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!
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.
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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).
That was your sense of touch reacting to the heat
Touch encompasses a wide range of sensations like soft, prickly, sharp, hot, cold, etc, it’s basically the widest variety of sensation with the most stuff going on.
It’s possible to smell heat because that’s also a touch sensation occurring within your nose or a learned association of the sensation of smelling something hot
https://hms.harvard.edu/news/exploring-our-sense-touch-every-angle
Not directly related but your comment reminded me of it: did you know you can hear a difference in hot vs cold water?
And I don’t mean that as a general, “one can learn to hear it,” I mean it as, “this is a skill you there reading this probably have that you likely never realized you have.” (Unless you have also seen this video or something like it.)
You can also hear the difference between crispy and crunchy! And how full a bottle is of water as you fill it!
Or how full an opaque bottle of water is when you pick it up, just by feeling how it sloshes inside the container. Our brains are doing some serious math
I mean… I can hear the difference between boiling water and ice shifting so I guess that’s true? 🤔
Huh that’s neat!
It makes sense that it is the touch sensing the heat, but it’s not like a physical touch against an object so that’s the only reason I thought it could be treated differently for the purpose of this shower thought.
You’re physically touching molecules of air and water vapor that got heated up by the cup. And also physically touching infrared photons emitted by the cup. The sensation of hot and cold is technically the sensation of receiving or losing energy of your body particles jiggling around.
That said, the other commenters are also right in that “touch” is just a catch-all term for all the different types of receptors our skin has
But it is. Heat is nothing but very fast Brownian motion of particles. So the kind of very warm light touch comes from fast moving particles in a gas emanating from your cup of Joe and touching your upper lip.
It is called thermoception.
So you got your taste, touch, smell, sight, hearing, and thermoception? Assuming we’re treating it differently from touch.
There are several more. My favourite is proprioception - the sense of where your limbs are. Phantom limb syndrome exists because we have proprioception.
You can try adding the vestibular system, which is the sense of balance and spatial orientation, if you want to “catch them all”.
