How Many Senses Do We Have

The five senses taught to us in school; “sight (vision)”, “sound (hearing)”, touch (feeling), taste, and smelling. A sense is your brains intrepration of stimilous from the environment, usually though specific receptors in your body (ie: your nose, your eyes, your fingers, your tongue, etc). Observations in science are preformed and verified using your senses. (To be fair we often invent equipment that helps extend the capabilities of our senses to observe the expirement)

But are there only five senses? Of course not; consider the following

Sense of Balance: We don’t fall down when we walk because of special sense (that happens to be located near our ears), that keeps us balanced when we walk). This is unrelated to hearing, it just happens to be located inside the ear. (ie: Deaf people still have a sense of balance), being sick can affect your sense of balance, but you can still hear

Sense of Motion: You may think this is simlar to sense of balance, some argue this is actually several senses working together. However you define it. If I put you in a sensor deprevation tank, and move the tank around, you can still tell you are moving.  It is that wierd feeling you get on an elevator, usually during accelleration or deceleration.

Sense of Pain: Put your hand on a hot stove, or drink a boiling cup of water, and you will experiance the sense of pain. This should not be confused with the sense of touch. Touch allows you to differentiate for example between a rough (course) object, and a soft object. Pain can occur witout even touching something (eg: a headache), and you can experiance touch and pain at the same time.

Sense of Hot/Cold: Again often confused with the sense of touch, but you don’t actually have to touch an object to feel a draft, or a heat wave. Possibly it could be argued that the air is touching your skin. But if that were the case why do we not feel the air when it is neither hot nor cold?

Sense of Fear: That feeling you get when you walk out on a dark evening in the woods, or while watching a scary movie that makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. When you heart starts pumping faster and your adrenaline starts running. “Fight or Flight”. Again some argue this is a combination of senses working together.

Sense of Humor: Why do you laugh when you hear a joke? Why do you find something funny when your spouse doesn’t even break a smile? We all have different and unique sense of humor, the thing that tickles our funny bone and makes us laugh.

So there you have it – more then six senses, so let’s teach the senses properly!

A few other quickies on the senses:

Illusion: This is the mis-interpretation by your brain of input from your senses. For example looking at shadows in a dark room may appear as ghostly images. Or the appearance of water on the street on a hot day that disappears as you get close to it

Hallucination: This is perceiving something that isn’t really there (usually brought on by drugs). If you see spiders crawling all over your friend during a bad acid trip when no spiders are really there, this is hallucination.

Delusion: Believing something to be true that is out of touch with reality. If you believe yourself to have super powers and can fly off of tall buildings, this is a delusion.