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Humans interact with the world largely using our five senses: sight, smell, taste, touch, and hearing. Many people, however, argue that we have other senses that are very useful, but aren’t nearly as well-known.
One of those potential ‘sixth senses’ is called interoception, and a group of researchers at Scripps Research and the Allen Institute has been awarded $14.2 million from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
So, what exactly is interoception?
It is described as the sense that humans have about the internal state of our bodies. For example, if you feel hungry, sad, or have to use the bathroom, or any number of things that occur inside the body, they are detected using interoception.
While the other senses use specialized organs to gather data about the outside world, interoception uses the nervous system to monitor and respond to the physiological signals of the body.
It is widely accepted that when there are problems with one’s ability to sense the state of their internal body, it can cause serious health issues. For example, some people cannot accurately feel hunger or thirst, which can put them at serious risk. This is one of the reasons why the NIH wants to have it better studied.
The team that will be performing the research is led by Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist Ardem Patapoutian, as well as Li Ye of Scripps Research, and Bosiljka Tasic from the Allen Institute. In a statement about getting the prize money, Patapoutian said:
“My team is honored that the NIH is supporting the kind of collaborative science needed to study such a complex system.”
Ye went on to add:
“We hope our results will help other scientists ask new questions about how internal organs and the nervous system stay in sync.”
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Learning how humans are able to detect such a large number of different internal conditions could be helpful in teaching people to better monitor their own health. The ultimate aim of the research is to create a 3D atlas that illustrates the anatomic and molecular neural pathways in the body.
Co-investigator Xin Jin, said:
“Interoception is fundamental to nearly every aspect of health, but it remains a largely unexplored frontier of neuroscience. By creating the first atlas of this system, we aim to lay the foundation for better understanding how the brain keeps the body in balance, how that balance can be disrupted in disease and how we might restore it.”
It will be interesting to see what discoveries they make.
If you think that’s impressive, check out this story about a “goldmine” of lithium that was found in the U.S. that could completely change the EV battery game.