I thought this was pretty interesting, I suppose that we constantly underestimate ourselves! The Body is an AMAZING organism, so much more then we often reduce it to (size, weight, shape, form) It is to be appreciated and respected for its wonder. Check this out it’s a cool read that I sense (you’ll get that in a minute if you continue reading) you will enjoy and learn from.
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By: Karl Smallwood, Eddie Rodriguez July 11, 2011
When we reach the age of two, we start to have a few questions about our bodies. At first they’re simple. ‘Will that toy fit into the wet hole in the middle of my face?’ But as we mature, the questions become more complex and too numerous for any reasonable human being to answer. It’s no coincidence that around this time, your parents ship you off to school where someone is payed to give you answers.
Unfortunately, many of the answers you get there are lies that seem specifically designed to make the world around you seem boring. Because how else are they going to get you to stop asking so many damn questions? For instance, you probably still believe …
#6.
You Only Have Five Senses
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.
And wannabe intellectuals have rocked the comb forward/beard combo ever since.
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.
Oh, yeah. We just dropped the H-bomb on you.
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.