Your body is constantly communicating with your brain, sending silent signals about everything from your heartbeat to your blood pressure. It’s an ongoing internal conversation that keeps you alive. However, it is also a system that science still barely understands.
Now, a new $14.2 million research effort led by Scripps Research Institute, a non-profit medical research center based in San Diego, California, aims to change that by mapping the body’s mysterious “hidden sixth sense.”
The five-year project, funded through the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director’s Transformative Research Award, will attempt to decode interoception—the process by which the nervous system monitors and interprets internal physiological signals.
Researchers hope their work will produce the first-ever atlas of this inner sensory system, revealing how the brain keeps tabs on vital functions such as breathing, digestion, and immune responses.
“My team is honored that the NIH is supporting the kind of collaborative science needed to study such a complex system,” Scripps project lead, Dr. Ardem Patapoutian, said in a statement.
Dr. Patapoutian is no stranger to decoding the body’s hidden senses. In 2021, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering how cells sense touch and pressure, a finding that fundamentally reshaped our understanding of sensation. Now, he and colleagues at Scripps believe that interoception could hold the key to the next great understanding of how the brain maintains internal balance.
Interoception isn’t like the classic five senses. You can’t see or hear your blood pressure or digestion. Instead, this “sixth sense” operates through a network of sensory neurons that relay information from deep inside the body to the brain, often without conscious awareness.
These neurons weave through organs and tissues—heart, lungs, stomach, kidneys—forming a hidden communication network that ensures your body’s systems stay in sync.
The project represents a partnership between Scripps Research and the Allen Institute, combining expertise in molecular genetics, whole-body imaging, and neuroscience. Dr. Patapoutian will be joined by Dr. Li Ye, the N. Paul Whittier Chair in Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Scripps Research, and Dr. Bosiljka Tasic, Director of Molecular Genetics at the Allen Institute.
The NIH Director’s Transformative Research Award is part of the agency’s High-Risk, High-Reward Research Program, designed to fund bold ideas that push scientific boundaries. Established in 2009, the NIH describes the award as “supporting exceptionally innovative and/or unconventional research projects with the potential to create or overturn fundamental paradigms.”
Interoception remains one of biology’s least understood systems, partly because it’s so difficult to study. Unlike external senses that rely on clearly defined organs—eyes, ears, nose—interoceptive pathways are diffuse and overlapping. Signals from the heart, gut, or lungs intermingle as they travel to the brain, blurring the boundaries between systems.
Since the sensations monitored by interoception originate deep within the body and are interpreted largely without our conscious awareness, researchers often liken it to a kind of “hidden sixth sense.” Understanding how this internal sensory network functions could profoundly reshape how medicine approaches everything from stress regulation to chronic disease.
With NIH backing, the researchers plan to systematically map how sensory neurons connect to internal organs, including the heart and gastrointestinal tract.
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