Body Senses

Leonardo da Vinci once proclaimed this sentiment.

According to this renowned Renaissance artist, the five senses are the key to truly experiencing and embracing life. His view supports the reality that each sensory organ transmits sensation to the brain to help us comprehend and interpret the world around us.

• What are body senses?
• How do our body senses work?
• What senses do humans not have?
• Why is sensation important in psychology?

Body Senses and Their Function

We view the world through our five senses. Our bodies would be rendered functionally worthless without them. In reaction to a physical phenomenon, the five senses function through body parts and sense organs that supply data for interpretation via a network of nerves. All sense organs have distinct functions designed to accomplish different goals.

Body Senses and Organs

Body organs enable us to see, smell, hear, touch, and taste.

Sight

The visual system, or sense of sight, is responsible for visual perception and is dependent on the transduction of light impulses received via our eyes. Vision as one of the senses is essential since it supplies the brain with the most information per second. The eyes are the primary sensory organ capable of detecting shape, color, motion, and depth.

Smell

The olfactory system refers to the biological components that support the sense of smell. Specialized sensory cells called olfactory sensory neurons are present in a small patch of tissue high within the nose that give us the capacity to smell. The sense of smell helps us detect and distinguish distinct odors. Different scents are either good, bad, or neutral based on the feelings they provoke.

Hearing

The auditory system senses sound by detecting vibrations via the ear. Your ears gather sound waves, turned into neural signals and delivered to the brain. In the brain, they are associated with previous experiences and presented as the sounds we hear. Hearing helps you communicate with people, experience the senses and sounds of nature, provide personal safety, and sustain mental health.

Touch

The somatosensory system known as the sense of touch comprises multiple sensations sent to the brain via specific skin neurons. The skin is the body's largest organ and has many receptors that help you feel what you touch. It senses cold, hot, smooth, rough, pressure, tickling, itch, pain, and vibrations, all controlled by this system. The sense of touch impacts our lives from feeding to walking, sexual behavior to social connections.

Taste

The gustatory system, known as the sense of taste, is a sensory process involved in flavor perception. This sense is triggered when a substance in the mouth chemically interacts with taste receptor cells on the taste buds located on the tongue. The tongue distinguishes between five specific flavors: sweet, sour, salty, bitter, umami (meaty). It can also detect cool and hot.

Proprioception

Proprioception or kinesthesia refers to your body's ability to perceive movement, activity, force, heaviness, stiffness, position, and posture. It is based on the interaction of the body's central nervous system with specific soft tissues such as muscles, tendons, and ligaments.

Senses Humans Do Not Have

Humans have higher intelligence than animals. However, there are other things humans cannot do and senses only animals possess. Some of those differences are special senses, sensory organs, and body adaptations that allow animals to move and thrive in the environment.

Echolocation

Do you recall when you lost your keys or mobile phone in your bedroom? Imagine the stress of going through all your things before you even realize it's just under your blanket. It would be better to let out sounds that echo back at us to locate objects quickly. Unfortunately, only animals can do that. We call this ability - echolocation.

For instance, bats produce high-frequency sounds as they sense insect prey. The sound waves reach the moth and leave an echo released back to the bat. The bat then receives the echo giving information on where the moth is.

Fg. 1 Bats displaying echolocation, pexels.com

Infrared and Ultraviolet Vision

Animals such as snakes have sensory organs that allow them to see at night using infrared vision. Pit vipers and pythons, for example, have pit organs that are sensitive to heat generated by warm-blooded animals like rodents and birds. Heat reaches the nerve fibers in the pit organs giving the snake infrared vision of the target. Birds with ultraviolet vision, such as kestrels, can detect traces of prey such as urine and mouse dung. Even the trails may be seen in the ultraviolet, contrasting the uniform color of a planted field.

Electric Sense

Electric eels have electroplate organs that can generate electric charges to hunt prey. This fish also has an electric field generated by its electroplates which sense water.

Fg. 2 Electric eels with electric senses, pexels.com

Magnetic Sense

Humans rely on a compass to understand geographic orientation. Still, animals such as sea turtles, sharks, and some birds have magnetic senses to help them travel long distances and know specific directions. It is thought that the animals' nervous system has traces of magnetite-like compass needles that help detect the earth's magnetic fields.

Meaning of Senses in Psychology

APA Dictionary of Psychology (n.d.) defines senses as mediums used to collect information about the external environment or the state of one's body in connection to it. The five primary senses—vision, hearing, taste, touch, and smell—along with the body senses of pressure, pain, temperature, kinesthesis, and equilibrium—are all included. Sensory receptors direct information into a pathway that connects to a specific area in the brain. Sensation happens when a sensory receptor recognizes sensory input. These sensations help people understand how they can act in the world and deal with life's obstacles.

People experience a lot of senses and stimuli every day to the point that they don't pay much attention to them. However, a lack of awareness of these sensations can give rise to later problems in life, whether for a person's physical or mental health.

Body sense psychology helps to explore the mechanisms behind our senses of balance, pain, and actions in response to sensory input detected by our body senses — touch, temperature, pain, balance, and body position.

Importance of Sensation to Psychology