Sense-ability

We all have five senses, right? Sight, smell, taste, touch, and hearing. Everybody knows that.

Don’t they?

Don’t we have more, if you think about it?

The five traditional senses were first identified by Aristotle roughly 2,350 years ago. Many things Aristotle taught have been perceived as writ in stone. Many things he was dead wrong on, such as inertia (bodies in motion). It took an intellect like Thomas Aquinas’s to “Christianize” Aristotle’s thought. But much of what the ancient Greek philosopher taught, such as the fact we have five senses, persist to this day.

In fact, we have much more than five senses.

What other senses might we have (assuming we stick to reality, and not anything extra- or super-real)?

What other things, beside light, odor, taste, touch, and sound, can we sense?

Consider the following:


Balance
Acceleration
Pain
Body and limb position
Relative temperature
Time
Itching
Pressure
Hunger
Thirst
Fullness of the stomach (satiation)
Need to urinate/defecate
Blood carbon dioxide levels


Most researchers who’ve, er, researched this come up with a range of sense-items, usually from 9 to 20 and containing many listed above.

Just something interesting I came across surfing the web at lunch at work yesterday.