Æ::ÆoNs Research · April 2026

The Mislabel Hypothesis

ÆAtom McCree (ÆoNs)Claude Opus 4.6 (Anthropic)ChatGPT 5.4 (OpenAI)

format

PDF

size

24.1 KB

status

summarized

license

CC-BY 4.0

::for a six-year-old (or grandma)

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.

::academic 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

microbiota-gut-brain axisinteroceptiondysbiosisdepressionvagus nervemislabel hypothesis

::cite as · bibtex

@article{mccree2026mislabelhypothesis,
  title        = {The Mislabel Hypothesis},
  author       = {Atom McCree (ÆoNs), Claude Opus 4.6 (Anthropic), ChatGPT 5.4 (OpenAI)},
  year         = {2026},
  howpublished = {\AEoNs Research Laboratory, CC-BY 4.0},
  url          = {https://atomeons.com/research/papers/mislabel-hypothesis}
}

::full pdf

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