Homer to Interoception

This is the reading path that runs beneath everything else on this site. Homer placed the organs of feeling in the chest — thumos, kradie, phrenes — and described them as physical structures that fill, harden, and overflow. Three thousand years later, Bud Craig mapped the anterior insular cortex as the site where the body’s visceral signals become subjective feeling. The distance between these two descriptions is smaller than it appears.

Start with Snell, who identified what Homer’s characters lack: a unified concept of self. Then Onians, who showed that Homer’s body-vocabulary was not metaphor but pre-scientific anatomy — real attempts to describe where thinking, feeling, and deciding happen in the body. Read the Iliad with these lenses on. Then Dodds, who traced how the Greeks progressively rationalized what Homer described. End with Damasio and Craig, who brought the conversation back to the body by demonstrating that feeling is not a disturbance of reason but its prerequisite.

The arc is circular: body → mind → body. Homer knew. The West forgot. Neuroscience remembered.