There has long existed a common misconception that the human body only contains five senses. This claim is inherently false. The five basic senses that humans possess are: sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch. However, there are myriads of other things that our body are capable of doing.
Located in just your skin alone, there are many nerve endings that further expands on the sense of touch. There is the sense of heat, cold, pain, itch, and pressure.
Additionally, there are two senses that people feel all the time: hunger and thirst! Also, there is a sensor located in the bladder that tells you it’s time to use the bathroom, and one in your intestine that tells you that you’re full.
Your muscles and joints have senses that allow you to be aware of different parts throughout your body with the motion and tension of muscles. This is how you’re capable of touching different parts of your body knowingly even without sight. The specific term for this sense is called Kinesthesia.
Synesthesia on the other hand is a phenomenon that stimulates other sensations throughout the body. For instance, a correlation of sight and hearing is an example of synesthesia (hearing something can make you see a shade of a color). However, this rare sense occurs in 1 in 1000 individuals and it’s normally associated with the correlation of numbers/letters with colors Savants (persons who have profound or extensive learning) are able to connect things mentally through the sensation of synesthesia.
There are other senses that accumulate to form all of the senses in the human body. There are many senses that people won’t consider actual senses, and some that people will. There are some that have not even been discovered yet. But many can argue with a lot of backup that there are senses that exceed the five main ones. What we fail to acknowledge is that the senses that we don’t think of are closely correlated to the five basic ones. This makes people eliminate the idea of there being more than just five senses. Looking in more depth shows that there are more senses in the human body. And even more possible, there are probably more senses that we have that have not yet been discovered.
Sources:
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-tiJbVJLOCc0/TZnsckHSodI/AAAAAAAAAAM/euSmgUsUw5E/s320/5-senses.jpg
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/savant?s=t
http://www.scientificpsychic.com/workbook/chapter2.htm
http://science.howstuffworks.com/life/question242.htm
I agree that our body can do so much more than just the five senses, but I also think some of your examples are just an expansion of the five senses. Pressure, itch, and pain can just be more detailed descriptions of the sense of touch. The heat and cold senses are interesting though because we don’t think of that as being a sense we just think of it asking knowing that our body is uncomfortable. Other than that I completely agree with your statements and it is interesting that our body can do so much but we don’t stop to think about it much. This article has 10 senses that we don’t think about as being senses.
Do you think it is quite possible that with the more recent understanding of kinesthesia came the quickly growing field of Kinesthesiology? Its interesting how science developments can influence the rest of our lives and society as a whole. Penn State offers majors and courses in this field as well!