Balance or our ability to know (an then stand straight or walk ) which direction the acceleration field is, is a sense or not ?
I know the mechanism of balance and the fluid in our ears and all that.
I’d say that it falls mainly under touch.
Haj
I agree… basically balance is your brain making sense of all of the “touch” sensations caused by the fluid in the vestibular system. Of course I’d imagine sight plays into this, kind of like how smell and taste are intertwined. To be fair, unlike some other chemists I know, I won’t pretend to be an expert outside of my field 
In the book The Collapse Of Chaos by Jack Cohen & Ian Stewart, it is stated that human beings have the traditional five senses (seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, and tasting) as well as the sense of acceleration, balance, and temperature. But some might argue that these last three are covered by the sense of touch. I say temperature is, but the sense of acceleration and balance are two separate senses (IMHO).
as a firefighter, I did an article once for training purposes that discussed how many (or how few) of our senses we actually use in a fire scenario.
Apart from the normal 5 senses, there is also a ‘sixth sense’ that we often fail to recognise (and not everyone can recognise it) that is called the proprio-receptive sense which, in simple terms, is an awareness of where we are in relation to our environment.
There are several variables involved in this process one of which involves receptors (not just in the ear) but in the soles of the feet which give us an indication of whether we’re upright, leaning, or upside down. There are also other receptors in the skin that subtly tell us about variations in temperature, humidity, etc, and some that are so sensitive that they can tell us when we’re close to another object.
Other receptors give us information also as to whether we’re being touched by a smooth or rough object and even what shape it may be.
Is balance a ‘sixth sense’? If, as a firefighter, I include it as an integral part of that overall proprio-receptive sense, then I guess MY answer would have to be yes.
regards,
nostromo
Actually, all of your skeletal muscles (and many tendons) have proprioreceptors (aka “stretch receptors”). These specialized neurons tell your brain where the various limbs are, and in what positions. This is what allows you to, say, walk without having to watch your feet, or touch your finger to your nose with your eyes closed. So, one could say that the ability to “know” where your pieces-parts are (so long as they’re still attached), and what they are doing, is another sense.
Wow. What a great question!
At first, I thought “Eureka! andy_fl has found it!”
Then I took just one step back: Maybe balance is the greater mechanism, and the actual sense is “levelness.” (When I think of balance, I even include the muscular reactions I make in order to maintain my…er, balance. Vision does not imply how I react to what I see, etc…)
We truly CAN sense levelness…it’s more of an unconscious sense, but so are the other proposed sixth senses.
Is it feel? I’m moving my head around trying to feel it. Where IS this sense of levelness, or the sensor, anyway? The conventional wisdom points out the inner ear, but I have to tell you: For me, I have a poor inner ear sense of balance, and I know for certain that my EYES are involved in my own balance! I’ve always been a B- athlete because of it. I have to be careful in the shower, with my eyes closed.
So I’m saying it might be a composite sense, but…for the rest of my life, when people mention a sixth sense, I’m going to say “Yep…balance!”
Must I give you credit?
I don’t think balance can be truly considered a separate sense.
The reason I say this is because one’s sense of balance is very strongly tied to visual input. One can sit perfectly still and watch a movie that will cause him to experience vertigo.
Balance is the result of our brains reconciling input from our other senses, but I don’t think it can be considered a sense of its own.
Each of the five traditional senses is tied to an organ that intercepts physical stimuli. Based on these stimuli, these organs then send signals to the brain, which make sense (no pun intended) of the impulses to form an external reality.
Sight :: eyes/retina
Sound :: ears/cochlea, tympanic membrane
Smell :: nose/olfactory bulb
Touch :: skin/receptor cells
Taste :: tongue/taste buds
If you follow the pattern as I’ve outlined it above as a definition of a sense, then it’s clear that one should add “balance” to the list, with its corresponding organ, the propriorecepters in the inner ear.
I think there are six basic senses, with the “balance” sense being left out for so long because its receptors were hidden (or at least less obvious) and their function less intuitive.
Every one of the 5 recognized senses seem to determine the state of other objects or our environment. Our sight tells us what things look like (color, placement), our hearing interprets sounds, etc.
A sense of balance or levelness doesn’t tell us anything about our environment or another object, only our relation to the ground. Because of this difference I feel it isn’t a separate sense, rather a byproduct of data from our other senses (touch, sight, hearing)
As far as I’m concerned, if there is a separate part of the brain wherein a particular neural signal is interpreted, that’s a sense. Balance and equilibrium fall into that category, as do pain (which uses different nerve endings than touch), kinesthesis (using the aformentioned propriorecptors) and the five “traditional” senses. If one extends the definition to anything for which we have sensory apparati, the number can go up to as high as 20 (see this entry at HowStuffWorks).
“Touch” can also be split into several separate senses: Temperature, pressure, pain, etc, all use different sensors.
Explain, please, how the receptors in my ear were affected by the visual display I experienced in Columbus Ohio’s COSI (Center of Science and Industry)- a dark walkway through a spinning tube of lights.
Standing beyond the edge of it, I was able to easily witness the spinning and the walkway. Immediately upon stepping forward enough to have the rotating lights fill my vision (including peripheral), I began leaning in the direction counter to the spin of the tube I was walking through.
I’ve seen others so affected that they were reduced to crawling along the floor while most, like myself, merely have to clutch the handrails.
My balance was most certainly affected by my vision alone. How?
thinksnow:
A perfect example of what I was talking about! I was there about three months ago. I happily walked across that room, while my wife and kids were practically scared to. To convince them that there’s nothing scary about the walkway, I started doing a little dance at the far end. After about 5 seconds, I couldn’t keep my balance without holding one of the rails.
If balance is a distinct sense, this shouldn’t really happen.
Chaim Mattis Keller
because your brain interprets its sense of position from more than just the labyrinth in the inner ear. Conflicting data from sight and touch cause central nervous system confusion.
Proprioception is thought by many neurophysiologists to represent a true 6th sense, with input from many different types of receptors, and processing in several areas of the brain.
Head Righting Reflex (HRR), which should emerge between 2 to 3 moths after birth, adjusts the eye and neck muscles to compensate for each movement of the head or body and is part of the oculo-vestibular system. A lack of this reflex results in inaccurate and/or inadequate sensory information reaching the brain about the body’s position in space. This poor interaction of responsive muscle tone and posture manifests itself in problems with balance and eye functioning. Poor co-ordination of sequential movements, difficulty with spatial relations and problems in selective attention (particularly auditory) are all concomitant with such faulty vestiblar processing. De Quiros (1976) points out that, ‘vestibular-oculo-motor pathways control the skilled movements of the eyes which are essential for establishing the correct relationship between motion and space
This is a quote from this site
http://www.patoss-dyslexia.org/neuro.htm
I don’t know why it posted when I pasted it to the reply box!
Anyhow, I thought it was pertinent to the discussion.
I’ve always seen the term describing the sense of your body’s position in space as as proprioception not proprioreception.
All our senses are somewhat imperfect :
Vision : Only limited spectrum is seen. And there are myraids of optical illusions.
Touch: When I started learning about temperature, the first thing I was told was our touch sense is imperfect when it comes to temperature.
Hearing : Limited sound spectrum again.
Taste : Well, the tongue has defined taste buds and again not a perfect system - I read about how the tongue cannot detect taste if u touch the material to a different region of tongue. Many poisons are also not detected by taste.
Smell: Dogs do a much better job.
IMHO just because a sense is imperfect is not grounds for saying its not a sense.
**If balance is a distinct sense, this shouldn’t really happen.
Chaim Mattis Keller**
There is no reason why it shouldn’t happen. Have you ever tried to eat something while holding on to your nose? I kow i can’t taste a thing. But we still have taste as a distinct sense. Whats stopping us from saying that balance is like taste, that it needs other senses for it to work properly. Like sight and touch.
Or better yet, ever tried eating your favorite food in a room full of fresh feces? A strong smell can seemingly wipe out one’s taste receptors. Perhaps visual input is somehow overriding the balance sense in cmkeller’s “spinning” tube.
Couldn’t a blind person navigate that tube? Is it easier with eyes shut?