5 senses research paper
Edition: Available editions Global Perspectives. Become an author Sign up as a reader Sign in Get newsletter. Researchers are now trying to understand if this could be an early sign of the disease. Odd findings in a brain scan of a year-old woman have scientists asking new questions about how our sense of smell really works. If artificial intelligence can amaze us with its prowess, there are many areas where it falls flat when compared to human and animal intelligence.
How the 5 Senses Help Inspire Workplace Productivity
HUMAN beings tend to take their five basic senses pretty much for granted. Happily, scientists have not shared this general indifference. Indeed, information about the senses has been of first interest to scholars from Aristotle on, touching, as such information does, on primary philosophical problems concerning the nature of reality and the perennial question of how we know what we know and whether we really know it.
For the past years or so, research on the senses of humans and animals has led to a mass of information extraordinary in amount and kind.
One of the most striking observations has been one of the most recent—the very strong possibility that some human beings may be able to see with their fingertips. The first word of this strange phenomenon came from a Russian scientist early last year.
Our own scientists received the news with skepticism. But such first impressions soon turned to wonder with the revelation that an American psychologist, Dr. Richard P. Youtz of Barnard College, had tested an American woman who can identify colors by touch alone. Meanwhile, the Russians claim to have turned up two more cases of fingertip seeing, and have had their leading scientists doublecheck the earlier findings. SUCH a discovery directs fresh attention to what science knows about the senses.
How strong are they? What are their limits? Do we have other hidden senses? Indeed, to start at the beginning, what is a sense? A sense may be defined as a mechanism in the body which allows a human or an animal to receive special infor mation about the world and transmit it along nerve pathways to the brain. Each sense has its own specialized cells for picking up its own particular type of information — sounds, tastes, sights and so forth.
And each sense has its own area in the brain where the infor mation it garners is monitored. The data picked up and processed for us by the senses are either of a physical or chemical nature. Ears and eyes, for example, are stimulated physically, by sound or light waves. Taste and smell are produced by chemical contact with taste buds or olfactory centers. Our eyes can only see, not hear. Hearing gives the simplest example of this. A human being cannot hear the monitory scream of one mouse to another as the cat approaches; a human's ears are not on the same soundfrequency level as the mouse's.
The sea is full of the sounds of fish calls, mating cries and cries of warning, yet we can hear very few of them. On the whole, the fact that human hearing will not pick up higher frequencies is a blessing. If it did, mankind would be constantly listening to a cacophony of background noises that would be maddening.
It is a blessing, too, that our other sense spectrums have limits or we would be picking up scents well left to the bloodhound or scavenger or seeing sights after dark fit not for man but for beast. Human vision, for example, may be the most versatile in nature. People with normal vision can see a grapefruit at 1, feet, small print within inches of their nose. A hawk's distance vision is better than ours in daylight: but his eyes don't have the range ours do after the sun goes down.
A honeybee can see more than we can up close but his distance seeing is terrible compared with a human's. We can perceive distant objects times smaller than those a honeybee can. Our ability to perceive color is certainly among the best in the animal kingdom. Ostriches can discriminate among colors and even fish can tell all the colors of the rainbow.
But the. SOME living creatures hunt by day but are totally blind at night and thus hole up at gloaming. Another group can't see well by day. The highly adaptable human eye can get along perfectly by day and comparatively well by night. Our eyes have a visual intensity range of one billion to one; that is, we are able to see by the glaring light of a tropical sun or the dimmest starlight, at least to some extent.
Our hearing also contains a directional sense, and ability to tell where sounds are coming from. This capacity is extremely keen and tests have shown that we can learn, for example, to tell the exact location of 18 different instruments in an orchestra at a distance of 50 feet, with our backs turned to the orchestra. But luckily this dull sense isn't asked to function alone. Sherlock Holmes believed that a good detective should be able to recognize 75 different odors.
But he was selling humankind short. The fact is that the , cells connected to the olfactory center in the nose can detect seemingly limitless scents. The human nose has its own odor spectrum within which it operates, just as the ear and eye have their sound and lightwave spectrums. We couldn't smell our way to a flower as a honeybee can, but in our own area we're fine. A recent survey, for example, counted 17, odors among which the human nose can discriminate.
As for distance, we come nowhere near the world's record in smelling. It is held by the male silkworm moth, which can spot its mate from seven miles upwind. THE human sense of touch needs up to 10 billion times more energy before we can feel an object than sight needs before we can see an object.
Still, touch could hardly be called a weak sense. Our sense of touch also allows us to recognize in a split second the differences between hard and soft, wet and dry. We have, too, a sense thatallows us to discriminate very precisely between weights. There are indications that the subjects may have improved their strange abilities with practice.
If true, does this mean that a human being can extend the outer limits of his sense organs? The answer is no. We have such limits to hearing, smell, touch and taste as well. To do this they employ a sense that most people possess to some degree but rarely have to use; this is the innate ability to pick up small echoes rebounding from near objects. A blind man tapping with his cane is sending out a kind of signal and picking up its echoes from the furniture and walls.
Blind people often make a clicking noise as they go along, unconsciously sending out sound signals to direct themselves just as bats do. THIS latent human sense is a weak one, of course, but with patient training one can reach its outer limits. So far it has been discovered that a human can learn to locate by echo a pole six inches in diameter at a distance of at least three feet. Gault of Northwestern University proved this 35 years ago. He constructed a device that allowed the human voice, amplified greatly, to come into contact with the fingers of a subject.
A training period allowed a subject to recognize short sentences vibrated against his fingers three out of four times. The fact that our senses of taste and smell can be trained to maximum proficiency is attested to by the fact that the great food and drink industries spend millions of dollars hiring and training special tasters for their wares.
The taste sense of such a specialist becomes inordinately sensitive. He soon learns to tell the chemical content of practically anything he puts in his mouth. Standing blindfolded in a roomful of people, a trained nose can tell who is wearing what powder or hair tonic, or even whether some individual has taken a vitamin tablet in the past 24 hours.
IT is said that Helen Keller could tell the identity of her friends by their individual odors. This was not because she had developed a sense of smell that was basically superhuman or of the bloodhound vanety. She had simply trained herself to notice the identifying perfumes, hair oils and other odorific traits of her friends.
We can be trained, too, to the outer limits of our sense of touch. And a few can merely tap a piece of cloth once with a stick and tell everything they need to know about it. Although senses can be trained to reach their outer limits of acuity, these limits cannot be extended by such drugs as mescaline, L.
Drugs of this kind give strange and often fascinating experiences to the taker; and there are many reports of people who gain deep insights into themselves and the world under the influence of such drugs. The main action of these drugs, however, is probably not on the senses as such but on the brain.
One may experience feelings of increased sensory acuity, but these are subjective. The drugsprofoundly affect what the mind itself does with the sights and sounds one perceives but theydo not actually allow one to see or hear at a greater distance or increase one's innate sensory limits in other ways. If means can be devised for amplifying this weak capacity the blind might be able to use it for reading the ordinary printed page, and, in the reaims of the visual and tactile, a whole new esthetic synthesis may take place.
Such a utilltarian use of our increasing knowledge about the senses would be in an already broad tradition. When a new fact is found it is usually followed by practical suggestions for ways in which it might be used or by inventions based upon it. This capability is used in a device to control the sex of herds and flocks in artificial insemination.
Many other possibilities stem from new information about the senses. A mosquito repellent based on lowering skin temperatture has been suggested by new data which indicate that mosquitoes are attracted to those humans who have slightly hotter skin surfaces. A shark repellent has been suggested by research on minnows which found that when a minnow is injured his skin exudes a secretion that warns his brother fish away; if sharkshave the same faculty of smelling a warning from an injured brother a really effective shark repellent may be found:.
SOME inventions are arrived at by studying the special attributes of animals and insects. Until this device was invented, pilots could only tell their speed in relationship to the speed of the wind.
These are but a few of the facts uncovered about the senses in the past century. The extension of- this knowledge, and of practical uses for it, seem today almost limitless in scope. One thing is clear. We shouldn't take our senses for granted. Recent experiments have shown not only that the senses areimportant but that they are essential to survival of the human mind. In these experiments subjects were cut off from all possible sensory stimulation; their eyes were covered with goggles that blocked vision, their hands were covered so they could not feel anything; they were isolated from contact and could hear only a steady background hum.
IN the environment the subjects soon ceased to do any concerted thinking. Some had hallucinations, some burst into irrational rage, some had delusions that they had two bodies or that their minds were detached from them and were wandering around in space.
The Five Senses of Science | Find, read and cite all the research you One strand of work in this field has begun to highlight the continued. In this white paper, Silvia Peleteiro discusses how our senses do not work point of view, is determined by the five human senses: sight But studies from the.
Humans have five basic senses: touch, sight, hearing, smell and taste. The sensing organs associated with each sense send information to the brain to help us understand and perceive the world around us. People also have other senses in addition to the basic five.
Students take their senses for granted and often do not realise how they work together in providing different types of information about our immediate environment. This information allows us to respond to changes in our environment.
Eating is something we do many times every day and uses all five of our senses. We look with our eyes at what is on our plate or the food that is on the shelf at the store.
Sight, Sound, Smell, Taste, and Touch: How the Human Body Receives Sensory Information
The five senses are an important part of many of the science disciplines. Beyond human anatomy, the five senses also branch into communications , biology and human anatomy. Paper Masters will custom write a research paper on the five senses or you may use the information here to pick your own topic on this wonder of human anatomy. Most people learn in grade school that human beings have five senses:. The senses are physiological characteristics that allow the individual to receive outside stimuli.
Eating with all five senses: Sight
Every sense has the power to influence how we perceive the world and how we remember experiences. So what if a space was designed with all five senses in mind? Would that make us happier? More productive? More engaged? These questions have been examined by numerous researchers, most famously perhaps by designer Jinsop Lee who, in a TED talk , postulates that the best designs appeal to all or most of our senses. Corporate interior designers—like FOX Architects and Gensler—have been exploiting the unique ability of senses to evoke a range of emotional responses. Sensory design elements—colors, lighting, sounds, textures and smells—are now purposefully adapted to enhance the work environment and increase productivity.
HUMAN beings tend to take their five basic senses pretty much for granted.
The nervous system must receive and process information about the world outside in order to react, communicate, and keep the body healthy and safe. Much of this information comes through the sensory organs: the eyes, ears, nose, tongue, and skin.
