Dubai, United Arab Emirates (CNN) — The five traditional senses: sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch, aim to protect us from danger. It also helps us to find food and may help us meet a companion or companion on the way. They frame the order that surrounds us, and, if set properly, unfold before us some natural beauty and wonder within our sight.
What the senses have in common is that they are processed through the brain. In fact, everything we see, hear, feel, smell, and taste is perceived by our brains, and it may be controversial for many.
That’s right: it’s our brains that translate the tiny, invisible airborne particles from the smell of bread into the stinky sock. Our brains can turn pressure waves or vibrations into a whisper or the pounding of distant thunder. Our brains can also weave the visible light portion of electromagnetic radiation into a beautiful mountain, or the glow on our mother’s face. Our brains can recognize the infrared portion of the same electromagnetic radiation, such as feeling warm while sitting near a lit fireplace. It’s really amazing.
In the new season of the “Chasing Life” podcast, which launches this week, we’ll explore the many mysteries of the senses.
I’m a practicing neurosurgeon, and my first love has always been the brain, but reporting this season’s stories was an opportunity to combine that with another love: journalistic storytelling. What I heard, saw, smelled, tasted, and felt was absolutely wonderful.
Our traditional five senses may seem obvious, but in reality they are not. Each has its own multiple and subtle aspects, with many differences. Take touch, for example. Some people like it while others don’t. Far from being just one sense, touch can be divided into pressure, temperature, touch, and pain. We’re still learning how it all works.
Just last year, in 2021, two scientists working separately, shared the Nobel Prize for Medicine for their work identifying a sensor in the nerve endings of our skin that responds to heat, and other sensors that respond to pressure. And just this year, the two researchers published a paper describing some of the possible neural underpinnings of pleasurable sensations such as cuddling and foreplay.
Moreover, the traditional five senses are not the only ones we have. It may surprise you to learn that we have seven senses, maybe eight at the minimum. You will learn more regarding the other secret senses that most humans have in this season of “Chasing Life”.
In addition, we will see what happens when people do not have a sense or a sense component. We have an episode of the inability to recognize faces, generally known as prosopagnosia, a condition in which people can see faces but cannot recognize them, sometimes even to the faces of their family members. We will learn how people in the deaf-blind community have created language to help them communicate better.
We’ll also look at synesthesia, when two senses blend together to create a unique ‘synthetic sensation’, such as colored hearing, where sounds make certain colours. You will learn why synesthesia occurs and how the experience is so ingrained in the individual that many who have it do not realize (for a long time) that others do not see the world in the same way.
In addition, we’ll take a deep look at psychedelic drugs, which distort the senses and separate us from our usual way, and can be used to treat mental health conditions, such as post-traumatic stress disorder and depression.
Animals and how they see the world
We kicked off the season with an interview with award-winning science journalist Ed Young. He is the author of a new book, A Colossal World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Worlds Around Us.
Ed explains how all creatures, not just humans, live in their ‘sensory bubble’, the very specific part of reality that is crucial to their survival and well-being. This phenomenon is called umwelt, a concept devised by Baltic German biologist Jakob von Uexküll in 1934.
Ed takes us on a fascinating journey through the many mystical senses of the animal kingdom that lie beyond our sensibilities, beyond the reach of what we humans can know for sure.
Ed told me, “I started the book with this thought experiment, like imagining you’re sharing a room with an elephant, a bee, a snake, a spider, and a bat. They might all be in the same physical space, but you’d have radically different experiences of that space. The rattlesnake would be able to sense “The body temperature of the animals around them, the elephant can make low ultrasound sounds that other creatures can’t hear. They smell a lot of smell.. the other animals mightn’t get it. So, we are all trapped in our sensory bubble and looking at reality.”
The really amazing thing, Ed said, is that each of those organisms, including us, thinks we get the full picture of what reality is.
Join us every Tuesday for Chasing Life as we explore the senses and how we make the world come alive for us, so we can live our lives better.
