When I was in an Oral Interpretation class in college we had to take a poem and list all the “sense appeals” in it. When I mentioned the “sense of time” the instructor ridiculed the choice and made a class example of my “error.”
That said, do you consider that you have other senses beyond
I suppose it could be argued that there is also a sense of self, ie mind or ego.
Proprioception is an organism’s sense of where its body and parts are in space. It also allows you to eat with a fork without stabbing yourself in the eye.
A sense of fashion? E.g. knowing that cocktail dresses and sneakers so don’t go together?
I think it’s fair to think of senses of
balance
direction
if those are different from the ones y’all mentioned.
Scooped. Was going to say “kinesthesia”, but it’s mostly (although not entirely, apparently) the same as proprioception.
I think one could argue that interoception is different from touch, as well, as it’s a sense of what’s going on inside your body instead of what’s outside. Pheromone reception might be considered different from smell, since it’s generally not a conscious perception.
Wikipedia has some other senses as well.
Is touch the same as feel? Cause I get a specific yet indescribable “feeling” before a cold or allergies are coming on. Not painful, not achy, just a weird feeling. Not sure if “touch” captures it.
Also, some people get premonitions…
The sense of acceleration. Speed doesn’t quite cover it, because you can be going quite fast and still feel nothing (due to inertia). But going from 0-60 is a feeling, indeed.
Wouldn’t that just be touch?
There’s that sense that someone is watching or following you.
Here is a citation of sorts, though I have no idea how reputable the site is or the people mentioned.
I have some kind of sense of feel. I can mentally go over choices and feel a “bump” over the good one.
Smision.
I don’t think so. Even if you’re in a car or elevator and the air and all surfaces you’re in contact with are functionally motionless relative to your body, you can still tell when you’re accelerating.
First of all, several of the “five senses” can be broken down further. For instance, “touch” includes senses for heat, cold, contact, pressure, and pain, which are handled by different nerves.
It can be tricky to know how far to break things down, though. Should “taste” be broken down into sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and savory? What, then, of smell, which has so many components they haven’t all been identified? Is vision in different color channels different senses, or all part of one sense? What about hearing in different frequency bands?
And interoception, mentioned by Kaio, is a whole host of different senses, operating through completely different mechanisms. The sense of needing to pee, for instance, is a mechanical process, but the sense that you’ve held your breath for too long is a chemical one.
And then there are senses which are documented to exist in at least some animals, but for which it’s unclear whether humans have them very faintly, or not at all. Can we detect magnetic fields, like pigeons? Or electric fields, like roaches and sharks? Certainly not very easily, but it wouldn’t be a huge surprise to learn that we have at least some sense of them.
Balance is something of a composite sense, since it integrates information from our senses of gravity, acceleration, proprioception, and vision.
The sense of acceleration is quite different from touch (which itself includes a number of distinct senses), and relies on completely different organs. Gravity and linear acceleration are sensed by the otoliths of the inner ear, and rotational acceleration by the semicircular canals.
The idea that there are just five senses is really a holdover from classical times. Depending on how you count them, we have at least a dozen and perhaps more than twenty senses.
The five senses, in Cartesian philosophy, correspond to mouth, nose, eyes, ears, and skin. There is another sense “above” these - a sixth sense - the common sense coordinating the other sense “organs”. I remember something Descartes wrote about the pineal gland. And everyone has common sense…
The Animaniacs “The Senses” Song… has a lovely plethora of 'em…
My favorite: Sense of impending doom.
Though Astroboy14’s smision is a good one too.
Humor
I think most people can tell which is the heavier of two very, very similar weights just by holding them, but whether that’s a separate sense than ‘touch’, I don’t know.