How many senses do we believe we have to navigate through our physical world? If you think of sensory systems as finely tuned instruments, such as a jet or yacht may have, finely tuned to gather information from the environment to give us a good chance of appropriately responding to the challenges of our world.
As a neuroscientist I am perplexed as to why most people believe that they only have the five senses that Plato defined (almost 2,500 years ago). All of our education and "common sense" affirms that many believe that they only have the five. What if you were to suddenly discover that you had more than that, many more?
Most of us also believe we have a psychic sixth sense, this sixth sense enables us to perceive stimuli from the spiritual, paranormal, or psychic realms.
I do not have to be a neuroscientist to know that Plato was totally wrong. Everyone really knows they have more that five senses, but many have not integrated the information. For example, we know that we have a sense called kinesthesis that enables us to know whether we are upright, prone, or upside down. The receptors for this sense are in the inner ear or cochlea. Another sense that we have that we are not very aware of unless we dance, practice the aerial arts, or gymnastics is the proprioceptive sense. This location of the proprioceptive sensors are in the joints of the body and tell us the position of our limbs even when we cannot see them.
So that is seven sensory systems, and then the eighth psychic sense.
However, the senses that Plato "lumped" together as the "touch" sense is actually at least six separate sensory systems with distinctly different receptors and distinctly different pathways into the brain.
If I am correct then we have at least 12 senses, and the "psychic sense" may be easily explained by current neuroscience.
The one that I would like to present in this post is the Pacinian corpuscles, or the sensory system that detects vibration, energy, or fields.
All material forms, animate or inanimate, possess fields that surround those material forms. These are spheres of influence that affect phenomenon like the fields surrounding the moon affect our ocean's tides, human cycles, and the behavior of other than human animals.
As you can see in the image above, the pale yellow inner portion, the neuron itself, is surrounded by many grey fluid filled vessicles that protect it from over stimulation. These highly sensitive neurons are able to detect subtle changes in the environment, perhaps caused by the the approach of an inanimate object or even the attention of another animate form.
A few of the human fields, or spheres on influence, that surround human beings may be identified as listed below:
1. Gravitation
2. Electrical
3. Magnetic
4. Attraction
5. Attention
6. Intention
An example of the activity of these fields, if an individual pays attention to another individual for a length of time, often the subject of the attention feels that attention and will either turn to see where the energy is coming from or become visibly uncomfortable.
This not "psychic" or "spiritual" but a physical process that is well defined by current science.
The more we study and discover about these fields the more it appears as if the "psychic"and "spiritual" realms are simply an ignorance of the relationship between our dormant sensory systems and those qualities and characteristics of our physical world.
It is obvious, even with an in depth study of modern physics, that our physical world is not very easy to understand. We do not know what energy is, or what time is, or what space is, or whether light consists of particles or waves.
Perhaps it will take more than five senses (and the psychic sixth of course) to sort some of this out and study the physical world with greater clarity. Fortunately we have current neuroscience affirming that indeed we have many more sensory systems than those five.
It is time to discover our own sensory capacities and begin to exercise them, perhaps even learn to refine them. These are the
6 comments:
Nice! I look forward to your next dose of Light! TY 4 U!
thank u 4 including me on your email list. i think 6th sense is real and at times i hav used it or it has shown it self within me. i believe the human mind is much more advanced & intelligent than we giv it credit for.
Hello Simone Ducay,
Thank you for your comments. i hope this writing helps to convince you that the "6th sense" has a more scientific explanation. We have been taught that we have 5 senses, but according to current neuroscience we may have as many as 21, 12 of these I have studied in depth and will continue to write about.
Very insightful. I think that everything is energy and information and we are on the frontier of understanding how humans can tap into that huge field of information. A psychic can touch a tree and go back 1000 years and describe what happened? How? The tree is liken to a massive hard drive just storing information. The human has figured out how to retrieve the data and interprit it. How? Still searching. :)
Also a neat link along these ideas of energy potential.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhmojM1u2lA
The formula that Einstein left us with, E=mc2, affirms that the universe and every object and being is predominantly energy.
The equation basically proposes that the proportion of energy to matter is huge. When we see our world it looks solid, however all of us have heard that there is far more space than particles in the composition of that solid world.
That space is "filled" with particles moving at the speed of light, propelled by the enormous amount of energy throughout the enormous amount of space. We see those particles in perhaps 35,000,000,000 places at once, a factor of the speed of our perception and the speed of our processing.
A more aware consciousness "feels" and "sees" this energy and perceives the world more as an energetic field with particles and waves.
William Tiller, and the rest of the "What the Bleep...?" team did an excellent job of introducing some of the quantum concepts that we all can understand. However, we need to begin to integrate current neuroscience as well as quantum mechanics and the emotional aspects of consciousness.
What Descartes should have said was, "I feel, I think, I behave, therefore I am."
Did you know that scientists say that the duck-billed platypus is "the only mammal known to have a sense of electroreception?" They have rows of these electroreceptors in the skin of their bill that allows them to detect electric fields generated by the movement of their prey. This allows them to hunt under water, when their senses of hearing, smelling, and seeing are dampened by the water.
I remember when I first learned about this quality, I was certain that they were NOT the only mammals with this sense. I know that not only do we have these same kind of sensors somewhere, ours are even more highly attuned. I am eager to learn more about all of this. Thank you for sharing your knowledge with the rest of us, Bruce.
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