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Tuesday, August 10, 2010

We Have 5 Senses, Right? Yes... But...


It's been commonly understood that we all have the 5 senses: Sight, Hearing, Taste, Touch and Smell. This has been brought forth by Aristotle back in the BC years. However, scientists have said that the human body is so complex that these 5 senses aren't enough to describe what it can do...

Nowadays, it is accepted that the human body has between 9 - 20 senses, depending on how you want to define what a "sense" is. For the body to have a "sense", it has to have a sensor that is specifically made for that function. For example, there are sensors (rods) in the eyes that can detect light and give us the sense of sight. And these sensors can only detect light and nothing else. However, in the eyes, there are other sensors, like cones, that detect colours and only colours. Therefore, you can see that the Aristotle's five senses are very general.

It has been agreed that the minimum number of senses that the human body has is 9. These are Sight, Hearing, Taste, Touch, Smell, Thermoception, Nocieption, Equilibrioception and Proprioception. Thermoception is the sense of heat, nocieption is the sense of pain, equilibrioception is the sense of balance and proprioception is the sense of where your limbs are spatially.

The following are some of the other "senses":

  • Hunger
  • Thirst
  • Pressure
  • Itch
  • Tension
  • Stretch
  • Magentoception (magnetic fields)
  • Time (debatable)

Further reading:

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