Why isn't balance considered its own sense?

[HarvesteR]

Hi,

So, this question's been bugging me for a while now... Why is it that we are said to have five senses, when the sense of balance seems to meet all the criteria to be a sixth?

If one were blindfolded, had your ears plugged, nose clamped and suspended off the ground, you'd still be able to tell if you were turned upside down or right side up.

There might be a sensible explanation, so that's why I'm starting this discussion... what do you make of it?

Cheers

[Kryten]

The 'five senses' are a mediaeval tradition based on Aristotelian concepts (one corresponding to each of his five elements); there's some debate about what should be included, but modern, medical definitions have at least ten, including balance.

[flightmaster]

Yeah I've heard of around 17 senses. Things such as being able to tell where your limbs are when you can't see them, your ability to feel hot and cold within your body, as you said, balance and various others.

[Camacha]

Well, if you would want to be a bit rash you could all call those abilities to feel instead of strictly touch. However, I'd have to agree that the traditional view of five senses is a bit limited. Maybe one could speak of sensors instead of senses, since science tells us we are pretty much all mechanical anyway and just very fancy machines.

I often wonder what it is like to detect heat like a snake, to have the spatial perception of a small bird or the trinocular vision of a Mantis Shrimp with eyes that have not three, but sixteen different kinds of color receptors. The somewhat sad truth is we will never know, since our hardware is so different that we cannot even imagine. When we do try, it always ends up translating those things to sensory input we know (like the thermal imaging we all know and love from Predator) and that - of course - does not get us anywhere we haven't been before. We even shaped the world around us to match our internal wiring. As monkeys that lived on plains we don't do well with complex three dimensional spaces. Instead we simplify those into series of surfaces - or floors - that we do easily understand.

Maybe that we will learn to artificially build new organs in the distant future along with a brain structure to operate them. Those developments have already started in the shape of kidneys being experimentally printed in laboratories, but it will probably take generations before we can match the quality of real organs, so improved and new organs are a long long way off. Only then it might be possible to finally perceive those things we were never able to feel, see or touch before.

[ROFLCopter64bit]

Maybe that we will learn to artificially build new organs in the distant future along with a brain structure to operate them.

By the time the technological singularity comes around, we should be able to create a computer chip that implants into our brain, allowing us into the realm of superintelligence.

[Grahamglas]

Balance is composed of three aspects

1: Visual, we basically triangulate with our binocular vision and to a degree with the focal lenghth of our eye this positions our head (sight)

2: Skeletal, pressure sensors throughout our body feed back information fixing our posture and if any parts of our body touch the world we use our awareness of posture to caculate our position. Also the same sensors detect gravity to a certain extent, we hang from our skeleton thus exerting pressure in different places depending on which way up we are (this is all a sense of touch)

3: Inner ear cannals,(this is probably what your thinking of) we have some curved tubes in our ears which contain some liquid, this is pulled down and levelled by gravity. Hairs in these tubes feel where the liquid is and how ot moves hense we detect our orientation. (touch again)

Balance is our ability to take the input from these three sensor arrays and control our body so we dont fall.

So Balance is nothing but clever use of touch and sight and a bit of flash computing not a special sense on its own.

Hope this answers the question.

By the way, get conflicting data form any of these and we get motion sickness. Guess what happens in space.

Do Kirbles have ears? maybe they have a special balance gismo.

G

PS this forum needs a spell checker. I'm dyslexic so sorry if this is garbage.

[PIRATEONTHERUN]

The 'five senses' are a mediaeval tradition based on Aristotelian concepts (one corresponding to each of his five elements); there's some debate about what should be included, but modern, medical definitions have at least ten, including balance.

That's very interesting. You learn something new every day.

And,

@Grahmglas The only spelling error I caught was that I think cannals has only one 'n' (i.e. canals), but there is a forum spell check so now I know I'm right.

Hope this helps!

Cheers,

PIRATE

Edited May 4, 2013 by PIRATEONTHERUN

[GoodGuy]

However, do you consider one that people can sense, but not everybody has it?

[Obyekt]

Yeah I've heard of around 17 senses. Things such as being able to tell where your limbs are when you can't see them, your ability to feel hot and cold within your body, as you said, balance and various others.

That's called "Proprioception".

Some other than the 5 traditional sense

- Proprioception

- Balance

- Sense of time (distinguishing future, past, present, not all animals have this)

- Sense of timing (Imagine you're in an empty room. You just sit there. Humans know for how long they have been there. Obviously not up to the date, but there's one story of a russian guy who spent a month in a cave. Russian scientists wanted to experiment with what would happen when a human was trapped alone, in his space vessel. After a month or more without a watch, he was off only a few days of the actual time and date.)

- Detecting pheromones in the air (pretty much sense of smell, but still.)

- Temperature

[Camacha]

That's called "Proprioception".

- Sense of time (distinguishing future, past, present, not all animals have this)

Of course, the question is whether past, present and future actually exist. For all our knowledge, we seem to understand very little about the actual nature of time. Viewing time as we do might just be a way of our brain to deal with a more complex structure, for instance where everything happens at the same time. Remember that we are just cells that learned to deal with their environment in a way that does not kill them instantly; it does not mean the way we are wired to perceive things actually makes sense.

Of course, that might be one more thing we will never know, although 500 years ago the same might be said for electricity, radiation and micro organisms.

[Select Few]

I'll just leave this here.