All Human Senses

1. Sight: This technically is two senses given the two distinct types of receptors present, one for color
(cones) and one for brightness (rods).
2. Taste: This is sometimes argued to be five senses by itself due to the differing types of taste
receptors (sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami), but generally is just referred to as one sense. For
those who dont know, umami receptors detect the amino acid glutamate, which is a taste generally
found in meat and some artificial flavoring. The taste sense, unlike sight, is a sense based off of a
chemical reaction
3. Touch: This has been found to be distinct from pressure, temperature, pain, and even itch sensors.
4. Pressure: Obvious sense is obvious.
5. Itch: Surprisingly, this is a distinct sensor system from other touch-related senses.
6. Thermoception: Ability to sense heat and cold. This also is thought of as more than one sense. This
is not just because of the two hot/cold receptors, but also because there is a completely different type
of thermoceptor, in terms of the mechanism for detection, in the brain. These thermoceptors in the
brain are used for monitoring internal body temperature.
7. Sound: Detecting vibrations along some medium, such as air or water that is in contact with your ear
drums.
8. Smell: Yet another of the sensors that work off of a chemical reaction. This sense combines with
taste to produce flavors.
9. Proprioception: This sense gives you the ability to tell where your body parts are, relative to other
body parts. This sense is one of the things police officers test when they pull over someone who they
think is driving drunk. The close your eyes and touch your nose test is testing this sense. This
sense is used all the time in little ways, such as when you scratch an itch on your foot, but never
once look at your foot to see where your hand is relative to your foot.
10. Tension Sensors: These are found in such places as your muscles and allow the brain the ability to
monitor muscle tension.
11. Nociception: In a word, pain. This was once thought to simply be the result of overloading other
senses, such as touch, but this has been found not to be the case and instead, it is its own unique
sensory system. There are three distinct types of pain receptors: cutaneous (skin), somatic (bones
and joints), and visceral (body organs).
12. Equilibrioception: The sense that allows you to keep your balance and sense body movement in
terms of acceleration and directional changes. This sense also allows for perceiving gravity. The
sensory system for this is found in your inner ears and is called the vestibular labyrinthine system.
Anyone whos ever had this sense go out on them on occasion knows how important this is. When
its not working or malfunctioning, you literally cant tell up from down and moving from one
location to another without aid is nearly impossible.
13. Stretch Receptors: These are found in such places as the lungs, bladder, stomach, and the
gastrointestinal tract. A type of stretch receptor, that senses dilation of blood vessels, is also often
involved in headaches.
14. Chemoreceptors: These trigger an area of the medulla in the brain that is involved in detecting blood
born hormones and drugs. It also is involved in the vomiting reflex.

All Human Senses

15. Thirst: This system more or less allows your body to monitor its hydration level and so your body
knows when it should tell you to drink.
16. Hunger: This system allows your body to detect when you need to eat something.
17. Magentoception: This is the ability to detect magnetic fields, which is principally useful in providing
a sense of direction when detecting the Earths magnetic field. Unlike most birds, humans do not
have a strong magentoception, however, experiments have demonstrated that we do tend to have
some sense of magnetic fields. The mechanism for this is not completely understood; it is theorized
that this has something to do with deposits of ferric iron in our noses. This would make sense if that
is correct as humans who are given magnetic implants have been shown to have a much stronger
magnetoception than humans without.
18. Time: This one is debated as no singular mechanism has been found that allows people to perceive
time. However, experimental data has conclusively shown humans have a startling accurate sense of
time, particularly when younger. The mechanism we use for this seems to be a distributed system
involving the cerebral cortex, cerebellum, and basal ganglia. Long term time keeping seems to be
monitored by the suprachiasmatic nuclei (responsible for the circadian rhythm). Short term time
keeping is handled by other cell systems.
Basic Human Senses:
1. Ophthalmoception (Eyes) Sight or visual perception
2. Audioception (Ears) Hearing or auditory sensations
3. Gustaoception (Tongue) Sense of taste
4. Olfacoception or Olfacception (Nose) Sense of smell
5. Tactioception (Skin)
Internal Human Senses:
6. Thermoception (Skin) Lack or increase of heat (temperature)
7. Proprioception (Body Parts) Awareness of body parts without visual input
8. Nociception (Whole Body) Sensation of pain in the body (skin, body organs, etc.)
9. Equilibrioception (Whole Body) Sense of balance (determined by ear fluid)
Additional Human Senses:
10. Kinesthetic Sense (Whole Body) Sense of acceleration
11. Tactility (Mostly the Skin) Perception of pressure
12. Chemoreception (Blood and Brain) Sensation of hunger, thirst, vomiting and suffocation
13. Stretch Reception (Muscles, Joint and Skin) Sense of gag reflex, gas distension, excretion, etc.
14. Cutaneous Reception (Skin) Sense of skin vasodilation (like flushed skin)
15. Synaesthesia (Body Parts) Combination of senses (like smiling at someone's voice)
*Extra Sensory Perceptions:
16. Sixth Sense (Small Brain) Sense of intuition (gut feeling)
17. Premonition (Paranormal) Subconscious sense of future events (usually danger)
18. Telepathy (Paranormal) Auditory perception of a person's (near or far) thoughts
19. Precognition (Paranormal) Visual perception of future events
20. Clairvoyance (Paranormal) Visual perception of invisible objects or events
21. Clairaudience (Paranormal) Auditory perception of the invisible

All Human Senses

*Extra sensory perceptions are controversial human senses and have very little to no scientific
evidence.
Importance of Senses in Human Life:
A person who has absolutely no 'sense' of self or the world, would be someone in the grave or in a coma.
In other words, 'sense' is very vital for a human being and it is the senses we possess, which differentiate
the living from the unconscious and the dead. For a person to be alive (even to just exist in a vegetable
state), most of his/her mechanoreceptors and interoceptors would have to be functioning. Apart from
consciousness, the role of human senses include:

Motion
Reaction
Emotion
Articulation
Interpretation
Comprehension
Cognition
Recognition
Sensation
Perception

Bonus Facts:
The traditional five senses model (sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste) is credited to Aristotle

One such method for testing whether humans have magentoception is by placing a strong magnetic
field near a person and then disorienting them. Results have shown that people in this scenario
perform significantly worse at being able to re-orient themselves in terms of the cardinal points than
people who are not near a strong magnetic field. More conclusive evidence has been demonstrated
by examining subjects brains when magnetic fields are produced near a person. It has been shown
that these magnetic fields will evoke a response in the brains activity.

Numerous experiments have demonstrated that people do have the ability to detect accurately the
passage of time. One experiment showed that, without consciously counting or anything of the like,
a group of 19 to 24 year olds were able, on average, to tell when 3 minutes was up within a 3 second
margin of error. Interestingly, the age group of 60-80 tended to average perceiving 3 minutes pass at
around 3 minutes and 40 seconds consistently within the test group. This would seem to indicate
whatever mechanism we use to sense time slows as we age and thus as we get older time seems to
pass faster to us.
People with Parkinsons disease and ADD have severely impaired sense of time passage compared
to normal people.

The vestibular labyrinthine system (equilibrioception) works by sensing the motion of fluid in three
canals in your inner ear, as well as sensing the weight of small crystals of calcium carbonite on tiny
hair-like sensory receptors.

All Human Senses

Proprioception (sense of relative position of body parts) comes from the Latin proprius, meaning
ones own.

There exists a type of bacteria, called magnetotactic bacteria, that build magnets inside themselves in
order to orient themselves with the Earths magnetic field. They also migrate and form chains of
themselves along magnetic field lines.

Many avian life forms posses a region of their bodies that contain a biological magnetite, generally
in their beaks. It is believed this gives them a strong magnetoception and thus allows them to sense
direction accurately. More recently, it has been shown that certain birds have the ability to see
magnetic fields. How this works is the Earths magnetic field effects how long a certain molecule,
cryptochrome, in their photoreceptor cells stays in the active state. This then affects the light
sensitivity of the birds retinal neurons. The net effect is the birds can perceive magnetic fields with
their eyes. The biological magnate and ability to perceive magnetic fields with their eyes are thought
to combine to form a very accurate mapping and directional system in the birds.

Sharks, stringrays, and chimeara all possess an electroreceptive organ called an ampullae of
Lorenzini. This organ gives them the ability to detect even small variations in electric potential.
They can use this to detect magnetic fields, among other things.

Cattle tend to align themselves north-south, which leads some researchers to believe they have a
strong magnetoception sense.

Some people experience something called synesthesia where they may perceive some sound and
think of it as a color. So a dog barking may be red to them or the like. This condition does not
generally occur naturally, though it can; it usually manifests itself when people are under the
influence of hallucinogens.