How many senses do we actually have?

Question

Some say just the regular 5 are considered actual senses, but other people say we have up to 10, even more... and they seem much more important to us than taste and touch for example...

I remember someone saying about our sense of equilibrium and stuff like that... what about senses like these that no one talks about but we clearly have?

Answer 1

well, i think that humans are a very special beings since we have so many special ties compare to other living things. but to know exactly how many senses we have is quite impossible. that is because not all of our senses can be pr oven scientifically (at least for now). so, I'll stick with the 5 senses that have been proven.

Answer 2

the 6 obvious ones, plus proprioception. " the sense of the relative position of neighbouring parts of the body"

any more for any more?

Answer 3

The only ones I ever heard of are see, hear, taste, touch, and smell...

Answer 4

I always thought it was just the standard 5 senses but come to think of it your right there do seem to be alot more.

Answer 5

Weleres 5 obviously .. sight, hearing, smell, touch and feel but then I do believe that there is at least a sixth sense where for instance you can tell something is wrong, you are in danger etc subconciously.

Answer 6

It depends on how thin you want to slice them. "Touch" can be divided into pressure, pain, hot, cold and (possibly) tickling. "Taste" can be divided into sweet, salty, bitter, sour and umami (savory). "Smell" can be divided into at least dozens of different aromas. Talk to a professional wine- or beer-taster for a description of just the ones involved in those fields. "Sight" involves brightness and a myriad colors. "Hearing" involves perception of loudness and frequency. Kinesthetic senses involve proprioception and balance.

How many senses do you want to have? Adjust your classification accordingly.

Answer 7

There are definitely more than 5. The ability to feel heat and cold is another sense.

Answer 8

There was an answer to this in a book i read. Apparently some scientists are argueing that we have as many as 29 senses in our body (or was it 27?).

Yeah but we have other senses that are less well known as well, a sense of balance, for example, is actually a sense. Then the sense of touch can be broken down into pressure sensing, temperature, etc.. im not sure, but im pretty confident that humans also have a very slight sensitivity to electromagnetic fields. Possibly the reason why sleeping on the other side of your bed helps you nod off, or indeed, awareness of somebody behind you, without hearing or seeing them.

Answer 9

well,there's see,hear,touch,taste,and smell.

Answer 10

The thing is, nobody can agree on exactly how many senses we have, though it's generally agreed it's at least nine, and perhaps as many as 21 or more, depending on what you count as a sense and how you subdivide them.

The traditional "five senses" model - sight, hearing, taste, smell and touch - dates back to the time of Aristotle, and is still taught to this day, but it is not really adequate to describe all the senses. Balance is not accounted for among those - while we do use visual cues to assist with equilibrium, we have specialised vestibular organs, the semicircular canals in our inner ears, that do most of the work. Sensing pain and temperature sometimes get lumped together with "touch" in the five senses model, but this is an oversimplification - there are different nerve endings that the handle different sensations of touch, pressure, heat, cold and pain. And even those can get subdivided further - pain can be classed as cutaneous (skin), somatic (bones, joints and muscles) and visceral (organs). Then there's the less obvious sense of proprioception, the sense of our body's own positioning and movement (such as how you're able to touch your own nose with your eyes closed - your body can sense where the limb is moving with no other cues). The numbers climb further if one subdivides other senses too - counting taste not as one sense but five because we have five different types of taste receptor on our tongues, for example.

Things are so often a lot more complicated than the simplified ideas we are taught in school!

Answer 11

We have billons of nerves in our body that help us with or main 5 senses. The 5 senses are like catagories. In feel you would have your skin. In sight you have your eyes and anything that works to function the should go under the sight catagory. Things can go under more thatn one catagory. For instance our brain goes under all five will our pupal goes under only sight.

Answer 12

we have more than 5 senses. That's old school thought