Khaberni - Aristotle told us that we have 5 senses, and that the world is made up of 5 elements, and we no longer believe that. Recent research suggests that we actually might have dozens of senses.
Due to our constant engagement in front of screens and other sources of social interaction, we often neglect our senses except for hearing and sight, although they are constantly at work.
When we pay more attention, we feel the roughness and smoothness of surfaces, we feel the stiffness of our shoulders, and we recognize the softness of bread.
The Confluence of Senses
In other words, almost all our experiences are multisensory. We do not see, hear, smell, and touch separately; instead, all these senses occur simultaneously in a unified experience of the world around us and ourselves.
What we feel affects what we see, and what we see affects what we hear. Different fragrances in shampoo can affect how we perceive the texture of hair. For example, the scent of roses makes the hair feel smoother.
Flavors in low-fat yogurt can make it feel richer and creamier in the mouth without adding more emulsifiers.
According to a research paper published by "The Conversation" by Dr. Perry Smith from the University of London, the perception of smells in the mouth, which reach the nasal passages, is affected by the viscosity of the fluids we consume.
The taste of tomatoes on a plane
The researcher points out that while our perception of salty, sweet, and sour tastes diminishes in the presence of white noise, the flavor and taste of tomatoes and their juice are unaffected by airplane noise; instead, this noise enhances their delicious flavor.
Smith and his colleague Sir Colin Blakemore discovered the effect of airplane noise on the taste of tomatoes in experiments that explored how adjusting sound can affect a person's sense of lightness or heaviness.
The experiments demonstrated how auditory clues in the Tate Britain museum, which address the listener as if the model in the painting is speaking, help visitors remember more visual details of the painting.
What about berries?
Smith and Blakemore's experiments revealed that the sense of taste that distinguishes salty, sweet, sour, and bitter is not what interacts with mint, mango, watermelon, strawberries, and berries.
We do not have receptors for berries on the tongue, nor is the flavor of berries just a mix of sweet, sour, and bitter.
There is no mathematical equation for the flavors of certain fruits like berries, but we perceive them through the combined work of the tongue and nose. Smell contributes the major part in what we call taste.
The number of human senses
Dr. Charles Spence from the Multisensory Lab at Oxford reports that his colleagues in neuroscience believe the number of senses ranges between 22 and 33.
These senses include proprioception, which enables us to know the position of our limbs without looking at them.
Our sense of balance relies on the vestibular system in the ear canals, in addition to the sense of sight and proprioception.
Interoception and Limb Movement
Among other examples is interoception, through which we sense changes in our bodies, such as a slight increase in heart rate and the feeling of hunger.
We also have a sense of control when moving our limbs: a sensation that may be absent in stroke patients who sometimes might think someone else is moving their arms.
There is also the sense of ownership. Stroke patients may sometimes feel that their arm is not theirs, even though they can still feel sensations in it.
It means that some traditional senses are a mixture of several senses.
Touch, for example, includes pain, heat, itch, and tactile sensation. When we taste something, we are actually experiencing a mix of three senses: touch, smell, and taste, which combine to form the flavors we perceive in food and drink.
This supports the idea of the multisensory hypothesis, suggesting that the number of human senses might range between 22 and 33.
