this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2025
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Five senses; taste, touch, smell, sight, hearing, acceleration, temperature, body configuration, pain, balance, time, hunger....
You are missing CO² chemoception. Our lungs tell us if there is a lot stale air, but not if we are in a pure nitrogen environment.
And interestingly: no sense for wetness.
Getting the washing off the line...time to play "is it still wet, or just cold"
Walking/riding in a thin rain coat, the sensation of rain telling your body you're completely soaked, while dry as a bone underneath.
Facts.
Acceleration, temperature, body configuration (positioning), pain, balance and hunger are all related to touch in one way or another.
Time, however, is legit. Along with emotion. Maybe you could call the 6th sense cognition?
Proprioception (body config) is actually feedback from the muscles.
Also they forget or were unaware of the most interesting sense: CO² chemoception. It is how our lungs tell if we need air.
In theory we can break down the sense of sight into subcomponents, too. It's only the visual cortex that processes those raw inputs into a coherent single perception. We have two eyes but generally only perceive one image, even if the stereoscopic vision gives us a good estimate of distance, and one eye being closed or obscured or blinded fails pretty gracefully into still perceiving a single image.
We have better low light sensitivity in our color-blind rods but only have color perception from our cones, and only in the center of our visual field, but we don't actually perceive the loss of color in those situations.
So yeah, someone putting a warm hand on my back might technically set off different nerve sensors for both temperature and touch, but we generally perceive it as a unified "touch" perception.
Similarly, manipulating vision and sound might very well throw off one's proprioception, because it's all integrated in how it's perceived.
Isn't acceleration just a sense of balance? Like you feel acceleration because the whatever fluid moves in your ears due to acceleration which is the same as balance.
I was going to say you have a static sense of what orientation you are in, e.g. you can tell standing up Vs lying on your front/back/side without relying on other senses and that feels different to the sensation of moving...
But thinking about it I guess the orientation sense is just detecting acceleration due to gravity?
I guess so, but similar to how a lot of taste is actually perceived via smell? I suppose linear and angular acceleration could be two separate senses which encompass the sense of balance.
Eh, it's not really similar though. Yes, a lot of what we think of as "taste" is actually perceived via smell. But separately from that, there is actually a phsyiological sensation of taste that is unrelated to smell, i.e. the five basic tastes: sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and savoury.
Whereas there isn't really any meaningful distinction between the sense of acceleration and balance. They're exactly the same sensation, and the mind only knows which one you're actually experiencing by cross-referencing what your other senses tell you. If you're in a situation where these other senses are unavailable, people generally can't distinguish whether they're accelerating or off balance.
This has led to a number of plane crashes in history, in situations where pilots are in dense cloud cover and can't see the horizon. During stressful situations, if they forget to look at the artificial horizon display, they think the plane is pitching up, and therefore try to pitch down to correct, when in fact the plane is accelerating (due to already being pitched down), resulting in a crash.
well, theres the sense of taste, referring to sweet, salt, sour, bitter and umami. then separately theres the sense of smell, sensing what we call aromas. These are two separate senses.
Our perception of taste could be argued includes the two senses
i'd say the somatogravic illusion being a thing kind of proves you right.
it is why kobe bryant helicopter crashed. the pilot lost in a fog thought he is going up, when he was just accelerating down really fast. there is air crash investigation episode about it.