01Feelings live in the body
When researchers asked thousands of people, across more than a hundred countries, to color in where they feel each emotion, the maps came out strikingly alike: anger rising in the chest and arms, sadness dimming the limbs. Neuroscientists who study interoception (the brain's sense of the body from the inside) suggest our feelings are built partly from these signals: heartbeat, breath, gut, muscle.
Each entry starts the same way: pause, notice what is happening in your body, and speak from there.
Nummenmaa, Glerean, Hari and Hietanen (2014), "Bodily maps of emotions", PNAS. Read it
02Naming a feeling softens it
In a well-known brain imaging study, simply choosing a word for the emotion in a distressing face turned down activity in the amygdala, a region that responds to threat, and turned up activity in part of the prefrontal cortex. In a later study, people who described their fear out loud showed less of a bodily fear response a week later.
That is what a daily voice entry asks of you: say what you feel, in your own words, out loud.
Lieberman et al. (2007), "Putting feelings into words", Psychological Science. Read it
03We learn to feel together
The psychologist Allan Schore, drawing on attachment research and affective neuroscience, argues that feelings are first held between people, not alone. A caregiver catches a baby's distress in its face and voice, feels it with them, and helps them settle. In his view we never stop needing this: being met and attuned to is how we find our way back to safety.
Interfeeling is built on this idea: you share what you feel, and another person meets it, in their own voice.
Schore (2019), Right Brain Psychotherapy, W. W. Norton; Schore and Schore (2008), Clinical Social Work Journal. Read it
04Listening brings us in step
When a person told a real story, the brain activity of the people listening came to mirror theirs, and the closer it matched, the better they understood. When one partner showed a feeling to the other, the two brains coupled as it passed between them.
Every Interfeeling reply starts with someone listening all the way through.
Stephens, Silbert and Hasson (2010), PNAS; Anders et al. (2011), NeuroImage. Read it
05When someone gets it
People recorded themselves describing emotional moments, then saw replies from peers while their brains were scanned. Replies like “I understand why that affected you” activated regions linked to reward and social connection. Replies that missed them activated regions linked to distress.
In Interfeeling, a kind stranger replies to understand you, not to fix you.
Morelli, Torre and Eisenberger (2014), Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience. Read it
06Steadier together
In brain scans of people waiting for a possible mild shock, holding the hand of a partner or close friend quieted threat-related activity, and the effect was stronger in people who felt well supported. Researchers suggest the brain expects trusted people nearby, and that facing things alone simply costs us more.
Cosoma is built around steady, repeated, kind contact, so that trust has time to grow.
Coan, Schaefer and Davidson (2006), "Lending a hand", Psychological Science; Coan et al. (2017). Read it
07A voice carries feeling
Across more than a hundred studies, listeners could hear emotion in a voice well above chance, in its pace, pitch and loudness. And when people reconnected with old friends or talked with strangers, speaking left them feeling closer than typing did, and it was no more awkward than they had feared.
That is why Cosoma is voice first: you speak your entries, and replies come back in a human voice.
Kumar and Epley (2021), "It's surprisingly nice to hear you", Journal of Experimental Psychology: General; Juslin and Laukka (2003). Read it
