The Five Senses

I read an article the other day that stated that we have more than the usual five senses that people talk about. However, they were not talking about extrasensory perception and so I was not as greatly interested as I had been when I read the title of the article. Not that I’m necessarily a believer in such things as ESP, but I am also not a total disbeliever. I’ve had too many strange things happen to me over the years to discount it altogether.

Traditionally, the five senses are taste, touch, smell, sight and hearing. But there are all the sensations of our bodies to take into consideration. Or at least that was the thrust of the article. Rumbling stomach, churning intestines and the like seemed to come under the heading of “other senses.”

Okay. For me, that’s all a bit iffy. Because for years, I’ve sort of looked at it as if there is really only one sense and that would be touch.

Think about it. Photons land on the retina and you have vision. Molecules land on receptors in your nose and you have smell. All sorts of things sit on your tongue and you taste them. Sound waves bump into your eardrum and you hear. All sorts of things make contact with your body all day long and so you have the feeling of things touching you.

It’s all basically about things touching things. So maybe Touch should be the main heading and all the others should be subheadings.

But consider this, without our brains to interpret all that incoming touch data, what would we have? All of it, touch, taste, smell, hearing and seeing all go on in the brain.

So, are there really any senses at all?

That’s my thought for the day.

Published by Dianne Lehmann


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