Fwiss

 

What most of us are taught in school is that we have 5 senses - sight, touch, smell, sound, and taste. It's widely believed that other animals and plants have different senses. Many aquatic creatures (and birds and bats if I'm not mistaken) have echolocation or other sound-based methods of sensing that we don't have. Many people might call that another sense, but it's basically the same method we use to pick up and send sound, though at a higher wavelength. This means that echolocation is more of an augmented version of our already existing senses than it is a new one entirely.
For a closer example, take a normal domestic dog or cat. Dogs can sense changes in barometric pressure and predict bad weather quite reliably due to their ability to sense changes in barometric pressure. In that way, dogs can predict future weather, which is a textbook sixth sense, though sensing changes in pressure is also a trait of hearing. Almost all other mammals have a better sense of smell than humans. This allows them to smell where other have been and what they have been around. I remember many a story involving a spiritual log on every object that can be detected with a sixth sense. Dogs can do almost exactly that with merely an augmented sense of smell.
Should senses be measured by how many there are? Dogs have the same senses as us, yet they perform more functions. Maybe senses should be measured by what they can do and not by what kind of input they take.

Cracked: 6 Lies About the Human Body You Learned in Kindergarten

 

Sight, smell, touch, taste, hearing. Them there's your five senses. Since kindergarten, you've probably been told that anyone who thinks she has a sixth sense is either a television psychic or M. Night Shyamalan. This original classification is widely attributed to Aristotle, so if you try to argue that there are more than five, you're basically arguing with the guy who invented being smart.

The Truth:
Scientists still aren't quite sure of exactly how many senses you have, or what even constitutes a sense, but you'd be hard-pressed to find one who believes you have five. Depending on how they count them, they usually wind up with something like 14 to 20. The five you learned about in school were just the five most evident senses, aka the boring ones you could have figured out for your own damn self. The rest are far more interesting.

The Harvard School of Medicine lists six extra ones that are pretty hard to argue against. Close your eyes, then touch your nose with your index finger. How did you know which one was your index finger without looking at it? How did you know where your nose was? Did you smell your finger to your nose? Did your sense of touch somehow tell you what the air molecules you encounter along the way to your nose feel like? Nah, that's proprioception, your body's awareness of where it is in relation to itself.


Maybe the most interesting one they left out is your sense of timing, which might seem like it's only a sense in the way that fashion is a sense. But leading neurologists like David Eagleman think it's the most important of all the senses, since it's the thread that ties the rest of them together. An apple is just a series of different sensations without your sense of time telling you they're all happening at the same moment. Still not convinced? Try staring at a white wall in a totally silent room. Your sense of time tells you how much of your life has been wasted because you didn't take us at our word.

It's also worth noting that this sense your kindergarten teacher failed to mention can operate like a freaking superpower. For instance, if you're walking in the woods and a bear growls in the bushes behind you and to your left, the bear's growl hits your left ear a millionth of a second before it hits your right. Your sense of time is able to pick up on that infinitesimal difference and allows you to perfectly triangulate the bear's location behind you.
If you were only relying on your sense of hearing, you would only know that the bear is somewhere on the left side of your body. Your ears don't swivel around like a dog's, so you would have to turn and use your eyes to pinpoint the bear. A blur of brown and black fur would be the last sight you ever saw.