Come to Your Senses

[Synapse]

Unsure where this belongs so places this topic here. I found this article that talks about the idea of your 21 Senses and more quite intriguing.

Aristotle did some harm to the world of philosophy by proposing only five senses: vision, hearing, touch, taste, smell. How could he leave out balance?

Balance is a wonderful sense, ecstatic in its own way, with its own elaborate sensory structures in the inner ear, and its own pathways in the brain. Tilt your head to one side, and move it very slowly in some direction, and savor that sensation. Balance lets you walk with ease, and adds richness to every movement.

Sensory Modality
Vision
- Light
- Colour
- Red
- Green
- Blue

Hearing

Smell
- 2000 or more receptor types

Taste
- Sweet
- Salt
- Sour
- Bitter
- Umami

Touch
- Light Touch
- Pressure

Pain
- Cutaneous
- Somatic
- Visceral

Mechanoreception
- Balance
- Rotational acceleration
- Linear acceleration
- Proprioception - joint position
- Kinaesthesis
- Muscle stretch - Golgi tendon ogans
- Muscle stretch - muscle spindles

Temperature
- Heat
- Cold

Interoceptors
- Blood pressure
- Arterial blood pressure
- Central venious blood pressure
- Head blood temperature
- Blood oxygen content
- Cerebrospinal Fluid pH
- Plasma osmotic pressure (thirst?)
- Artery-vein blood glucose difference (hunger?)
- Lung inflation
- Bladder stretch
- Full stomach

 

[Synapse]

I'm going to explore this idea and look up the ideas listed later.
What are your thoughts? Do we have more than 21 senses unused or just 5 very well attuned senses?

 

[Lark]

I think Aristotle is a great thinker for a reason.

 

[NewEra]

Colour, Sweet, Salt, and Blood oxygen content are not senses.

I trust my man Aristotle.

 

[Polaris]

Really it comes down to semantics, but I consider there to be two senses: touch and taste. The other so-called senses, sight, smell and hearing, are not truly senses since they describe things that lie outside the body. Sight is the awareness of objects situated in space, hearing is the awareness of objects not situated in space, and smell is an awareness of the quality of either a specific object or the external world in general. (The difference between smell and qualities like ugliness is that words can only imply a smell, whereas ugliness is right from the start bound to language. Ugliness is an empty word, a void label that will take hold of anything it can reach and yet never touch it. Fragrance, on the other hand, is something that transcends words, or at least the ones we speak.)

 

[Lark]

I do think that Aristotle was spot on but I'm not surprised that someone has done this list, I would ask do you think its the work of a thinker or sensor? I'd say its a thinker

 

[Synapse]

Oh really, shucks and I thought I was onto a winner.

According to wiki

"A system that consists of a group of sensory cell types that responds to a specific physical phenomenon, and that corresponds to a particular group of regions within the brain where the signals are received and interpreted."

The traditional five senses are sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste as classified and attributed to Aristotle. Which is fair enough but it is limited. Like skeletal frame work that is missing some bones. Might have gotten the main attributes but neglected the finer detail.

 

[Synapse]

Humans are considered to have at least five additional senses that include:

Balance, equilibrioception, or vestibular sense is the sense which allows an organism to sense body movement, direction, and acceleration, and to attain and maintain postural equilibrium and balance. The organ of equilibrioception is the vestibular labyrinthine system found in both of the inner ears. Technically this organ is responsible for two senses of angular momentum and linear acceleration (which also senses gravity), but they are known together as equilibrioception.

The vestibular nerve conducts information from the three semicircular canals corresponding to the three spatial planes, the utricle, and the saccule. The ampulla, or base, portion of the three semicircular canals each contain a structure called a crista. These bend in response to angular momentum or spinning. The saccule and utricle, also called the "otolith organs", sense linear acceleration and thus gravity. Otoliths are small crystals of calcium carbonate that provide the inertia needed to detect changes in acceleration or gravity.

Thermoception sense is the sense of heat and the absence of heat (cold) by the skin and including internal skin passages, or rather, the heat flux (the rate of heat flow) in these areas. There are specialized receptors for cold (declining temperature) and to heat. The cold receptors play an important part in the dogs sense of smell, telling wind direction, the heat receptors are sensitive to infrared radiation and can occur in specialized organs for instance in pit vipers. The thermoceptors in the skin are quite different from the homeostatic thermoceptors in the brain (hypothalamus) which provide feedback on internal body temperature.

Proprioception, the kinesthetic sense, provides the parietal cortex of the brain with information on the relative positions of the parts of the body. Neurologists test this sense by telling patients to close their eyes and touch the tip of a finger to their nose. Assuming proper proprioceptive function, at no time will the person lose awareness of where the hand actually is, even though it is not being detected by any of the other senses. Proprioception and touch are related in subtle ways, and their impairment results in surprising and deep deficits in perception and action. [8]
[edit] Pain

Nociception (physiological pain) signals near-damage or damage to tissue. The three types of pain receptors are cutaneous (skin), somatic (joints and bones) and visceral (body organs). It was previously believed that pain was simply the overloading of pressure receptors, but research in the first half of the 20th century indicated that pain is a distinct phenomenon that intertwines with all of the other senses, including touch. Pain was once considered an entirely subjective experience, but recent studies show that pain is registered in the anterior cingulate gyrus of the brain.[9]

With possibly an additional weak magnetoception (direction)


And six more if interoceptive senses are also considered.

 

[Synapse]

Oh Synesthesia is mix of senses. It isn't in our imagination since there is a thread about http://www.typologycentral.com/forums/science-technology-future-tech/10983-synesthesia.html started by Penelope which is very interesting.

"Take the strange case of synaesthesia, a mixing of the senses. The most commonly reported forms are experiencing sounds, letters, numbers or words as colours. Synaesthesia is highly developed in some individuals, who were until quite recently dismissed as raving fantasists and sometimes even misdiagnosed as schizophrenic. They may speak of an aroma's texture or the taste of different letters of the alphabet. It may be possible to "hear" the taste of a peach or "feel" a colour. What this tells us is that the senses are less than primary, and that perception is what we really get."

 

[Tamske]

We have balance and acceleration sensors at our ears... whenever someone speaks of a "sixth sense" I think "Acceleration or some paranormal illusion?"

 

[KDude]

"Hearing" the taste of a peach "smells" like bullshit to me.

 

[Synapse]

"Hearing" the taste of a peach "smells" like bullshit to me.

Wait "Smelling" the sound of a peach "tastes" like bullshit.

 

[Synapse]

As to the mixed sense it is real for some people, but of course I'm merely trying to illustrate that neurologists consider there to be more than 5 senses, more like 9.

With
Thermoception - the sense of heat
Nociception - the perception of pain
Equilibrioception - the perception of balance and
Proprioception - the perception of body awareness as credible senses so there.

While Aristotle was right, he neglected some.

And not happy with up to 21 senses then eco-psychologist Michael J Cohen puts the number of senses at our disposal at 53. His definition of a sense goes beyond the physiological phenomenon/nerve sensor definition. He breaks the senses down into four categories:

* The radiation senses: sense of colour, sense of moods associated with colour, sense of temperature.
* The feeling senses: sensitivity to gravity, air and wind pressure, and motion.
* The chemical senses: hormonal sense, such as pheromones, hunger for food, water or air.
* The mental senses: pain, external and internal, mental or spiritual distress, sense of self, including friendship, companionship and power, psychic capacity.

Apparently but then we are overlapping some.

 

[NewEra]

"Hearing" the taste of a peach "smells" like bullshit to me.

It's called synesthesia.

 

[KDude]

I gather that. Except, like I said, it's bullshit afaik. A peach's odor doesn't really have much in the way of producing audible noises, and I'm not really open to the idea that someone is hearing something... I'm more open to the idea that these people are insane.

“Sometimes when I hear John Coltrane play trumpet, I see a purple mist escape from my eyes, into the great void of existence, to meander about and swirl in beautiful, dancing motions that bring tears to my unworthy eyes. I feel great joy and sorrow at this, and it moves me like nothing else.”
~ A Synesthetic on Seeing Sounds

It's poetic, I guess. But if he's serious, he needs to stfu.

Funnily, Coltrane didn't even play trumpet. He played sax. This guy needs to get real on multiple levels.

 

[Cybin]

It's neurological. It's well accepted. It's not that the taste of a peach produces sounds, but that arousal of the part of the brain that comprehends taste also arouses that which comprehends sounds. The wires get crossed.

Letters with color and texture, numbers arranged in space, and sounds with color are also common. It ranges from just the mental association (What was her name, I remember it was blue...) to actually seeing the shade overlayed on the written word.

 

[Synapse]

Synesthesia

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[Synapse]

Tests, I love tests.

The Synesthesia Challenge - Is your brain hard-wired for creativity?

I got 57%,

I found some more.
Synesthesia Color/Emotion Test

happy
green: 100% correct, 1270 ms/response
blue: 80% correct, 1256 ms/response
red: 33% correct, 3184 ms/response
yellow: 50% correct, 2327 ms/response
orange: 66% correct, 1691 ms/response
purple: 100% correct, 1850 ms/response

sad
green: 33% correct, 4321 ms/response
blue: 33% correct, 3120 ms/response
red: 100% correct, 5607 ms/response
yellow: 50% correct, 2110 ms/response
orange: 0% correct, NaN ms/response
purple: 0% correct, NaN ms/response

angry
green: 66% correct, 1765 ms/response
blue: 0% correct, NaN ms/response
red: 75% correct, 1283 ms/response
yellow: 50% correct, 1583 ms/response
orange: 50% correct, 1930 ms/response
purple: 66% correct, 1296 ms/response

frightened
green: 100% correct, 1396 ms/response
blue: 100% correct, 753 ms/response
red: 50% correct, 2982 ms/response
yellow: 75% correct, 1061 ms/response
orange: 100% correct, 944 ms/response
purple: 100% correct, 644 ms/response

Interesting but what does it mean.

Synaesthesia | All tests
Test for weekdays, numbers and months and went with numbers.

Your results of the color test indicate that you most likely aren't a synaesthete. However you've answered the related questions in a typical way for synesthetes. Maybe you just weren't fully concentrated or you have a different form of synaesthesia. Keep on testing yourself.

A bit of fun

 

[Bamboo]

"Hearing" the taste of a peach "smells" like bullshit to me.

I gather that. Except, like I said, it's bullshit afaik. A peach's odor doesn't really have much in the way of producing audible noises, and I'm not really open to the idea that someone is hearing something... I'm more open to the idea that these people are insane.

“Sometimes when I hear John Coltrane play trumpet, I see a purple mist escape from my eyes, into the great void of existence, to meander about and swirl in beautiful, dancing motions that bring tears to my unworthy eyes. I feel great joy and sorrow at this, and it moves me like nothing else.”
~ A Synesthetic on Seeing Sounds

It's poetic, I guess. But if he's serious, he needs to stfu.

Funnily, Coltrane didn't even play trumpet. He played sax. This guy needs to get real on multiple levels.

There are a ton of misconceptions about what synesthesia is. I also see a few too many people on this forum talking about having some form of synesthesia which isn't actually synesthesia...that's another topic.

But synesthesia is a real condition. People make it out to be a whole lot more artistic than it generally is in everyday experience.

The strongest objective measure that synesthesia exists (imo) is actual MRI scans that show a connection in the synesthesate's mind that isn't present in most test subjects. This proves that something is physically different in the operating hardware, hence the difference in perception.

Also objective measures, that you could claim are fake but I think are pretty strong, are that there is very very little change in the experience - a certain sound or tone will be the same color and texture - even if asked decades apart to describe it. It's also an unellicited response. You can't "turn it on" or "off" for that matter. It's either there or it isn't.

There is a variety of types of synesthesia.

PS: Main reason I rarely ever talk about my synesthesia, aside from giving a speech in college about it (which turned out to be a mistake), is that people think you are crazy, or just making stuff up. Or people annoy the crap out of you by asking you "what does that sound like" etc.

I made a post in the synesthesia thread, check it out for more info.

 

[Bamboo]

Also, synapse - if you are addressing the actual condition of synesthesia, than the first three examples (pictures) aren't all that representative of a synesthetic experience...

"synesthesia" does, however, have a different definition in terms of art vs. neurology. so in artistic terms, sure.