Saturday, November 10, 2012

The truth about how many senses we have

The questions of "How many senses do we have?" recently was brought up in class by our professor. After the conversation was had in class I decided to go on a google search to see what I could find out about this very question. So I opened up Google and typed in "how many senses do we have".
  Site one was from a Dr. Travis Langley, Professor of Psychology at Henderson State University he does not actually define the term sense he does note that there is more then the traditional five and comes up with a list of 10 main ones: sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch, heat, cold, pressure, pain, motion,and balance. He then continues on to talk about the difference between sensation and perception. Site two from TLC Family How stuff Works starts off by saying "The standard list of five senses doesn't really give our bodies credit for all of the amazing things they can do. There are at least a dozen different things we can sense." The site goes on to say "In order for us to have a sense, there needs to be a sensor". They then go through and break all different parts of our body down into sensors we have and come up with up to 20 different ones. I skipped over the next couple of sites as they were just yahoo forums and another forum where the same question I had asked was also asked and I wanted more reliable information. Next Wikipedia was listed. Wikipedia actually defined sense as "Senses are physiological capacities of organisms that provide data for perception". It then states "Human beings have a multitude of senses" and it goes on to list Sight, hearing, taste, smell,and touch as the basic five but then notes that the "ability to detect other stimuli beyond those governed by the traditional senses exists, including temperature (thermoception), kinesthetic sense (proprioception), pain (nociception), balance (equilibrioception), acceleration (kinesthesioception)[citation needed], and various internal stimuli (e.g. the different chemoreceptors for detecting salt and carbon dioxide concentrations in the blood), only a small number of these can safely be classified as separate senses in and of themselves. What constitutes a sense is a matter of some debate, leading to difficulties in defining what exactly a sense is." Further down on the page they state that "there is no firm agreement among neurologists as to the number of senses because of differing definitions of what constitutes a sense." At this point in my search the truth about how many senses there really are was becoming clearer... There is no true answer it is based on how the word is defined to you and what you classify as a sense. I at this point see the reason why we only teach student the basic five. I don't see any harm in the basic ten that the professor of psychology stated but the list of 20 plus is that really necessary common knowledge? I feel in some ways my knowledge of what a sense really is may be more blurred then it was before this question was even brought to my attention.
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