Stuck in front of our screens all day, we regularly ignore our senses beyond sound and vision. And yet they’re at all times at work. After we’re more alert we feel the rough and smooth surfaces of objects, the stiffness in our shoulders, the softness of bread.
Within the morning, we may feel the tingle of toothpaste, hear and feel the running water within the shower, smell the shampoo, and later the aroma of freshly brewed coffee.
Aristotle told us there have been five senses. But he also told us the world was made up of 5 elements, and we not consider that. And modern research is showing we may very well have dozens of senses.
Just about all of our experience is multisensory. We don’t see, hear, smell, and touch in separate parcels. They occur concurrently in a unified experience of the world around us and of ourselves.
What we feel affects what we see, and what we see affects what we hear. Different odors in shampoo can affect the way you perceive the feel of hair. The fragrance of rose makes hair seem silkier, for example.
Odors in low-fat yogurts could make them feel richer and thicker on the palate without adding more emulsifiers. Perception of odors within the mouth, rising to the nasal passage, are modified by the viscosity of the liquids we eat.
My long-term collaborator, professor Charles Spence from the Crossmodal Laboratory in Oxford, told me his neuroscience colleagues consider there are anywhere between 22 and 33 senses.
These include proprioception, which enables us to know where our limbs are without them. Our sense of balance draws on the vestibular system of ear canals in addition to sight and proprioception.
One other example is interoception, by which we sense changes in our own bodies akin to a slight increase in our heart rate and hunger. We even have a way of agency when moving our limbs: a sense that may go missing in stroke patients who sometimes even consider another person is moving their arm.
There may be the sense of ownership. Stroke patients sometimes feel their, for example, arm isn’t their very own regardless that they could still feel sensations in it.
Among the traditional senses are combos of several senses. Touch, for example involves pain, temperature, itch, and tactile sensations. When we taste something, we are literally experiencing a mixture of three senses: touch, smell, and taste—or gustation—which mix to supply the flavors we perceive in food and drinks.
Gustation, covers sensations produced by receptors on the tongue that enable us to detect salt, sweet, sour, bitter, and umami (savory). What about mint, mango, melon, strawberry, raspberry?
We don’t have raspberry receptors on the tongue, neither is raspberry flavor some combination of sweet, sour, and bitter. There is no such thing as a taste arithmetic for fruit flavors.
We perceive them through the combined workings of the tongue and the nose. It’s smell that contributes the lion’s share to what we call tasting.
This isn’t inhaling odors from the environment, though. Odor compounds are released as we chew or sip, traveling from the mouth to the nose though the nasal pharynx in the back of throat.
Touch plays its part too, binding tastes and smells together and fixing our preferences for runny or firm eggs and the velvety, luxurious gooeyness of chocolate.
Sight is influenced by our vestibular system. If you find yourself on board an aircraft on the bottom, look down the cabin. Look again when you find yourself within the climb.
It’ll “look” to you as if the front of the cabin is higher than you’re, although optically, every little thing is in the identical relation to you because it was on the bottom. What you “see” is the combined effect of sight and your ear canals telling you that you simply are titling backwards.
The senses offer a wealthy seam of research and philosophers, neuroscientists and psychologists work together on the Center for the Study of the Senses on the University of London’s School of Advanced Study.
In 2013, the middle launched its Rethinking the Senses project, directed by my colleague, the late Professor Sir Colin Blakemore. We discovered how modifying the sound of your individual footsteps could make your body feel lighter or heavier.
We learned how audioguides in Tate Britain art museum that address the listener as if the model in a portrait was speaking enable visitors to recollect more visual details of the painting. We discovered how aircraft noise interferes with our perception of taste and why it’s best to at all times drink tomato juice on a plane.
While our perception of salt, sweet, and sour is reduced within the presence of white noise, umami isn’t, and tomatoes and tomato juice are wealthy in umami. This implies the aircraft’s noise will taste enhance the savory flavor.
At our latest interactive exhibition, Senses Unwrapped at Coal Drops Yard in London’s King’s Cross, people can discover for themselves how their senses work and why they don’t work as we predict they do.
For instance, the size-weight illusion is illustrated by a set of small, medium, and huge curling stones. People can lift each and judge which is heaviest. The smallest one feels heaviest, but people can then place them on balancing scales and discover that they’re all the identical weight.
But there are at all times loads of things around you to indicate how intricate your senses are, if you happen to only pause for a moment to take all of it in. So next time you walk outside or savor a meal, take a moment to understand how your senses are working together to aid you feel all of the sensations involved.