Health can be assessed by stomach rumbling

Scientists from University College London have proposed an unusual way to test how well a person can "hear" their own gut. Volunteers were asked to guess which of two recordings of rumbling was being transmitted from their abdomen in real time and which had been made several minutes earlier. The results of the study have been published in the journal Scientific Reports.

Interoception — a kind of "sixth sense" — allows a person to perceive signals from their own body: hunger, thirst, heartbeat, bladder fullness, and even emotions. Impaired gut interoception has been linked to overeating, eating disorders, irritable bowel syndrome, and anxiety, while excessive sensitivity can trigger panic attacks. Until now, to measure this sense, doctors have had to inflate balloons inside the digestive organs or ask patients to swallow electronic capsules — procedures that are unpleasant and difficult to scale.

The new experiment involved 45 healthy adults who came to the laboratory after a three-hour fast. A digital stethoscope was attached to each person's abdomen, capturing borborygmi — the characteristic sounds of intestinal activity. Participants were then played two fifteen-second audio clips: one was a live, real-time broadcast of sounds from their own gut, and the other was a recording made several minutes earlier. The task was to guess which of the clips was playing "right now." The test was conducted under three conditions: on an empty stomach, after drinking carbonated water, and after consuming a high-protein shake.

The average guessing accuracy was 56–60 percent — only slightly above the chance level of 50 percent. However, the key finding was the variation between participants: one in five volunteers demonstrated significantly higher accuracy on an empty stomach, and after consuming liquid or food, this figure rose to one in four. Moreover, response accuracy correlated with the participants' confidence in their own decisions.

The authors of the study emphasize that the developed method is open-access and free. It allows gut interoception to be assessed without any discomfort and could find application in studying eating disorders, anxiety, and depression — conditions in which the perception of internal body signals is often impaired.