Sense
Sense
Sense (/sɛns/) is a physiological capacity of organisms that provides data for perception. The senses and their operation, classification, and theory are overlapping topics studied by a variety of fields, most notably neuroscience, cognitive psychology (or cognitive science), and philosophy of perception.
Etymology
The word "sense" comes from the Latin sensus, which means "faculty of perceiving, thought, understanding, a way of perceiving or feeling". It was first used in the English language in the 14th century.
Types of Senses
The human body has five traditional senses, which are sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch. However, what constitutes a sense is a matter of some debate, leading to difficulties in defining what exactly a distinct sense is.
- Sight: Also known as vision, is the ability to perceive the surrounding environment by processing information contained in visible light.
- Hearing: Also known as audition, is the sense of sound perception and results from tiny hair fibres in the inner ear detecting the motion of a membrane which vibrates in response to changes in the pressure exerted by atmospheric particles within (at best) a range of 20 to 20000 Hz.
- Taste: Also known as gustation, is one of the two main "chemical" senses.
- Smell: Also known as olfaction, is the other "chemical" sense. Unlike taste, there are hundreds of olfactory receptors (proteins), each binding to a particular molecular feature.
- Touch: Also known as tactition, is a perception resulting from activation of neural receptors, generally in the skin including hair follicles, but also in the tongue, throat, and mucosa.
Related Terms
- Perception: The organization, identification, and interpretation of sensory information in order to represent and understand the presented information or environment.
- Neuroscience: The scientific study of the nervous system.
- Cognitive Psychology: The scientific study of mental processes such as "attention, language use, memory, perception, problem solving, creativity, and thinking".
- Philosophy of Perception: Philosophical interest in perception stems from questions about how the senses give rise to knowledge.
External links
- Medical encyclopedia article on Sense
- Wikipedia's article - Sense
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