Is it time to do away with the "5 senses" paradigm?

[Maia_s_Well]

This is not about anything paranormal or supernatural, please. I’m not talking about a “sixth sense” in some ooga booga way. I’m talking about senses like this.

Way back in grade school, I remember asking a teacher why we were learning about only five senses. I specifically asked about our sense of balance, and she pretty much brushed me off, saying something like, “that’s not really one of the main senses.”

So, what I’m wanting to know is:

Are we still mostly teaching kids, “you have five senses” as though that’s all the senses we have?

If so, there seems to me to be some problems with this, beginning with the simple fact that this information is, at best, incomplete. But I also see (and have experienced) some problems with this paradigm in terms of how we sometimes ignore sensory information about our bodies. For example, most of us would rush to the doctor pretty quick if we suddenly couldn’t see or hear. But what would you do if your sense of balance was a little off? Or, as another example, would you be willing to go to a doctor and say, “I can’t tell where my arms are unless I’m looking at them”? Or, “rollercoasters don’t feel right to me anymore.” What I’m suggesting with these examples is that we teach children that there are only five senses, so maybe they don’t learn to pay attention to their other senses and they certainly don’t learn the language needed to express what they’re sensing.

One of the other problems I see came to my attention in a philosophy class I took years ago. In the first day’s lecture, the professor talked about the part our “five senses” play in the formation of our philosophy as the mechanisms by which we gather data about the world. I raised my hand and asked about other senses, and he blew me off with a “we’re not discussing anything paranormal in this class” (presumably he thought I was asking about a “sixth sense”). My point is, if we are limiting ourselves to data gathered by only five senses, are we cutting ourselves off from data that might help us in scientific and philosophical pursuits?

Your thoughts and experiences are appreciated.

[begbert2]

The five senses thing is just a label - rather arbitrary. It’s like of like how they say there are seven continents - despite europe being quite snuggled up with asia. Similarly I don’t think that you’ll be laughed out of the doctor’s office for referring to an inner ear problem as a “loss of my sense of balance”.

[Bryan_Ekers]

The OP’s right, but good luck overcoming linguistic inertia.

[Miller]

I don’t know that I’d include balance with the other five senses. The “classic” senses are things that allow you to perceive the world around you. Your sense of balance is how you perceive something about yourself. Seems like a relevant distinction, to me.

The other senses listed in the OP’s link look like subdivisions of “touch.”

[Liberal]

Balance does sort of help you perceive the world around you. It tells you, for example, that you’re on a hill or a flat plane.

[Colibri]

@Miller

I don’t know that I’d include balance with the other five senses. The “classic” senses are things that allow you to perceive the world around you. Your sense of balance is how you perceive something about yourself. Seems like a relevant distinction, to me.

“Balance” actually includes a couple of distinct sensory modalities. We have a sense of gravity, in that we can tell which way is down, mediated by the otolithic organs in the inner ear. We also sense acceleration with these organs, and rotation with the semicircular canal. Certainly the sense of gravity is sensing the world around you; you could argue that the others are internal senses, but they are actually sensing not your own body but its movements through space.

Recognizing five senses is a totally arbitrary formulation. “Touch” is a compendium of multiple senses, some of which don’t involve actually touching anything at all. There are distinct receptors for heat, cold, light pressure, deep pressure, and pain. Pain itself could be categorized as “how you perceive something about yourself,” especially in the case of internal pain such as a stomach ache.

There is some discussion of the variety of senses here in Wiki; they include exteroceptive senses such as the traditional five and balance, plus interoceptive and proprioceptive senses about the body itself.

The traditional five senses are sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste: a classification attributed to Aristotle.[2] Humans are considered to have at least five additional senses that include: nociception (pain), equilibrioception (balance), proprioception & kinesthesia (joint motion and acceleration), sense of time, thermoception (temperature differences), with possibly an additional weak magnetoception (direction)[3], and six more if interoceptive senses are also considered.

Other interoceptive senses include stomach or bladder fullness, body temperature, and so on.

The classification of how to classify senses is a complex one, and certainly not done justice by considering only the traditional five.

[The_Tao_s_Revenge]

@Miller

I don’t know that I’d include balance with the other five senses. The “classic” senses are things that allow you to perceive the world around you. Your sense of balance is how you perceive something about yourself. Seems like a relevant distinction, to me.

The other senses listed in the OP’s link look like subdivisions of “touch.”

You saying which way is up isn’t data about the world around you?

[Der_Trihs]

@Miller

I don’t know that I’d include balance with the other five senses. The “classic” senses are things that allow you to perceive the world around you. Your sense of balance is how you perceive something about yourself. Seems like a relevant distinction, to me.

Not really; the senses extend to the inside of the body to a degree ( especially pain ). And to a degree the sense of balance does tell you about the outside world; the direction that gravity is pulling.

[Little_Nemo]

A sense of balance is simply the ability to sense external gravity. As such I feel it’s as valid a sense as any of the main five.

The ability to sense temperatures is perhaps more questionable. If I put my hand over a fire or a block of ice I can sense if they’re hot or cold. But am I actually sensing the temperatures directly or am I just touching the air around the fire or ice? Can a person sense whether something is hot if it’s in a vacuum?

[Frylock]

@Little_Nemo

A sense of balance is simply the ability to sense external gravity. As such I feel it’s as valid a sense as any of the main five.

The ability to sense temperatures is perhaps more questionable. If I put my hand over a fire or a block of ice I can sense if they’re hot or cold. But am I actually sensing the temperatures directly or am I just touching the air around the fire or ice? Can a person sense whether something is hot if it’s in a vacuum?

There’s no single sense of touch anyway. There’s temperature sense, pressure sense, roughness sense, and I think a few more besides.

[The_Tao_s_Revenge]

@Little_Nemo

A sense of balance is simply the ability to sense external gravity. As such I feel it’s as valid a sense as any of the main five.

The ability to sense temperatures is perhaps more questionable. If I put my hand over a fire or a block of ice I can sense if they’re hot or cold. But am I actually sensing the temperatures directly or am I just touching the air around the fire or ice? Can a person sense whether something is hot if it’s in a vacuum?

Yep, for heat anyway. My cite: sunlight. Infrared, which things with heat radiate, transmits heat.

Cold objects, no way naturally. There’s no cooling anti-heat kind of light for cold, except scientists with tricky lasers. Heat is vibration, and if a photon coming from the right direction smacks the atom from the right direction at the right time it sheds more energy in photons then it got from the impact. The loss of the energy cools the atom. Think of it like running into a kid on swing. When he’s at the bottom of the arc, and all his energy is kinetic, if swings into something he’ll stop, and lose all his energy, but if he’s at the highest point in arc, where he’s not moving at all and all his energy is potential, he’ll keep all his energy and accelerate when whatever it is gets out of his way. This is how they cooled rubidium atoms down to -459.67F to make a Bose-Einstein Condensate. Normally light strikes atom in such a way that the atom gains energy, but it’s possible to knock some energy off.

So in other words it’s possible to transmit a “cold” sensation through a vacuum, but bloody well not easy, to say the least.

Edit:On second thought, could a negative mass photon exist? What would happen if it hit something? Would it eat some of the energy and cool it, or just eat some of the mass?

[Maia_s_Well]

Thanks for all the responses, especially those who mentioned that a sense of balance does tell you something about the world. This was my initial problem with categorizing senses such as balance outside of mechanisms to interpret data taken in from outside of ourselves.

But I think there may be a bigger problem here (with teaching kids “humans have five senses”). Aside from the fact that it’s not accurate, it seems to me we are missing something rather large. The idea that we only count the senses that “tell us about the world” (and, as pointed out above, some of our other senses do relate to the external) seems to underscore the human tendency to see ourselves as somehow separate from “the world”, as though our bodies are somehow outside of natural systems. Please understand (since I’m probably not making myself very clear) that I am not suggesting that teachers stand in front of their classes and say, “we are not part of the natural world.” I’m simply suggesting that this misinformation about human systems may be one small factor in a more pervasive, although unspoken, paradigm.

There are other reasons, I think, that we hobble our children a bit with this paradigm. Since abstract concept are more difficult for some children to learn, whenever you can make something concrete (something they can sense), they often learn pretty quickly. If we can engage, for example, a child’s senses to teach the child about physics, by taking them on the swings or merry-go-round, we’ve provided a way for a child to literally feel physics in action.

It seems to me that our brains and bodies are our starting points to interpret the universe. Seems only sensical to me that learning about our own bodies would allow us to be more discerning about the data we’re taking in.

All of this is even more interesting to me now than when I was a little girl, because I have MS, which has fried some of these other senses in me (many of these are senses I didn’t know I had until they went screwy). Also, I have an autistic daughter and have spent quite a bit of time with special needs kids, and I’ve seen…well, I’ve seen lots of stuff I can’t explain. Yet. But one of the things that most of these kids seem to have in common is atypical sensory reactions.

BTW, a note about “touch”. I don’t think “touch” is a good catch-all for all the other senses, although I can certainly understand the concept, since many of the other senses produce some kind of “feeling” in the body. However, try this as a fun little experiment. Stand up, close your eyes, and then hold your arms out perpendicular to your body. Make sure your arms are even (held at the same height), and make sure you’re not touching anything else. While you’re doing that, ask yourself what senses are informing you. How do you know, for example, if your arms are even with your eyes closed? Are you sure you’re holding them at the same height? How do you know? Then, try flapping your arms, again, with your eyes closed. How do you know your arms are moving? (they are moving, aren’t they?) Aside from mebbe the feeling of air displacement on your skin as your arms move, would you call the other senses you feel senses of “touch”?

We don’t seem to have a lot of good, accessible words to talk about senses. It seems to me that, as a result, we’re missing some data.

[Colibri]

@Little_Nemo

The ability to sense temperatures is perhaps more questionable. If I put my hand over a fire or a block of ice I can sense if they’re hot or cold. But am I actually sensing the temperatures directly or am I just touching the air around the fire or ice? Can a person sense whether something is hot if it’s in a vacuum?

There are two different kinds of thermoreceptors, one for heat and one for cold.

The adequate stimulus for a warm receptor is warming, which results in an increase in their action potential discharge rate. Cooling results in a decrease in warm receptor discharge rate. For cold receptors their firing rate increases during cooling and decreases during warming.

So sensing depends on the actually heating or cooling of the receptors. Someone could sense that something is hot even in a vacuum since it is emitting infrared radiation that will warm the skin. Pit vipers (and some other snakes) have specialized infrared receptors located on pits on the face that enable them to track warm blooded prey. However, I don’t think you would be able to sense a cold object in a vacuum. It would have to have some medium by which heat could be transmitted from your body to lower your skin temperature.

[Colibri]

@Maia_s_Well

However, try this as a fun little experiment. Stand up, close your eyes, and then hold your arms out perpendicular to your body. Make sure your arms are even (held at the same height), and make sure you’re not touching anything else. While you’re doing that, ask yourself what senses are informing you. How do you know, for example, if your arms are even with your eyes closed? Are you sure you’re holding them at the same height? How do you know? Then, try flapping your arms, again, with your eyes closed. How do you know your arms are moving? (they are moving, aren’t they?)

This sense of body position has a specific name, proprioception. Receptors in your muscles and joints tell you how your body is positioned, even when you are not using other senses. The sense of how your body is moving is referred to as kinesthesia; its relationship to proprioception is described in the article. These senses have nothing to do with touch.

[Maia_s_Well]

@Colibri

This sense of body position has a specific name, proprioception. Receptors in your muscles and joints tell you how your body is positioned, even when you are not using other senses. The sense of how your body is moving is referred to as kinesthesia; its relationship to proprioception is described in the article. These senses have nothing to do with touch.

Yes, I’m familiar with the term from my own experience. My proprioception is compromised, so the experiement doesn’t work well for me. With my eyes shut, I have no way of knowing exactly where my arms are, although I have a general sense of it. I no longer have a sense of my body as a cohesive unit, except when I’m in the water. My experience of motion (kinesetic sense, prolly misspelled, sorry) has changed. I don’t miss much of my old life, but I do admit I really miss rollercoasters. Used to love them! Now, my senses are so screwed up that a rollercoaster ride has an entirely different feel, and not a good one. The best way I can describe it is that I used to love the intense order of a coaster ride, but now the motion feels horribly off and chaotic. Wish I could find better words to describe it.

All of the sensory changes that have happened to me have actually been pretty fascinating, at times.

[EvilTOJ]

I don’t see ‘sense of humor’ on the list. Maia’s Wall, how did you lose your sense of proprioception?

[Maia_s_Well]

@EvilTOJ

I don’t see ‘sense of humor’ on the list. Maia’s Wall, how did you lose your sense of proprioception?

I have a few short circuits.

I have multiple sclerosis. It’s considered an autoimmune disease, and it chews up white matter (although in recent studies they’re finally starting to figure out that gray matter is damaged, as well, possibly even before white matter). Everyone who has MS has a different experience, but sensory problems are very common. It has done some interesting, if inconveniencing, things to me.

Fortunately, my sense of humor has only improved, so mebbe that one’s not hard-wired!

[njtt]

According to these guys, there is really only one sense!

I think the idea, roughly, is that in practice our different types of sense receptors are always working together to tell us about the world around us and our situation in it, and if you insist about thinking about each sense in isolation you get a false idea of what is really going on.

Behavioral and Brain Sciences is pretty much the leading scientific journal in the cognitive sciences, by the way, although it does like to publish controversial stuff. This is not scientific orthodoxy, but it it is not whacko either. Stuff does not get into BBS without very rigorous peer review. (A lot more rigorous than most scientific journals. Believe me, I know! :()

[Machine_Elf]

@EvilTOJ

I don’t see ‘sense of humor’ on the list. Maia’s Wall, how did you lose your sense of proprioception?

Didn’t see a smiley, so I’m giving a straight answer. Sense of humor is not about colllecting a new type of data; it’s simply a way of processing the data derived from the traditional senses. Hear a joke, hear a funny sound, read a joke, watch slapstick, maybe even taste/touch/smell something that makes you laugh.

[Colibri]

@njtt

I think the idea, roughly, is that in practice our different types of sense receptors are always working together to tell us about the world around us and our situation in it, and if you insist about thinking about each sense in isolation you get a false idea of what is really going on.

True enough. What we perceive as taste is actually an integration of smell and taste. Our “sense of balance” depends on an integration of the senses of gravity, acceleration, rotation, sight, proprioception, and kinesthesia. “Touch” is a compendium of inputs from a variety of quite different sensors.