Sure, everyone knows the 5 senses; taste, touch, smell, see and hear. But I’m talking about the other 5 senses. I can already feel the disapproving looks as I say these words, but stick with me and you’ll see, I’m actually onto something. For as long as I can remember I have been taught about the basic 5 senses that everyone learns in kindergarten, although recently in TOK I have learned that in addition to this, there are another 5 sense. These include the following:
· Nociception – the sense towards things that are damaging or harmful
· Chronoception – sense of time
· Proprioception – sense of one’s self
· Equilibrioception – sense of balance
· Thermoception – sense of temperature
At first, you might think that this is a bunch of nonsense and that there is no true knowledge to support this. However, if you really think about it, you can relate to some of these senses. In my case I was thinking about chronoception – the sense of time – and I remembered a game I would play with either my brother or a friend where we would try to guess the time after a long period of being indoors, without being exposed to any watches or other methods of timekeeping. The remarkable thing was that we were able to gauge the time and guess – relatively accurately – what time it was. The same applies to nociception, proprioception, etc. All of the senses relate to our lives but we usually don’t notice them because of how instinctual they are.
This really was an eye opener for me to be able to realize how little we really know about the way our own brain functions. this leads me to another article, published in the Guardian which was titled "Memory Contaminates Perception". This article was highly intriguing and discussed how imagery that is retained in the mind can affect visual perceptions. In fact, as the author put it, "our perception of the world is the brain's best guess at what is actually happening, based on the information it receives through the senses". We also know that the brain can sometimes perceive visual information incorrectly as discussed in the previous blog post about optical illusions. so i decided to apply some of the information learned in class about 1st order and 2nd order claims to evaluate the knowledge from this article
1st order claim:
2nd order claim:
Visual working memory can influence our perceptions
what we see is not necessarily what everyone else sees or what is actually there
optical illusions are not what they seem
the perception of the mind can be tricked
how we feel affects what we see and music also affects how we recognize facial expressions.
perception can be influenced by temporary factors acting on the mind
