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.
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/Place_cell
The innate sense of where you are in relation to your environment is... spatial frequency?
That doesn't sound right.
And pressure--i.e. texture.
Do you mean an itch or a sunburn-type discommfort or something else?
Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glutamate_flavoring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umami
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.
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.
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...
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
Previously noted by me in:
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/6x7u6a/on_the_...
Borrowed from Schopenhauer, who actually made a better point about the goal: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/301471-however-for-the-man-...
I've only recently really discovered Schopenhauer (having of course at least heard of him), and find his writing clear and appealing.
Wonderful online essays collection:
https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/schopenhauer/arthur/essays/...
("On Authorship and Style" was posted to HN a few months back.)
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.
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.
[0] https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/empire-of-the-senses-978185973...
Some people are sensitive to some frequencies.
An LCD shouldn't whine, but some can (bad capacitors, cheap power supplies, or any number of other causes).
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.
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.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2018/10/20/448...
Some may argue proprioception is provided by touch, but by the same light smell and taste are inextricably linked.
We can also sense heat and humidity to some extent, we have some of the mechanisms needed to sense magnetic fields, but no compelling evidence (to my understanding) exists that demonstrates that we can.
It's just one of those things thats much fuzzier than we think
Many things that we are taught in elementary school have this property