusing on that.

Everybody is interesting and absorbing if you ask the right questions.

I do think asking questions and also just developing that curious inner toddler mindset that is so focused on the other person and has no fear of asking a question and wanting to get to know that person.

And I think that's a real way to stay in the interaction instead of being inside your head.

I'm glad you brought that up because it is very important.

You cannot tune into another person if you're not tuned into yourself.

And interoception, as you've accurately described it, is how well you read what's going on within your own body, whereas perception is how you perceive what's going on outside of your body.

And to develop interoception, there are a lot of people that are trying to help people improve their interoception.

With things like float therapy, where you kind of neutralize outside stimulus and you're submerged in water, which makes you much more aware of what's going on inside your body.

But meditation is an excellent way.

way to get more in tune with yourself.

I was reading a study, actually it was relatively recently, that showed that meditation helped you not only become aware of your own physical signals, but your heart rate and your brainwaves start to sync up, actually.

They've measured the EEG and the EKG of people who meditate, and those start to sync up.

So you've developed this sort of feedback loop within yourself where you are more in touch with yourself because you're focusing on your heart rate, you're focusing on your breathing, and your neural patterns, apparently, according to the study, start to fall into sync with that as well.

And then they did another study that showed that people who were meditating together were

that all of their heart rates and respiration and neural patterns started to sync up in the room together.

So there were no individuals anymore.

They were part of a larger organism.