Do people really have only 5 senses?

Most of us agree that people have five senses. Sure, because if not, the famous movie about a boy who can sense mysteries has not been named "The Sixth Sense".

Every day, we live on the ability to see, hear, taste, smell and touch (touch). All of those senses are extremely important and in particular, the life of every human being will be much more difficult without one of these five senses.

However, the truth is that not everyone agrees with that number. They argue that it is not the correct number of senses to talk about how we know the world around us. Some experts have taken a great deal of research on human senses, and given mixed opinions. Some argue that humans actually have only three main senses, others boldly list the number of senses up to more than 1000.

People have five senses?

The principle of human five senses comes from Aristotle's De Anima (Discussing the Soul) , an ancient Greek philosopher and scientist. In this work, he discusses the nature of living organisms. He favored a whole chapter to talk about sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste. Today, these five senses are considered to be fundamental and sometimes used for reference before the authors want to mention certain more mystical, controversial topics.

Since then, there have been many other studies on human senses , but we still do not have a specific definition. The definition we still know about the senses is "a part of the nervous system that helps us feel the stimuli of the environment outside the body". Another sensory definition according to Jessica Cerratini: "is a system of the body consisting of a group of sensory cells that not only respond to specific physical impulses, but also connect to an area. specific brain ".

Picture 1 of Do people really have only 5 senses?
The principle of five senses of human origin dates back to ancient Greece.

As mentioned above, "people with five senses" seem to have been standardized and considered a knowledge base for anyone who wants to delve deeper into this issue, but we have inadvertently forgotten that this actually a hypothesis.

The senses have not been named

A lot of research on the senses then showed that, if neuroscientists go deeper into understanding the very specific definitions of the senses, they will discover many more senses that have not been placed. Name. Here are some examples of interesting "senses" we still experience everyday:

  1. Close your eyes and place your right index finger at the left elbow. Do you have any difficulties?
  2. You stand up, close your eyes, relax. I will help you tilt it to one side. Do you feel your body position tilting gradually?
  3. You sit on a car standing still, close your eyes, maybe even cover your ears if you want. When the car moves, do you feel that the car is on or off? Even when it accelerates or slows down, can you feel it?

Through the above cases, you will realize that if the perception of the human world is made with five individual senses, then we certainly will not get such feelings. They are more related to body positioning, which is a combination of touch and balance of the body. These capabilities also help us identify the senses around us, but have never been named specifically.

Some research

Some experts, in their research, have argued that the senses need to be defined by the forms of sensations we have, ie each different means of having one Different senses. This makes our five basic senses broken down into many different senses. For example, the same sense of touch, but our feeling of hot, cold, warm, cool, the sense of pain, the pressure on the skin . is very different. Or another example: the same taste, but we have many different feelings about sour, spicy, salty, sweet, about the heat, cold, the rancid taste . And if it follows this division logic , the number of 1000 human senses can be considered a reasonable hypothesis.

Others, on the other hand, think that the number of five senses is too much. According to their argument, people have only three main sensory groups , namely mechanics (including touch, hearing), chemistry (including tasting, smelling and sensations inside the body), and light. .

So what does it mean to study human senses? For people with sensory difficulties, sensory problems do not simply stop at the level of scientific answers.

Walfish - the author of "The Self-Aware Parent" - said: "Some children and adults are very sensitive to noise (hearing) or with contact (touch)." The crunching of clothes or the seams of clothing can be uncomfortable for those who are overly sensitive, she added: "Identifying and learning about sensitivity and level Your emotional injury will help protect us from situations that make us feel negative like frustration, misunderstanding, anger, and fear. "

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What kind of sense of balance can your balance be?(Image source: Pixabay Public Domain).

According to Walfish, experts who list too many senses (some experts list up to 20 senses) do not help parents deal with emotional problems of their children. They are just making the problem more complicated and confusing.

She also said: " The ability to keep balance and the ability to locate the distance between us and others can be considered as two senses." Many children and adults have encountered difficulties in these two areas. Doctors who are aware of these senses are easier to make treatment decisions for patients with sensory problems.

Conclude

Thus, we can see that there are many different studies on human senses. However, it should be recognized that there is no single, logical way to define the senses. It would be unreasonable to make the distinctions between senses, when in fact they are more or less mixed. Just like the color of food or sound in a restaurant will affect your taste. This also explains the story of dream forest: soldiers imagine the image of dreams, but their taste is what makes them crave and motivate them to go faster.

Therefore, if you can fully understand the world around you, just have fun and enjoy your life. Whether you have 3, have 5, or have thousands of senses, you are still the most complete and happy person in the world.