The Senses

The senses: Synaesthesia: When senses merge

Synaesthesia: ‘My sister tastes of blackcurrant yoghurt, my grandmother of thick, condensed milk’. We meet the man who tastes every sound he hears.

Beyond the Five Senses

Telepathy, echolocation, and the future of perception.

Eating Should Feed All of Our Senses

Food isn’t all about taste. It’s essential to smell a bay leaf, hear the snap of a celery stick and feel a peach’s fuzz.

Humans have more than 5 senses

When we think of human senses we think of eyesight, hearing, taste, touch and smell. Yet we have always known that we are capable of sensing much more than this. Exactly what, however, is still subject to ongoing scientific research.

Is there a universal hierarchy of human senses?

Research at the University of York has shown that the accepted hierarchy of human senses – sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell – is not universally true across all cultures.

Sense of Sight … The Story of the Missing Watch

The human visual system is a pattern seeker of enormous power and subtlety. The eye and the visual cortex of the brain form a massively parallel processor that provides the highest bandwidth channel into your cognitive centers. You rely more on the sense of sight than on any other of the senses.

Which of the five senses do you value most? The answer may change as you age

We experience the world as a symphony of stimuli collected by the senses, though the influence of those various inputs changes over time. Technological advances like cochlear implants and Lasik surgery have made it possible for some people’s sensory experiences to improve. In most cases, however, sensory acuity diminishes through the natural process of aging.

Which Sense Do Humans Rely on the Most?

Aristotle established a one-size-fits-all rating that endured for centuries, but new research says upbringing, training and environment can determine which of the five senses are most important.

Brands That Engage All 5 Senses Stand Out From The Competition

We learn in grade school that humans have five senses: sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch. Innovative marketers create experiences to appeal those senses, and so can you.

How well you can identify colors, sounds, and tastes depends on where you come from

“There is no ‘true’,” wrote French author Gustave Flaubert in a letter to his friend, writer León Hennique. “There are only ways of perceiving.”

Our More-Than-Five Senses

You're familiar with touch, taste, smell, sight, and hearing. But your body moves through the world with more than five. NPR Short Wave reporter Emily Kwong speaks to neurobiologist André White, assistant professor at Mount Holyoke College, about our senses — the beautiful, intricate system that carries information from the outside world in.

The Art and Science of Our Senses

Sensory perception has untapped potential in daily experiences and business.

The silent “sixth” sense

Proprioception is the body’s mysterious ability to locate our limbs, even in darkness. We’re just beginning to understand it.

Using All Our Senses in an Age Obsessed With Sight

Common sayings such as “Seeing is believing” and “I’ve seen the light” neatly express our modern faith in the power of eyesight to capture the truth. Whether we’re surfing the internet, picking a restaurant or talking with co-workers, we value visual cues.

We Have More Than Five Senses; Most people take the faculties of sight, touch, smell, taste and hearing for granted—but not the scientist. Recent findings suggest we may have abilities we never suspected

HUMAN beings tend to take their five basic senses pretty much for granted. Unless something goes wrong with one of these senses, the ordinary person continues seeing and touching, smelling odors, tasting tastes and hearing sounds without giving a second thought to the diligent, no‐nonsense faculties that keep him so well‐informed about the complex world around him. Happily, scientists have not shared this general indifference.

What is the best sense? Scientists are still battling it out

On the other hand, looking from a neuroscience perspective, it is easy to see (no pun intended) why vision almost won the poll. The brain seems to have a vision focus. The primary brain area for processing visual stimuli, the visual cortex, takes up the largest area of any individual sense. Partly because of this vast processing resource, vision is the most acute sense we have for various kinds of discrimination.

Your Five Senses

Which of your five senses — sight, hearing, taste, touch or smell — would you say is your most developed? Which is your least developed? When have you recently had an experience in which one or more of your senses was overwhelmed — in either a pleasant or unpleasant way?

What’s the best sense?

Most of us have the fundamental five, and all of us have some that are more abstract. But which do we love best?