HOW MANY SENSES DO YOU HAVE?

Day 100 of the Lower Puna Eruption has the USGS pondering stall or finish:

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As a child, I was taught that the human body had five senses:  sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell.  Can you believe this notion was first advanced by Aristotle, who passed away at the age of 64, more than three centuries before Jesus?

I was thus surprised that the current August issue of Scientific American matter of factly  indicated that  we had a sixth:  body awareness or proprioception.  When did this happen?

Well, this concept was described by Julius Caesar Scaliger (actually, Giulio Cesare della Scala, an Italian scholar and physician) in 1557.  Other animals, too have this sense.  And even flowering plants. 

But, honestly, this sixth sense seems to me to be more like an extrasensory type of perception, or ESP.  The movie, The Sixth Sense, (Rotten Tomatoes:  85%/90%) with Haley Joel Osment and Bruce Willis, apparently, is one example.  Seeing ghosts is a real sense?

I bring this all up because that Scientific American issue mentioned above is entitled, The Seventh Sense.  The article is written by Jonathan Kipnis, professor and chair of neuroscience at the University of Virginia Medical School.  However, SciAm wants you to buy their magazine, so go to this Journal of Experimental Medicine publication.  Your immune system is, supposedly, this seventh sense.

Then, there are others who say there are 18:

• Pressure
• Itch
• Temperature
• Pain
• Thirst
• Hunger
• Direction
• Time
• Muscle tension
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• Proprioception (the ability to tell where your body parts are, relative to other body parts)
• 
  
• Equilibrioception (the ability to keep your balance and sense body movement in terms of acceleration and directional changes)
• 
  
• Stretch Receptors (These are found in such places as the lungs, bladder, stomach, blood vessels, and the gastrointestinal tract.)
• 
  
• Chemoreceptors (These trigger an area of the medulla in the brain that is involved in detecting blood born hormones and drugs. It also is involved in the vomiting reflex.)

Or a lot more to the right.  33???

However, forget most of the above, for there, really, truly, are only five common senses.  Anything beyond that number is mostly creative writing or supposition or evidence of sensory modality.  Oh, Wikipedia says five.

About returning to original roots, this same SciAm issue had another paper by Sabine Hossenfelder (right), a theoretical physicist at the Frankfurt Institute, and Stacy McGaugh, an astrophysicist at Case Western Reserve Universe, entitled, Is Dark Matter Real?  Now, this begins to make sense to me.

There seems to be a small movement suggesting that when you come down to the reality of it all, forgot those pie charts showing Dark Matter and Dark Energy dominating the circle.  Someday, perhaps, it will be scientifically proven that what you see, or measure, is all that there will be, for gravity will be able to explain this all.  We are not bright enough to see the truth.  If so, what an incredible simplification to the theory of everything.

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Tropical Storm Kristy in the East Pacific will fizzle, while Tropical Storm Yagi will not reach hurricane strength and more impact China and South Korea than Japan.

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