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Senses = Faculty by which the body perceives an external stimulus // Facultad por la cual el cuerpo percibe un estímulo externo
The traditional five senses are sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste. This system is attributed to philosopher Aristotle. Five is just the beginning. There are other senses, such as pain (nociception), balance (equilibrioception), time, and the ability to discern temperature differences (thermoception).
Also see: Sensory overload
Calendar
July 18 is World Listening Day. Contests and walks around the world focus attention on improving listening skills and conserving critical soundscapes.
Stray Notes
- Look with your eyes (not your hands) // Mira con los ojos (no con las manos)
Translating: Sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste
Learn how to say the traditional five senses in another language.
Swedish: syn, hörsel, känsel, lukt och smak.
German: Sehen, Hören, Berühren, Riechen und Schmecken
French: vue, ouïe, toucher, odorat et du goût
Estonian: nägemine, kuulmine, kompimine, haistmine ning maitsmine
Questions // Preguntas
- What are your favorite and least favorite experiences for each of the senses? // ¿Cuáles son tus experiencias favoritas y menos favoritas para cada uno de los sentidos?
Headlines
What science still doesn’t know about the five senses – Vox
The Gradual Discovery of Glasses
Educating Your Five Senses Via Travel
Recommended Listening
Smells and the City – Blueprint for Living – When was the last time you used taste, smell, sound or touch as a way to explore the place around you? If so, you might be already be aware of the burgeoning field of sensory urbanism —a practice that aims to amplify senses other than sight when discovering our cities and towns.
Orwell’s nose – What’s the world like when you permanently lose your sense of smell, or when you’re a super smeller?
Hearing the Past – Hindsight – Historians are starting to listen, tuning their ears to the sounds of the past to gain a new understanding of times gone by.
Flight from embodiment – Getting in touch with your senses.
Living in a world without smell – Anosmia or the loss of the ability to perceive smell can profoundly affect our eating and drinking behaviors.
Games
Human Senses
The five senses quiz
Quotes
Nothing can cure the soul, but the senses. Just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.
– Oscar Wilde
You grab with your eyes but you receive with your ears.
– Anthony Magen, Australian Forum for Acoustic Ecology
One sees clearly only with the heart. What is essential is invisible to the eye.
– Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
People who do not listen with all their senses will not hear. (Människor som inte lyssnar med alla sina sinnen, hör inte)
– Swedish proverb (Poster)
From the evolutionary record, the oldest sense that we have is either the sense of smell or the sense of touch, that’s what amoebae and bacteria use to navigate around in the world. Hearing is a very refined sense of touch, and of all the five senses, it is the latest to be developed by living entities.
– Walter Murch, Radiolab
Llena tus ojos con belleza (Fill your eyes with beauty)
– Conversation
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.
– Marcel Proust
If a photo is worth a thousand words, a soundscape is worth a thousand pictures.
– Bernie Krause, Soundscapes – the sounds of the natural world
Compared with other species, though, humans are missing out. Bats and dolphins use sonar to find prey; some birds and insects see ultraviolet light; snakes detect the heat of warmblooded prey; rats, cats, seals and other whiskered creatures use their “vibrissae” to judge spatial relations or detect movements; sharks sense electrical fields in the water; birds, turtles and even bacteria orient to the earth’s magnetic field lines.
– Top Ten Myths About the Brain
It is better to see something once than hear about it hundred times.
– Korean Proverb
Planeta.com