More Than Five Senses

We teach children that humans have five senses--sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell.  But we have more senses than just these five, although I do find it very uncommon to discover specific recognition of this fact!  Before I proceed I must define what I mean by a "sense": a sense is a faculty by which I perceive the external world.  The exact number of senses may remain controversial and unknown, but by the definition above I know with absolute certainty that I have more than just five.  In fact, although I did not always classify them as senses, I have always known that I have more than five senses!  Awareness of them is important for the objective of knowing myself and the external world I perceive.  If curiosity has seized you, by the end of your time reading this post you may find my claims much less controversial and unfamiliar than they might seem initially.

I have devoted a small section of writing to each of five nontraditional sense I will address.


Proprioception--sense of position of body parts.

This is how I sense where my body parts like limbs are when I am not using sight or touch to determine this.  If I close my eyes, I do not stop sensing the positions of other body parts.  If I stand upright with my eyes closed and allow my hands and arms to hang downward, I still sense where my hands are, even if they aren't physically touching the rest of my body.

Equilibrioception--sense of balance.

Balance prevents me from collapsing to the ground, unable to stand upright or maneuver anywhere at all.  Apart from this sense my life as it currently is would be almost totally unlivable.  Many people acknowledge that we have a "sense of balance", and yet they do not include it as one of the defining senses of humans alongside the traditional five.


Nociception--sense of pain.

Though some perceptions of pain involve my skin and thus are associated with my sense of touch, internal pains cannot be sensed through the skin because my skin is an external organ while some pains occur inside me.


Thermoception--sense of temperature.

With this sense I feel the sensations of hotness or coldness.  This is distinct from my ability to receive sensations via direct physical contact with the skin, for I do not have to touch certain things to sense varying levels of temperature.  Thermoception is constantly active during my waking moments and is very useful for regulating and calculating my safety in a given environment.


Chronoception--sense of time.

Time still passes even if my chronoception is misperceiving the exact speed or duration of it.  Although there is no physical organ I can trace my sense of time back to (unlike sight, touch, and so on), time is a reality external to my mind and thus a sense is required to perceive it.

These are just five other identifiable senses beyond sight, smell, touch, hearing, and taste.  As with the traditional five senses, the existence of all five of these senses is absolutely certain.  Each of them informs me of certain stimuli that the others do not or cannot necessarily do the same for.  Because of this, each of them is necessary to ensure that I continue perceiving things as I normally do--and yet I was not explicitly taught about their roles as actual senses, nor do I remember being told their names during my education in my youth.  Regardless of the reasons for why the fact that humans have five senses is taught despite its falsity, we simply do not possess just five.