At ScienceAlert, Fiona MacDonald reports,

We all know that humans have five senses. But a growing body of research shows we have a sixth one that almost nobody talks about – and it may be just as important for our wellbeing as any of the others.

It’s called interoception: the body’s ability to sense and interpret its own internal signals.

This sense detects things that seem ‘invisible’ but are happening constantly: your heart rate, your breathing, your hunger, the temperature running through your body.

“Humans Have a ‘Sixth Sense’ You’ve Probably Never Heard Of – And It Appears to Be Key For Mental Health,” July 11, 2026

But is this really a new sense? Or is it just an innate capacity for self-monitoring? That would make it similar to proprioception, the ability to know where parts of our body are in a given space.

Terminology aside, the concept is interesting:

An experiment published in eBioMedicine this year looked at how hunger impacted mood, and showed that people with strong and accurate interoception experienced fewer mood swings than those with poor interoception.

“This does not mean they never felt hungry – they just seemed better at keeping their mood levels stable,” medical psychologist and corresponding author Nils Kroemer from the University of Tübingen in Germany wrote for The Conversation.

“Key For Mental Health,” The paper is open access.

Even if the concept is controversial, the take-home point is surely this: Our bodies have all sorts of ways of giving us information that do not run through our senses – our senses are mostly aimed at getting information from the world outside ourselves anyway. We won’t go wrong if we learn to listen to all of them more carefully.