Terrific! Thank you Tommy!! I'll share it with all our Thanksgiving friends as we use our 33 senses to enjoy the day, the meal, and the fellowship we have with one another..What a lovely gift you have given us with this article...
Wow, thanks, it means an enormous amount to hear someone say that. It's a dream of mine to write a book, but I'm not currently working on one. That might change in the very near future, so I really appreciate the affirmation
You’ve got that rare combination of knowledge and understanding in a field that many people find interesting but difficult to understand AND you can write well and explain these difficult subjects in a way that is entertaining and enjoyable. Not sure in this day and age if you “need” to put a book out? Anyway, wish you success!
Regardless of needing a book out, I spent my formative years reading science and philosophy books, so it would be incredibly meaningful for me to put one out. So thank you
I 'love' the way some philosophers will claim that everything we know is from our five senses. Such reductive nonsense.
I would like to add another to your list of senses. When we are awake what we perceive in the mental milieu, is what we predict. If we act in our body to change something in the environment there is a prediction and very quickly, 200 msecs, a result.
How accurate the prediction is unleashes a storm of emotional transmitters, each having some effect on plasticity of neurons. This 'sense', when the predict fails, is often felt as a cognitive dissonance much like a brain slap. This 'enactive' sense shapes most of our concepts and skills.
This business of prediction is very cool in that there is actually circuitry in the cortical columns that activate the predicted percept. A nice write up on this is in the book On Intelligence: How a New Understanding of the Brain, by Jeff Hawkins.
Another note; you can feel this one by opening a door with some idea of what is on the other side and feel what happens to you emotional level and your attention when something surprising is on the other side.
I guess I'm not clear on what you mean by "objective". Here, for example, you're comparing a subjective preference for a temperature to an assessment of what something smells like. The difference you're pointing to seems to me to be the difference between talking about a subjective preference versus an assessment, not between the senses.
Seems to me that Aristotle’s 5 senses has to do with those 5 being more “objective”, whereas the others, and this article is fascinating in pointing them out, are more “subjective”. Pain, the feeling of warmth, needing to pee, etc., there’s no way to verify these senses since they differ widely among the population, and even across populations., whereas the famous 5 are more or less universal and verifiable, and measurable.
Forward acceleration and rotation (and bladder stretch) all seem pretty "objective" to me. There's a lot more individual variation in what we can smell than our ability to propriocept or detect temperature
fascinating piece, thanks! Really good points here re:: sensory division from a reductive neural perspective. So much of our analysis of anything depends on the scale at which we are discussing it. Interoception is absolutely its own sense, but I'd personally still group things like temperature and pain within the category of "touch" (unless it's internal pain).
I like the discussion though, because it does admit the possibility of other senses -- I think we have some that *don't* have neural correlates too.
Terrific! Thank you Tommy!! I'll share it with all our Thanksgiving friends as we use our 33 senses to enjoy the day, the meal, and the fellowship we have with one another..What a lovely gift you have given us with this article...
Oh wow, thank you ❤️ Comments like this mean an enormous amount
Thank you, I think it's wonderful to give thanks for our amazing senses. I always learn from your excellent articles.
Well done. Thankful for you Tommy!
Aww, thanks!
Are you working on a book of some sort? You should.
Wow, thanks, it means an enormous amount to hear someone say that. It's a dream of mine to write a book, but I'm not currently working on one. That might change in the very near future, so I really appreciate the affirmation
You’ve got that rare combination of knowledge and understanding in a field that many people find interesting but difficult to understand AND you can write well and explain these difficult subjects in a way that is entertaining and enjoyable. Not sure in this day and age if you “need” to put a book out? Anyway, wish you success!
Regardless of needing a book out, I spent my formative years reading science and philosophy books, so it would be incredibly meaningful for me to put one out. So thank you
Wow! Awesome work!
This was awesome🤓 Thank you🤗
I can surely feel how my neurons more often negatively charged than not!
I’m happy Carrie is your proprioception. And you should watch The Sixth Sense sometime “I see dead people”
I 'love' the way some philosophers will claim that everything we know is from our five senses. Such reductive nonsense.
I would like to add another to your list of senses. When we are awake what we perceive in the mental milieu, is what we predict. If we act in our body to change something in the environment there is a prediction and very quickly, 200 msecs, a result.
How accurate the prediction is unleashes a storm of emotional transmitters, each having some effect on plasticity of neurons. This 'sense', when the predict fails, is often felt as a cognitive dissonance much like a brain slap. This 'enactive' sense shapes most of our concepts and skills.
This business of prediction is very cool in that there is actually circuitry in the cortical columns that activate the predicted percept. A nice write up on this is in the book On Intelligence: How a New Understanding of the Brain, by Jeff Hawkins.
Another note; you can feel this one by opening a door with some idea of what is on the other side and feel what happens to you emotional level and your attention when something surprising is on the other side.
My wife and I agree much more on what something smells like than on what to set the thermostat to when we sleep.
I guess I'm not clear on what you mean by "objective". Here, for example, you're comparing a subjective preference for a temperature to an assessment of what something smells like. The difference you're pointing to seems to me to be the difference between talking about a subjective preference versus an assessment, not between the senses.
Seems to me that Aristotle’s 5 senses has to do with those 5 being more “objective”, whereas the others, and this article is fascinating in pointing them out, are more “subjective”. Pain, the feeling of warmth, needing to pee, etc., there’s no way to verify these senses since they differ widely among the population, and even across populations., whereas the famous 5 are more or less universal and verifiable, and measurable.
Forward acceleration and rotation (and bladder stretch) all seem pretty "objective" to me. There's a lot more individual variation in what we can smell than our ability to propriocept or detect temperature
fascinating piece, thanks! Really good points here re:: sensory division from a reductive neural perspective. So much of our analysis of anything depends on the scale at which we are discussing it. Interoception is absolutely its own sense, but I'd personally still group things like temperature and pain within the category of "touch" (unless it's internal pain).
I like the discussion though, because it does admit the possibility of other senses -- I think we have some that *don't* have neural correlates too.