Sorry for the confusing title, but earlier when I was sipping some coffee I felt the heat emanating off of the liquid in the cup without touching the cup.

So it made me think, why don’t we treat heat sensitivity as a distinct sense to touch, taste, smell, sight, and hearing? I’d love to hear a catchier name for ‘temperature sensitivity’ for its distinct sense as well, since those other ones are less of a mouthful.

Thank you for coming to my shower thought!

  • radix@lemmy.worldEnglish
    15·
    13 hours ago

    The classic “five senses” works well enough for the basic understanding of how we interact with the world, but doesn’t actually hold up under much scrutiny. You can apparently get up to 12 depending on how you want to define things.

    https://www.press.jhu.edu/newsroom/how-many-senses-do-we-have

    The idea of five classical senses dates back at least to Aristotle, himself a rather classy guy. In De Anima (Of the Soul) he argues that, for every sense, there is a sense organ.

    …

    Let’s tweak Aristotle’s definition of what a sense is just a bit. Instead of a sense organ, each separate sense really only requires a different kind of sensory receptor. In the skin alone, there are at least four different kinds of sensory receptors: those for touch, temperature, pain, and proprioception (or body awareness).