How Many Human Senses are There?

I can see certain colors when my eyes are closed and I'm sleeping. mostly the color violet, many colors of blue, at least 3 colors of grey or silver, and black with different shades of green and yellow.

I'm tracking at least 14 senses, but I'm too busy to type them all. Just so you know, people, there are more than five senses!

You all left out that sense you get when someone says something really stupid, but then someone will argue "that don't make no ...sense." What about the sense of comedy? Like for instance, this next one liner is gonna suck: "I can feel it."

Umwelt is a German term which means “environment” or “surroundings” and it refers to the world as it is experienced by a particular organism. Human beings, in general, have five sense organs that receive information from the environment and transfer them to brain for processing. This mechanism is the basis of a human’s perception of the world. The accuracy of the processed information has direct relation to the amount and quality of the received information by each particular sense organ. An extension in functionality of the sense organs will help people to better interact with their surroundings in their daily lives. the core agenda for technology in the 21st century is intuitive interactions. It is not the new Windows OS, or Internet of Things (IoT), or Smartphones. It is rather human centered interactive technologies.

I have a few senses you did not mention, I think. I know I have synthenasia where I hear colors. Also I have a weird ability. I can see in two directions at once, plus I have the ability to hyper focus where I can literally forget who and where i am.

"I'm hungry now. I feel it physically in my stomach."

I reckon you're going a bit far with this one. I could just as easily say that I feel sounds in my ears, so lets get rid of hearing too as it's just touch really.

We're defining these things to help us communicate, so our definitions should make sense.

I think the five senses they teach you about in school are the clear interfaces we have with the external world. They are the only (reliably replicate-able) way we can get information about the state of what is outside our body, into our body and to the brain.

The rest is all just internal wiring. We can't tell anything about the world outside our body when we feel hungry, that's just being aware of the signalling mechanism that makes us stuff the next bit of tasty fuel into our gobs.

I love it when people who are almost definitely not scientists or doctors or experts in any way just say, "Nope, my vast expertise is telling me it doesn't add up. I don't buy it, there's only five." It's science. That's no better than denying evolution or a round Earth just because you simply don't know any better. These are people who spent gigantic chunks of their lives learning this stuff, becoming legitimate experts, so we can just reap the benefits of their knowledge.

I agree there are more than five basic senses. Although the aforementioned additional senses I do consider to fall under the classification of one of those five broad categories. The senses thermoception and nociception, as explained in this article, I would not classify as anything but a sub-sense under the more basic sense of feel. I do agree that an argument can be made that the sense of balance and special reasoning could be classified separately but a case could just as easily be made that those are just extensions to the sense of feel as well. I will break out some additional senses and "sub-senses" that I believe could be considered. But we do have other senses certainly! I propose three additional broad categories.

First, I propose that we have a sense of reason and the degree to which that sense has developed for human kind is pretty special. Some of the secondary senses or "sub-senses," as I have been calling them, would be baseless conjecture or a sense of intuition. Logic and cognition would also fall under this category. This is a very sophisticated sense and hosts a multitude of other secondary senses that would make the list too long to add to base senses, such as a sense of direction, a sense of time, etc., etc., etc..

Additionally, we also have a sense of emotion that should be clearly separated from the first five senses. Oxytocin, serotonin and dopamine are powerful things and their release is not always from the stimulus of one of the traditional five senses. Empathy could be considered a sub-sense of emotion and is seen in many cognitively developed animals. Instinct would be the equivalent of empathy for less cognitively developed animals than humans. I don't think humans have many instincts left in us. We have evolved from that. As a child, I remember looking to other people’s reactions to avoid dicey situations.

Finally, and I may be going out on a limb here, I would propose a sense of chemical/biological identity. We experience this even though we may be unaware of the battles that go on at a cellular and molecular level. We are each a multitude. We know when we are dehydrated or sick. When white blood cells seek out invading cells and foreign bodies, that is a programed response from an outside source, and I would call that a sense. When we sense a change in our biology or chemistry we can be caused to feel sick, weak, fatigued or even loopy. All these are manifestations of our sense of chemical and biological identity, although the means through which interpret this sense usually stems from one of the other five senses.

Though I really tried hard to break this into three additional categories, I feel there may be more. Please, I am eager to hear any responses and would like to reflect on my ideas with all you smart people out there. Please, tear my arguments apart! Am I totally off base or do you agree with me? I want to hear your thoughts and fuel this discussion.

Thanks for taking the time to read my contribution.

Check your definition of senses. Don't confuse the brains interpretation of our senses as being the senses themselves.

Here's an experiment. Spin quickly with your eyes closed. Just make sure you are going to fall safely. All five of the senses (there are only five) communicate something unique about the environment around us. Each is really a very complex and highly specialized system.

Touch is feeling nerve impulses. Sight is detecting photons. Smell is detecting the chemical nature of a substance by the tiny molecules that float in the air around it. Hearing is detecting sound waves. Taste is detecting the flavor of something. The chemical make up of a substance in contact with the tongue.

The sense of heat is nothing more than the sense of touch. Even if I don't touch the item itself, my skin is feeling the physical effects of the heat on my skin. The brain identifies those feelings as heat.

I'm hungry now. I feel it physically in my stomach.

A case could be made that the brain also detects what it needs by what is missing from the blood. But, most of the time, the awareness comes from something identified with the other five senses.

I can tell you from a medical science perspective there are 12 senses. The dividing line is not significant for most people, hence why most "skin" senses are usually lumped together, but "touch" and "thermoreception" are in no way linked. Nocireceptors, that is pain receptors, respond to different a region in the brain than proprioceptors in the skin. Nocireceptors actually do not respond to pressure stimuli as proprioceptors do. Visceral pain, pain from say, holding your breath, is not activated by nerves but by nocireceptors firing.

Pain caused by loss of blood or oxygen is an alert signal rather than an external sensory message. Further, arguing that because two or more organs are involved negates most senses. After all, taste comes from smell. The taste buds are actually just signaling to the brain which nutrient is present (carbs, glucose, protein, etc.) Some scientists do break down the senses into more groups, sense of air pressure (which by the way is how blood pressure is monitored), electromagnetic fields, chemoreception (the glandular sense the gentleman referred to above) etc. but there is no defined set. Six main senses, 12 visceral senses, and endless debate beyond that.

I've been researching the senses for some time, as an amateur. The non-skin external senses are pretty straightforward: sight, hearing, smell, taste, and what scientists call vestibular sensation. (This last includes two pieces: one senses the direction of gravity, the other senses angular acceleration. Since gravity is itself a form of acceleration, I think of the whole sense as the sense of acceleration. The vestibule is the part of the inner ear that doesn't do hearing.)

So this is five mostly straightforward senses. You can increase the number if you count the visual contribution to the body's clock separately from sight, or pheromone sensing (if any) separately from smell, or if you split vestibular sensation into two, but seems to me those are cheating.

Balance is something the brain does with (mostly) sight and vestibular sensation. Proprioception is something the brain does with (mostly) the muscle senses and vestibular sensation, though it also lets the skin senses and sight pitch in if they can. I wouldn't consider either a sense in its own right.

Thermoception is, among other things, a skin sense. And this creates trouble because there's no widely accepted definition of what separates senses, so it isn't obvious how to separate the skin senses either from each other, or from the muscle and visceral senses.

For starters: There are four kinds of receptors we ordinarily understand as "touch" even by narrow definitions. Two of these are also found in the muscles, ligaments, and joints. Meanwhile, we have two very different kinds of receptor for heat and cold. One responds to heat; the other responds mostly to cold, but also to some levels of heat. (This is why cold can sometimes feel like it's burning you.) These may or may not be processed separately in the brain; and I have no idea whether, or to what extent, they feed into the somatosensory cortex, the touch map of the body, which is what I came to this page hoping to find out. So is thermoception one sense, two (separate receptors, perhaps separate brain processing), or zero (part of touch because it hits the somatosensory cortex -- if it does) ?

Don't even get me started about pain. For example, the top level of hearing according to hearing specialists is the "threshold of pain". Is this kind of pain the same as the kind we sense with our skin? With our guts? How about the pain from overly bright light?

And the fun only continues. The article blithely asserts that external thermoception works very differently from internal thermoregulation. Well, duh. But does external thermoception work differently from stomach thermoception? Yes, our stomachs sense heat and cold.

Once you get inside the body, also, things get very confused with the chemical senses. Many of our glands can sense when a particular chemical is low or high in a particular fluid. Is each of these a separate sense?

I have no idea how you get to 21 senses, but if those are all external senses, then whatever classification it is, ought to include, for example, each glandular sensor as a sense, and probably ends up somewhere in the hundreds. --Joe B.

What about our sense of time?

I've heard that the male human beings have five senses whereas female human beings have seven senses? Is it so? I'm really very confused. Please help!

How can we differ our senses from our thoughts or dreams?

What is the "order" in which the senses develop? Proprioception first? Also, touch and hearing are connected, as well as, smell and touch.

How are the senses connected?