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Author Topic:   How many senses are there?
Dr Jack
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Posts: 3514
From: Immigrant in the land of Deutsch
Joined: 07-14-2003
Member Rating: 8.7


Message 1 of 28 (201109)
04-22-2005 6:41 AM


I can think of eight, of which we have the first six:
1. Sight
2. Smell
3. Hearing
4. Touch
5. Taste
6. Heat
7. Electrical (like sharks, and many other fish have)
8. Magnetic (like some birds have)
Although thinking about it, I wonder whether hearing is just a specialised form of touch and smell is just a specialised form of taste?
Can anyone think of any more senses?

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Dr Jack
Member
Posts: 3514
From: Immigrant in the land of Deutsch
Joined: 07-14-2003
Member Rating: 8.7


Message 4 of 28 (201116)
04-22-2005 8:43 AM
Reply to: Message 3 by arachnophilia
04-22-2005 8:10 AM


I'd count it as hearing, yes.

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Dr Jack
Member
Posts: 3514
From: Immigrant in the land of Deutsch
Joined: 07-14-2003
Member Rating: 8.7


Message 5 of 28 (201117)
04-22-2005 8:43 AM
Reply to: Message 2 by Tusko
04-22-2005 6:54 AM


Good link, thanks.

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Dr Jack
Member
Posts: 3514
From: Immigrant in the land of Deutsch
Joined: 07-14-2003
Member Rating: 8.7


Message 23 of 28 (515177)
07-16-2009 4:50 AM
Reply to: Message 1 by Dr Jack
04-22-2005 6:41 AM


Additional
Learning more about such things since I posted this old thread, I'm even more convinced that the notion of five senses is basically nonsense (unless you perform the trick of lumping a vast number of independent senses into one set).
For humans, I'd list:
1. Sight
2. Smell
3. Hearing
4. Touch
5. Taste
6. Heat
7. Cold (we actually have different receptors for heat and cold)
8. Proprioception (sensory awareness of posture and position, vital for balance and movement)
9. Nociception (i.e. pain)
10. Acceleration/balance (the vestibular organs, which although located in the ear are entirely separate in function and have their own nerves)

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Dr Jack
Member
Posts: 3514
From: Immigrant in the land of Deutsch
Joined: 07-14-2003
Member Rating: 8.7


Message 25 of 28 (515255)
07-16-2009 5:54 PM
Reply to: Message 24 by onifre
07-16-2009 5:35 PM


Re: Additional
It's the same receptor: Cutaneous receptor
Read your link more closely, my friend, those are different types of receptor. Even more so, as you look at the operation thereof.
Found in the somatosensory system.
A system is not sense; a sense is a sense. Yes, there are commonalities in how differing sense are conveyed but they do, none-the-less, carry differing information.
equilibrioception/balance[/url] only functions as a result of other senses working together. It is not independent.[/qs]
A good point. Balance was a misnomer, none-the-less the information conveyed by the vestibular organs stand seperate from other senses.
Now, you may argue that our senses are combined, that - for example - balance depends on varying sources of information but the same is very much true of all your senses. You do not see the world as it is directly conveyed by your eyes but as it is reconstructed by your brain. You do not hear speech as conveyed by the systems in your ear (which, btw, are very cool - they're effectively performing a biological Fourier transform) but as post-processed by your brain to identify sounds relevant to the language you know.
Thus, arguing that a sense combines with other to produce sensation may be true, but by that argument we really only have one sense.

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Dr Jack
Member
Posts: 3514
From: Immigrant in the land of Deutsch
Joined: 07-14-2003
Member Rating: 8.7


Message 27 of 28 (515303)
07-17-2009 4:22 AM
Reply to: Message 26 by onifre
07-16-2009 6:24 PM


Re: Additional
I think your link is wrong.
Proprioception uses mechanoreceptor just as cutaneous touch does; but proprioceptive recepetors are not located in the skin - they're primarily located in the joints and muscles.
One could also reasonably argue that the different forms of receptor constitute differing senses. In which case - by your link - cutaneous mechanoreceptors alone constitute multiple senses. I'm not sure that's a useful way of looking at it though.
Fair enough, but I was just trying to show that the senses: touch, temperature, proprioception, and nociception are part of the same sensory system.
They're really not. Touch uses mechanoreceptors, temperature uses two distinct kinds of thermoreceptor (one for hot, one for cold) which produce differing sensory reports, and nociception uses another form of receptor again and pain is quite clearly experienced differently from touch.
But the senses are independent of the brain. Our brain receives the information and makes a representation of reality based on the info it got from its sensory inputs. IMO this is not the same as saying vision is required for balance. The brain compiles all the info and processes it, but that is secondary to the actual, initial sensing of what we interacted with.
Vision is not required for balance (or blind people would fall over, and you couldn't stand with your eyes shut), it is used to augment it. But goes both ways. Ever got horribly drunk and experienced that sickening world spinning thing? That's caused because the vestibular organs in your ears are giving errant information. Normally the information from your circular canals is combined with information from your eyes to provide a stable image; when it starts being wrong your sense of vision gives you the false impression that the world is spinning around you.

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