I do have more than 5 senses. So do you. And no, I’m not talking about any hippie stuff.

Senses are the physiological methods of perceiving our environment. When we were kids we got taught that humans have 5 senses (sight, touch, hearing, smell, and taste).

Is that really all there is to it? Only five ways of perceiving the world around us?

Actually no! If you really think about it we have other senses too:

• Sense of balance. Known as equilibrioception this is how we keep our balance. Sensory organs in our ears take care of our senses of balance. Incidentally they also get quite confused when you spin around making yourself dizzy.
• Sense of temperature. Known as thermoreception this is how we can sense heat and the lack of heat (cold)
• Sense of body positions. This one is a little trickier to explain. Close your eyes and touch your nose with you finger. Even though your eyes were closed you could use propriorecption to sense where your hand was at all times.
• Sense of pain. Nociception makes use of three different kinds of dedicated pain receptors to let us know when we are damaging our bodies.
• Sense of time. Apparently our brains do have some sense of time – we’re able to understand roughly how much time has passed without other stimuli.

There are also other ‘senses’ that affect humans. For instance how do you think you know when you’re hungry?

So it seems that they lied to us when we were young. Yet another lie-to-children, although in this case I don’t think it was necessary.