I have a question you could help me with. 5 or 6?

[Smokescreen]

I have stirred up a hornets nest in the Smokescreen household and thought it would be nice to bring the dispute here too. :-)

Every one knows of the first five.
Touch
Smell
Hearing
Sight
Taste
But I have a sixth sense in witch I can experience the physical world around me, and I don’t know why it is not counted in the list. I am aware of it in every moment, and I know of it without the help of any of my other senses. It is the sense of balance.
This sense has its own organs that work together to detect movement and tilt of the head.
In fact this sense works so well I am hardly aware of it most of the time, but try to walk across a dark room to find a light switch and you will become completely conscious of its ability to guide you.
So I ask you this
Is there 5 or 6?

[SydTheSkeptic]

Some say intuition is the sixth sense and I'd agree, which makes balance the seventh, and BS-radar is the 8th. hehe

[Smokescreen]

Ah, but intuition doesn’t interact with the physical world like the others do. And my BS detector is broken beyond repair.
Sigh! :-)

[SydTheSkeptic]

It's probably broken due to overuse during the Bush years.

[Smokescreen]

Yep, your right, I forgot about that one, but I am completely lacking in that sense too. All I wear is black, black, and more black. It’s great for funerals but sadly not so popular for weddings. A nice red scarf might help though. :-)

[Smokescreen]

Yep that’s what I thought. But boy is there some disagreement about it around my house.
I’m reading the Brain That Changes Itself and there is a case study about a woman that lost her sense of balance (do to an antibiotic overdose) and life is very hard without it. It was like having a very bad case of vertigo all the time. She found it hard to stand up and lost the ability to even leave her house it got so bad. So it is one of those things we take for granted but would find it very hard to live without.
So I’ll count that as a six vote. :-)

[Smokescreen]

Interesting. I’m not so sure. But I will tell you that I have tried to swim with me eyes shut and it doesn’t work very well. This could be a confirmation of it working in tandem.

But the way I understand it, the sense of taste relies heavily upon the sense of smell. And the sense of sight can also helps in hearing. Say for instance, you’re in a loud bar and some one is talking to you. It is much easer to understand what they say if you can see them saying it. Watching there lips and gestures help you to understand when you can’t hear all the words.

But I would be willing to bet that if I were to ride a rollercoaster with my eyes shut I would still know when I was sideways or going down hill or up. I think that would still work if I didn’t use my hands or feet for stability and for an extra sensory input. The same thing would be if I’m riding in a car and not watching where we are going. I can still tell if the car is going up or down.

As I see it the only down side to that conclusion would be that even with eyes shut you could tell by feel that there is more pressure on you back as you were going up and so fourth.

I still don’t think that would discount it as a sense though. It has a very large impact on everyday life. Just having a few to many drinks to throw off you equilibrium will prove that. Actually, I think I’m going to try that experiment now. In the name of science of course. He, he, he.

[Smokescreen]

Ah, you have led me into a trap that I did not want to go into. Let me explain.
We experience the world through the inputs that the brain receives from its senses. Our brain receives these inputs and puts them together for us. We do not experience reality one sense at a time. Therefore it is not the job of the brain to separate the senses from one another; in fact it is quite the opposite.

I feel the brain itself is the flaw to your approach to the problem. The brain sees all of its input devises in tandem, and shows them to us in that way. So to discount a sense because your brain uses it along with other senses doesn’t work for me. Do you see what I’m trying to say?

I feel that because the balance sense has its own organs and its own input to the brain it should be classified as a sense. Regardless of how the brain process’s the information after it has been received.

My point is that there is a separate vestibular organ (or organs) that have the purposes of detecting the world around us in relationship with the body, just like the other senses. And that the sole purposes of the semi-circular canals, the utricle, and the saccule is the sensing of the reality around us through equilibrium.

I knew that drink would help. LOL

And now you can see why this stirred up such a hornets nest at home. LOL

[Smokescreen]

Didn’t I mention that I was a mad scientist?
Bwahahaha

[Smokescreen]

Yep. The sense of touch is a big one. Simply by raising your arm it would feel heaver than if it were just hanging at your side. So without even touching anything you can still feel the pull of gravity. And just that simple thing helps your balance greatly.

And I understand that the inner ear is dependent on gravity to function but I think if one were blindfolded in space, (weightless) and spun around and around then suddenly stopped, dizziness would still be the result. Then again spinning like that might simulate gravity. (Insert sound of one scratching one’s head here). It’s a hard argument to make though. There is gravity, just like there are light waves, (for sight) and sound waves (for hearing). I’ll need to think about that one some more but, its hard for me to except that because gravity is the force behind the sense, that it is somehow discounted then.

I don’t know, it’s an interesting thought though.
Thanks
SS

[NimbleThimble]

Physiotherapist would say we have six senses and the one you describe (along with physios) is called proprioception. The sense of awareness of where your limbs/body are in the space it occupies and moves in.

[Smokescreen]

Proprioception. Is that more like a sense of yourself in relation with your surroundings rather than equilibrium?
Very interesting.

[NimbleThimble]

In a word, Yep!