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The way we learn about the five senses in elementary school bugs me. It is presented as this absolute fact and has become completely culturally embedded. Some

• ghaff 7y ago
  For a long time--even after Umami had been identified in Japan--it was still the norm, at least in the US, to teach that there are 4 tastes: salty, sweet, bitter, and sour. (Though, in all fairness, I'm not sure to what degree the US food science community recognized umami until relatively recently.
  • davidmurdoch 7y ago
    US African here. I din't know what Umami is. Looked it up just now... sounds like it would just be classified as a subtle variation to "salty" to me?
    • basilgohar 7y ago
      Fat, MSG, oils, etc. all impart a savory-style flavor that is called umami that has nothing to do with salt.
    • jacobolus 7y ago
      No umami is a rich meaty kind of taste (also found in seaweed, cheese, mushrooms, soy sauce, some vegetables, ...) which has nothing to do with sodium chloride. Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glutamate_flavoring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glutamate_flavoring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umami https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umami
    • soulofmischief 7y ago
      In the US, we are taught that this is called "savory".
      • ghaff 7y ago
        Savory isn't really the same thing. Savory is mostly a contrast to sweet. So a savory quick bread would be made with herbs rather than fruits. It does overlap some insofar as a bacon bread could also be called savory.
        • soulofmischief 7y ago
          I see. Thanks for clarifying!
    • davidmurdoch 7y ago
      *not African. Phone autocorrected American to African and I've missed the edit window.
  • WillPostForFood 7y ago
    Umami was named/Identified in Japan in 1908. That's still a pretty recent discovery compared to sweet and salt and the human timescale of discovering and naming flavors. So it isn't surprising that it is still working its way into people's consciousness and vocabulary. It is also subtle compared to the big 4 tastes.
• lordnacho 7y ago
  Yes, the obvious example is balance. You have a way to know which way you're pointing, yet it's not one of the five standard senses. I think of it as devices rather than physical process sensors, which are the building blocks. You have cells that can detect things like mechanical pressure or specific chemicals, and you have actuators that can trigger sensors. They get mashed up by evolution to create devices like balance detectors.
• wongarsu 7y ago
  Even "touch" as a sense makes no sense. Feeling pressure and feeling heat exchange are completely different senses. In addition to that there's obviously a kind of pain felt by the skin that is neither extreme pressure nor a temperature extreme but an indicator of skin damage. Then there's proprioception as mentioned in the article, the sense of balance/acceleration as measured in our ears, and together with smell, sound, taste and sight we are already at 9 senses. And as you mention many of the things we actually perceive are derived from many senses. The "taste" of a steak is a mix of smell and taste, your balance is a mix of sight and your acceleration, temperature is something we can't actually fell but can derive from how much heat enters or leaves our body, "pain" is a giant category spanning nearly all senses, etc.
  • earenndil 7y ago
    > The "taste" of a steak is a mix of smell and taste And pressure--i.e. texture.
  • jacobolus 7y ago
    > kind of pain felt by the skin that is neither extreme pressure nor a temperature extreme but an indicator of skin damage. Do you mean an itch or a sunburn-type discommfort or something else?
  • soulofmischief 7y ago
    We also have speed cells, boundary cells, place cells, grid cells... some of our senses might not be auxiliary or primary but rely on another sense which mediates them. But your body keeps track of its speed and location in any environment regardless of if your senses are impaired (grid cells and place cells rely not only on sight but information gathered from speed and head direction cells), which is as much of a sense as proprioception. We don't even have a word for this, I think. Locoception, perhaps? Posiception? Only two Latin roots I know which fit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_cell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_cell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Place_cell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Place_cell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_cells https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_cells https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boundary_cell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boundary_cell
• zarmin 7y ago
  A particular interest of mine is the perception of being watched. What sense is that?! Dean Radin has some very interesting studies on it, some of which extend to being watched through security cameras.
  • cameronbrown 7y ago
    Evolved instinct is my guess. Makes sense - people watching you don't always have the best intentions.
• grmn 7y ago
  Wreck a microwave oven or hold a video-streaming phone to your ear, either should be perceptible.
  • etaioinshrdlu 7y ago
    What? How?
    • braindeath 7y ago
      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetically_excited_acoustic_noise_and_vibration https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetically_excited_... Ie “coil whine”.. not saying this guy isn’t a nut. But it is possible to hear electronic devices. On a computer streaming video the increased current demands can make power supply coils more audible.
    • RandomBacon 7y ago
      With LCD TVs, I haven't noticed them now. But CRT TVs, I could hear if they were on (and muted) in the next room. Some people are sensitive to some frequencies.
      • toast0 7y ago
        You can certainly hear one of my LCD TVs, at least when it's working hardest (mostly black screen). Samsung had a capacitor recall program, but it wasn't that bad while that was active. I've been hoping it will die, but no such luck.
      • JonathonW 7y ago
        The CRT noise is an actual sound; CRT flyback transformers tend to vibrate at the horizontal scanning rate of the display and that's audible for NTSC and PAL (at around 15 kHz), if you have good hearing. An LCD shouldn't whine, but some can (bad capacitors, cheap power supplies, or any number of other causes).
  • catalogia 7y ago
    Can you demonstrate your supposed cellphone-detection powers in a double-blind experiment? I sincerely doubt it, but I'd be interested in watching you try.
• vanderZwan 7y ago
  You would probably enjoy Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader [0] https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/empire-of-the-senses-9781859738634/ https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/empire-of-the-senses-978185973...
• asveikau 7y ago
  The experience of synesthetics seems relevant here. Some people would appear to have the wires crossed on interpretation of the senses relative to others.
• 0xcde4c3db 7y ago
  The "five senses" thing in particular traces back to Aristotle, who was a smart enough guy in general but seems to also be the source of a lot of bullshit that's still uncritically repeated over 2000 years later.
  • HeWhoLurksLate 7y ago
    Maybe not unironically, but unexaminedly? It's not like he was intending to mislead people.
• jayd16 7y ago
  >we have some of the mechanisms needed to sense magnetic fields, but no compelling evidence Well you can easily sense charge if it's enough to lift your hair. We can also feel electric shock. I'm not sure if you want to categorize those as touch.
  • willis936 7y ago
    Those are actuating nerves that are traditionally considered “touch”. We have separate hardware for sensing magnetic fields. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2018/10/20/448449.full.pdf https://www.biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2018/10/20/448...
• crazypython 7y ago
  There are no five tastes. There are foods that activate special nerves on the tongue that are none of the five in many non-European cuisines.
  • pacaro 7y ago
    The most trivial example I can think of is Sichuan pepper (花椒)
    • jelliclesfarm 7y ago
      Sichuan pepper is responsible for neurological dissonance. It’s of the citrus family and is a ‘false pepper’. It creates a numbing sensation and when used with chili peppers of moderate heat, it tricks the mind into thinking that it’s hotter than it really is ..the tingling and numbing sensation leading to the nervous system trigger the same responses as though you are eating something excessively spicy and hot. I want to say..maybe a rush of endorphins. If you had just the Sichuan peppers alone, there would be no spiciness or heat. Just numbing and tingling. It’s a neat hack.
• Mattasher 7y ago
  How about our ability to echo-locate, given enough practice? That seems like yet another sense that goes beyond just hearing, and is probably linked to our proprioception skills.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• BiteCode_dev 7y ago
  We also have light receptors on the skin. And I'm assuming we have many others we don't know about. The way we teach about the human condition is very limited, and I only started understanding a bit how my body works after I reached 30 thanks to a lot of self-experimentation.
• dredmorbius 7y ago
  The way virtually anything is taught in primary and secondary school and much of higher education, may be pedogogically useful, but is almost always wrong in very major part. Some of that is in the sense of Wittgenstein's Ladder -- a tool which suffices to gain a level of understanding but then must be discarded. Often also referred to as "lies told to children". Some is institutional and cultural resistance to new idears or release of the old. (This turns up in language, we speak of the sun rising and setting, of good and bad humours, of magnetic personalities, and of sky gods and goddesses, bearded or otherwise, despite varying degrees of disproof or lack of proof of their existence.) So, yeah, you can pretty much drop most of your early education as being accurate. That said, if you're interested in sensation and perception, there is an entire division of psychology devoted to that, and amongst the first myths demolished in my own textbook on the topic is the notion of five senses, and in particular that of a unitary sense of touch. There's hope, if you look for it.
  • tialaramex 7y ago
    In the UK at least there has been clear improvement in how mathematics is taught, you can tell from the outrage of parents who've been taught an older approach and think the newer methods are "wrong". In particular children are being taught about basic arithmetic operations in a way that facilitates later showing them the larger picture. For example the consistent application of a "number line" and showing how operations involve counting up and down that line means later successor-of(), exponentiation, and the hyper-operators will fit nicely into the pattern rather than forcing a re-examination of what you learned earlier. Done right you can prime children to be shown Group Theory and just go "Oh, that makes sense" rather than having to re-examine what they learned already from a new perspective. Parents who've forgotten how long it took them to "just know" that 6 x 7 = 42 and don't have a strong mathematical background seem to rage at each iteration and then are further annoyed to discover that those of us who needed more mathematics later actually think these innovations are a good idea because now kids understand "why" 6 x 7 = 42 rather than just memorising it for a test...
    • dredmorbius 7y ago
      Maths is ... one domain. Concepts of science, both natural and social, philosophy, logic, and history are others. There's an (IMO) fascinating division in the teacing of skills versus "liberal arts" (ultimately: critical thinking, concepts of power and control) in education. What are now considered "technologies" had their beginning as "practical", "technical", or "servile" arts, contrasted with the Seven Liberal Arts: - Grammer, Logic, and Rhetoric: the Trivium, from whence, "trivia". Think "input, processing, and output." - Mathematics, Geometry, Music, and Astronomy: the Quadrivium. Think "quantity/measurement, quantity in space, quantity in time, and quantity in space and time." This divide remains apparent in both lower ("tracking") and higher education. For the latter, top-tier "prestige" schools, followed roughly by major research universities (science), technical schools and polytechnics, what used to be called "teacher" or "normal" schools in the US (now mostly state college / university systems), two-year and vocational schools. A huge problem of the pedagogical rigidity is the (usually) unstated goals of educational systems: - Produce a technically-skilled, but politically pliable, working class. - Produce a managerially competent, but not revolutionary, mangement and professional class. - Persist existing power structures. Observed by many over the years, including numerous 20th and a few 21st century commentators. I find John Stuart Mill's 19th century take interesting for its remove from immediate political machinations and for being possibly unexpected given the popular perception of his writings. See Hans Jensen's description, with cites: First, the universities were given the task of providing an unceasing supply of ideologically correct candidates for vital positions in government, church, and business. The state was able to make the faculties of the "venerable institutions" of higher education, or rather indoctrination, assume this duty because it controlled appointments and held the purse from which "emoluments" flowed into the coffers of academics. Hence the members of the university "hierarchy" made it their "business, the business for which they ... [were] paid," to "uphold certain political as well as religious opinions," namely those of the "ruling powers of the state" (J.S. Mill, Autobiography and Literary Essays, p. 429 (1981), J.S. Mill, Journals and Debating Speeches, p. 350. (1988) ). Thus the universities pursued with vigor their assignment to inculcate in their students those political and ideological views that were cherished by the power elite. The graduates of the ancient universities were, therefore, well prepared for employment in, and by, those institutions that were instrumental in perpetuating the existing maldistribution of income. All of this might come to naught, however, if the masses of the underclass should achieve anything approaching success in potential attempts at throwing off their fetters. The state devised a second educational strategy in order to prevent such a calamity from occurring. According to Mill, the "elementary schools for children of the working classes" were given the task of ensuring that the poor would continue to accept docilely their dismal station in life. It was very easy for the state to force the public schools to assume this role. It did so simply by failing malignantly to allocate sufficient funds for the operations of what Mill identified contemptuously as "places called schools" (J.S. Mill, Essays on England, Ireland, and the Empire, p.200; emphasis in original). These places were therefor understaffed. Moreover, the few teachers who were actually employed were completely "unfit for their work." The pupils therefore were so "wretchedly ill-taught" that they "did not ... even learn to read." And, said Mill with disgust, no attempt was "made to communicate ideas, or to call forth the mental faculties" of the children". (J.S. Mill, Public and Parliamentary Speeches, November 1850 - November 1868, p. 322 (1988). J.S. Mill, Essays on England Ireland, and the Empire, p. 200 (1982)). Hans E. Jensen, "John Stuart Mill's Theories of Wealth and Income Distribution". Review of Social Economy. Pages 491-507. Published online: 05 Nov 2010. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00346760110081599 http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00346760110081599 Previously noted by me in: https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/6x7u6a/on_the_role_of_universities_and_primary_education/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/6x7u6a/on_the_...