I’d consider that part of proprioception, since it entails gauging how much muscular effort is being used to hold up the two weights. You aren’t exactly sensing the mass of the weights themselves, but rather estimating it by using your muscles.
I know people who can feel when I look at them.
Wouldn’t a sense of gravity and acceleration be a part of propioception? Both are sensing the movement of your body through space.
Have you tried this under rigorous conditions? Think of the objections James Randi would raise; does it still work?
It would be fascinating to know what the underlying mechanism is!
My reason for skepticism is that such a skill – being able to tell when someone is watching you – would have such a huge survival benefit, evolution would almost certainly have bestowed it on, not only all people, but all mammals!
I really wonder what s/he had to say, because I think it’s pretty arguable that humans do have a sense of time (and more than 5 senses, at that). How else are we to tell that multiple sensory events took place in a given period, in order to establish the existence of something, as a whole? How would we even reference that it did happen, in order to reflect on it (and not in a vacuum)?
I don’t know the specifics of the rest in any detail, but the link, below, elaborates.
The gist of his comments was that Time is an intellectual and not a sensory concept and thus has no “organ(s)” to do the detecting. In fairness to the old guy (he was old at the time; testing the concept of an afterlife nowadays) my poem to analyze for “sense appeals” was Thanatopsis, which I had memorized in high school and which started me on my way to an agnostic approach to matters of that sort. I have forgotten which passages made me suspect that a “sense of time” was being appealed to.
Wiki redirects that to Bender (Futurama), but the article doesn’t have any reference to it. Google doesn’t pull up much more, although one dictionary says it’s a combination of smell & vision. Another site says it was listed by Bender, but left undefined. Which would be more true?
I’d vote that he was wrong, especially if he hadn’t referenced “organ(s)” when originally discussing senses. I’ve had anesthesia that interfered with my sense of time and anesthesia that didn’t. When it does, it’s really spooky. Although maybe what it interfered with mostly was my memory.
No.
Some spontaneously occurring real-life phenomena are extremely difficult to recreate under artificially arranged circumstances in a laboratory. I suspect that this may be one of them.
Technical term: the Vestibular system
I haven’t seen anyone mention hunger yet. Hard to categorise that as one of the “traditional five”
I wonder how the professor would have responded to the concept of “circadian rhythm”, then.
I’d agree, time is abstract and partially an intellectual process, but its also intuitive. Coupled to this, while we certainly do have dedicated sensory organs, the processing is still handled by the brain (itself an organ).
As someone stated, though, I think the first question is how one chooses to define a “sense”.
“Senses are physiological capacities of organisms that provide data for perception.” - Wikipedia
“any of the physical processes by which stimuli are received, transduced, and conducted as impulses to be interpreted to the brain.” -Free Dictionary
Proprioception is generally considered a sense of where the various parts of your body are based on feedback from your muscles and tendons. You have a sense of this even in the absence of gravity. The sense largely comes from stretch receptors in the muscles.
Gravity and acceleration are sensed by completely different receptors in the inner ear. Of course, these do have an input on your muscles so the can contribute to proprioception, but you would be able to sense them even in the absence of sensory input from muscles.
Such phenomena are best assumed to not actually occur, unless they can be reliably demonstrated. Your acquaintances can’t actually sense when you are looking at them in the absence of other input.
Good points. I can only suspect that this old guy was much like many (if not most) of the instructors I encountered in those days. They were big on passing on their “knowledge” without being bothered with hearing yours. Too many “teachers” think things are a one-way street, and I doubt this old boy would have understood (or been interested in hearing) the responses in this thread. After all, this was early 1960’s and younger people weren’t permitted to have novel or unconventional ideas! 
You’ve just summed up my four years of college.
irony?
Perhaps this is one of those places where propioception and kinesthesia differ, then. Or proprioception is one part of kinesthesia? I tend to think of kinesthesia as a sense of where my body is in space, which includes knowing my hand is in front of my face even if my eyes are closed, and knowing when I’m hanging upside-down from the trapeze even with my eyes closed.
For the record, my kinesthesia got horribly confused the first few times I did hang upside-down. The instructor was telling me to move my leg behind me, and I had no idea which way that was, even with eyes open. 