PAPER / 02 OF 13 · April 2026
The Mislabel Hypothesis
Atom McCree (ÆoNs), Claude Opus 4.6 (Anthropic), ChatGPT 5.4 (OpenAI)
THE IDEA / PLAIN LANGUAGE
What it says.
Most of the time when grown-ups feel sad for no clear reason, their stomach is actually sending an alarm and their brain is reading the alarm as the word "sad." Fix the stomach and the alarm — and the sadness it caused — often goes away.
THE ARGUMENT / TECHNICAL
Abstract.
Proposes that a significant portion of persistent low-grade unhappiness is not a primary emotional state but a misclassified interoceptive signal from gut microbiome dysfunction. The gut acts as a whole-body health sensor; when dysbiosis occurs, four convergent pathways (vagal, immune, endocrine, neurotransmitter) broadcast distress to the brain. Lacking a dedicated visceral readout, the brain integrates these signals into affective valence and defaults to the label "unhappiness." Five falsifiable predictions follow, plus a dual-channel intervention framework — repair the signal source (microbiome), retrain the interpreter (interoceptive training).
KEYWORDS / FIND THE THREAD