Most people can name five human senses without thinking too hard. Almost no one can name the sixth, which researchers are increasingly convinced plays a significant role in mental health.
It’s called interoception, and it’s the body’s ongoing system for reading its own internal signals—heart rate, hunger, breathing, gut sensation, muscle tension. Psychologists Jennifer Murphy of Royal Holloway, University of London, and Freya Prentice of University College London describe it as an “extremely important sense” that keeps the body’s systems in balance and alerts people when something is off. It also, as a growing body of research suggests, does tons of background work in regulating mood, anxiety, and emotional stability.
The hunger connection is one example. A study published this year found that people with strong, accurate interoception experienced fewer mood swings in response to hunger than those with poor interoception. Medical psychologist Nils Kroemer from the University of Tübingen, the study’s corresponding author, noted this didn’t mean those people never got hungry—they just didn’t get “hangry” when it happened.
Your Body Has a Hidden Sense That Helps Regulate Hunger, Mood, and Anxiety
Eating disorder research is where interoception is most striking. A UCLA study had women and girls hospitalized with anorexia nervosa swallow a vibrating capsule that researchers could activate remotely from outside the body. Even among participants whose weight had already been restored to healthy levels, the results showed significant dysfunction in gut-brain signaling—they were less accurate at detecting stomach sensations and slower to revise those perceptions when sensations were clearly present.
“One of the most striking findings was that these differences persisted even after weight restoration,” said Dr. Sahib Khalsa, the study’s senior author and a neuroscientist at UCLA. “Recovery from anorexia nervosa isn’t just about restoring body weight. The underlying brain-body communication problems may remain and could contribute to relapse.”
Murphy and Prentice’s analysis of 93 studies also found interoception differs between men and women, with women showing lower accuracy on heart-focused tasks specifically—a finding that could partly explain why anxiety and depression are more prevalent in women from puberty onward, though the researchers stress the link is complicated.
The concept has at least one notable skeptic. MIT cognitive scientist Felix Schoeller published a Frontiers in Psychology paper in 2024 titled — by his own admission, deliberately — “There is no such thing as interoception,” arguing the word has become too vague to do useful scientific work. Barry Smith from the University of London has separately suggested humans may have up to 33 distinct senses. Next to that, five starts to look like a conservative estimate.
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