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(I'd like to say this has nothing to do with religion, and if it some how goes against your religion, I'm sorry but I didn't know, and please just stop reading at that point. I don't know why, but I get this bad vibe that I'm going to offend someone’s religion for some unknown reason. This is just me postulating, and while I expect many people will disagree with me, none of that disagreement should be about religion)

Just an interesting thought I've had for a few months now, but do we really only have five senses?

Well, let's see.
1-Seeing
2-Hearing
3-Smelling
4-Touching
5-Tasting
6-Seeing dead people (joke, it's actually an awful name for what the movie was about, as it is still seeing, which is already a sense, just on a higher level of perception. Great movie though)

Well, sight, sound, hear, and touch let us sense the first three dimensions, but what dimension is taste? To move on let’s assume taste only effects one dimension, though I'll leave that open to debate, as I’ve never really considered the question before.

So anyways, those five senses cover the first three dimensions pretty well, right? Doesn't that mean we're all set? Wait a minute... Are there really only 3 dimensions we can sense? I don't know about you, but I can definitely sense 4.

TIME.

Now which sense covers time?
1-Seeing -nope
2-Hearing -nope
3-Smelling -nope
4-Touching -nope
5-Tasting -nope

You see, all those senses are experienced in the now, so therefore do not allow you to perceive time. I now propose a new sense.

MEMORY.

Is memory a sense? I think so. Without memory of any sort, how can you perceive time? How can you even be self aware? In short, you can't. Only instinct would function in such a case.

Now here's where it gets tricky.

Do we only have one type of memory? For those of you who know anything about the mind, we do not. So now, I propose that there is not only one sense for perceiving time, but two.

6-Short term memory
7-Long term memory

Short term allows you to perceive what is happening right now, or rather what just happened, as by the time you know "now" has taken place, the moment has already past. Basically, short term memory is required for you to recognize on any conscious level that you are receiving any other sensory input.

Long term memory is what short term memory is converted to after the fact, and is what you remember say a day or a year from now, though on different levels, as long term memory is constantly eroding and blending, and is re-painted when you recall it, though each re-painting is slightly different in one way or another because of the distortion it has gone through.

Something particularly important to note about long term memory is the way it stores information (or appears to store information). Have you ever had the feeling that time goes faster as you get older, or that time slows down when you experience something completely new? If you haven't experienced both of those, then I question if you are over the age of 3 (this is not a specific number, I would not venture to guess when the storing process of long term memory becomes evident). After a critical examination of my own mind far too many times, this is how I've worked out long term memory works: Every time you experience something new, your long term memory creates a new category/sub category, and stores the information in it. As you experience this over and over in say a routine, each time gets stores in that category. An example would be say you drink a coke almost every morning. You will be able to remember the most recent days you've drunk coke (if you're observant), but will not be able to tell which day you drank the coke with the polar bear on it or the one with the Santa on it, even if you stared at both for five to ten minutes (unless this was particularly important to you). Of course, how many categories and sub categories the matrix long term memory has is effected by how observant you are, and how good a long term memory you have. After years of experiencing a mostly routine life, you can see how your long term memory would end up compressing the categories that repeat themselves constantly until it hardly ever does more than make a notice that a particular event occurred like a checkmark on a list.

Now, to move on. So far, I've gone through 7 senses, which seem to cover just about everything.

1-Seeing
2-Hearing
3-Smelling
4-Touching
5-Tasting
6-Short term memory
7-Long term memory

But now I'm about to propose and 8th sense, which has so many mind blowing concepts and implications behind it I'm afraid people will flame me for posting them. Please note that this is all unproven hypothesis.

I'll start with something simple. Animals, before volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, even atomic bombings (according to survivor stories, ants at least) can be seen on the move, even hibernating animals such as bears. There are all sorts of explanations for why the animals can all sense what we can't, but it's really quite simple if looked at logically while taking into account a wider reality. We can, only to a much lesser degree. According to my "sources" (remember, I'm just proposing ideas here, whether or not this fact is true doesn't have a huge effect on the ideas as I discovered this after I came up with the idea, and I welcome all to find this study, it shouldn’t take more than a Google search if it is true), a test was done where people were shown many calm images on a projector, and then an extremely violent picture was flashed. Apparently, milliseconds before the violent pictures were shown, the people tensed up in some way. How could this be? Vibrations in the air? Something somehow traveling faster than the speed of light? Or, did these people just experience a glimpse into the future?

8-Precongnative memory

Did you read that? Good. Now please don't kill me and keep reading. Here's where it goes from plausible thinking to brilliant or insane insight.

First, imagine how a 3 dimensional object like a sphere must appear to a 2 dimensional being as the sphere passes through its two dimensional plain (please ignore for this example the possibility that we exist on a 2 dimensional plain and that the 3rd dimension may be a "hologram"). It would first appear as a point, grow to a circle, and then return to a point again before disappearing. Weird, huh?

Think hard now, where can we see such an effect on our plain of existence? I mean, it's not every day that a sphere just grows into existence and then disappears... Hold it! There is something that changes shape constantly to our perception! In fact, everything does. Time. We are moving though time.

Let’s flatten out the universe a bit, and put it on a line. A time line. Each point on this line is a "now", unless you are looking at a point somewhere else on the line, in which case it is a “then” or “a will be”. If you haven't guessed it yet, I'm proposing that us going though time is like walking down a path. In fact, because we think within time, it is impossible to accurately gauge the actually speed of even direction of time. The path already exists in all its entirety and we're just a point on it. Assuming the atoms we are made of always exist, we are in every point on it. This is much more than the idea of fate, it's the idea that not only is everything predetermined, but has already happened in a sense. I hope I've made this straightforward enough to follow. I could get into the even more interesting idea that time isn't just a line but like a 3 dimensional space then assuming that in fact everything has happened that can in our universe in a way, and just simply on a different point in a 3 dimensional timeline, but let's get back to memory.

Precognitive memory given what I've just described is simply remembering a point in time just before the current "now". Nothing supernatural about it. A "real" psychic (if such a thing exists), would just be someone with particularly good and clear precognitive memory. There are in fact some things people just can't except as coincidence that this explains. For instance, my grandmother knew my uncle was dead bofre she and the rest of my family she was with at the time learned of this. She just suddenly started crying and saying that my uncle was dead, and no one cloud calm her. After that they found that he had been shot because someone wanted to steal his car. Rather than suggest a psychic connection in my grandmother, I'm implying perhaps because of her precognitive memory she remembered his death before she learned about it. Crazy stuff, but my ideas about time were thought up before I speculated about all this memory as sensory perception, and only just while writing this realized that I had a personal possible example.

So, let's look one last time at the 5 given senses and the 3 proposed senses.
1-Seeing
2-Hearing
3-Smelling
4-Touching
5-Tasting
6-Short term memory
7-Long term memory
8-Precongnative memory


I'll leave it to you to decide whether you agree with my concepts or think I'm off my rocker, but in any case I hope this has been a good read.

... you're crazy

[EDIT]
Memory can't be a sense...



From http://www.intelligent-systems.com.ar/intsyst/glossary.htm.

'Senses' or 'Perception' involve gathering information around us (in a physical, or meta-physical world).

Memory doesn't have anything to do with that, it simply stores information that the brain has already processed for possible recovery at a later time.
[/EDIT]

So memory doesn't gather the passage of time? Because I'm pretty sure that the passage of time is information from around us...

Rough example: Your eye gathers a picture, short term memory gathers a movie...

Edit:If the above statement is wrong, I blame it one 2:30am.

Edit2:What you're describing is long term memory. As I'm too tired to make a real argument, I'll wait until tomorrow to see whether I should reconsider if long term memory counts as a sense, though the other two certainly do.

That depends on the cognitive model that you think is true...

There are different ones, some think that everything is stored in a linear fashion (like you are suggesting), others in a completely relational fashion (love -> heart -> red -> stop -> go -> etc), and other more exotic representations.

So, if memory was a sense of time, as you're suggesting, then it would have to be stored in a completely linear fashion, which I can't (personally) even begin to explain how wrong that is.

At any rate, I nkow that Sharks have a 6th sense - They can detect minute electrical signals through the water, and (I think) at some stage, humans had that sense too, kinda like the "Ever get that feeling someone is standing behind you?" saying.

There's plenty about the human mind and body that science is yet to explain, and not least of which is exactly how our senses and brain interact.

Jess.

what a nonsense post, you can hear a truck coming from the distance over time and you can definitely see similar results. good luck with your 'theories'.
just put the crack pipe down and walk away slowly.

All of your senses work in time. Now, you see one thing, in a few moments, you'll see something else. Not rocket science, I assure you.

Senses don't have dimensions. Sight only sees a flat image - well, 2 actually. Your brain converts the 2 images to 1 image with depth. Touch has no dimension, neither does smell, hearing or taste. The only dimension is that they change over time, and again that's a thought-process.

As for additional senses, there are many logical explanations. Like someone who meets somebody in a strange place, and thinks they had a feeling it was going to happen. For 2 specific people to meet in a specific place - yes, that would be weird. But what actually happened was that 2 people who knew each other met in a place where they wouldn't normally meet. That is very different - no specifics whatsoever and it's extremely likely to happen. You just happen to be one of the subjects in this case - it's actually happening all over the place, all of the time.

I certainly believe humans have more intuition than our senses would allow. For instance we can certainly detect electricity, but stranger things like detecting when someone is talking about us, or staring at us, or when it's a bad idea to walk down that dark shortcut. Self-conscious things but I'm thinking this stems from sub-conscious signals in the brain originally designed to keep us getting owned as cavemen.

The passage of time is not a communicative event, and therefore not an input that would make memory a sense (in my opinion). If you want to go down that argument route, I'd go with "thoughts". Since memory can store thoughts, you could argue you're communicating with yourself by "thinking" and thus memory is collecting that information. That carries more weight with me than time.

Still, weird discussion though.

It annoys me slightly how you think your theories are ground breaking when in fact they are really just ramblings.

Was it really necessary to pepper your post with "now THIS will *BLOW YOUR MIND*" style comments?

There are in fact way more than five senses, this has been known for ages and is well documented, if you had cared to look.

The most obvious example is heat - clearly we can detect whether a room is hot or cold, but this is not Sight, Sound, Touch, Taste or Smell.

Precognitive Memory has farcical implications. Did you just make up that experiment where the people reacted before the slide came up? I think you must have.

What would happen if the experimenter hit the slide, they person reacted to the bad image that was about to appear, but then the machine broke and it accidentally showed a picture of a daffodil.

I believe what would happen is your theory would go out of the window.

I thought heat was detected through touch? Heat is conducted through the air and the air 'touches' your skin. You are in essence feeling the temperature of the air you are in contact with. Or did you mean something else?

No, it's not detected through touch.

The touch sensors detect pressure, you can be in gases of different temperatures, but the same pressure (they would have to be different gases), and be able to detect the difference.

Senses also could be lying to you, or your senses can be decieved. Because we experience reality through the senses, the senses send data to our brains and our brains interpret it. Therefore we experience the world second hand. Then arises the thought can our perceptions of what we see be wrong or can our senses could be decieving our minds. Okay sounds like an insane thought, but really, you can ask yourself do we see things objectively or subjectively, we see something, do we see it fully, or do we only see part of the truth. Which Descartes came up with his saying in relation to this 'I think therefore I am' summarises his thought, that what we sense can or cannot be true, we don't know, but what we do know to be true, is that I exist because I can think, so I think therefore I exist 'I think therefore I am'.

Meaning thought, cognition, memory etc. cannot be a sense, for that it in the mind, sense is recieve data from external things, not internal.

I didn't read everything, too long in a short space in time, I might be interested in coming back later to reply as much as I can of it.

There's no sensor in your hand telling you when your touching something, it's all nerve endings sending messages to your brain, about how much pressure they're under (touch), how warm they are (temperature), we can identify fabrics and even tiny variances in temperature, so I don't see how that sense can be whittled down to 'touch', there's so much more involved. Considering that the same sensors send back pain information, we should consider that we could 'touch' things with our internal organs, we'd know if our bits were laid out on a marble slab - we'd feel the hard surface, the cold, the pain. Touch is a grey area, because it encompasses so much more, including temperature, texture, pain, moisture...

Pain is amplified touch signals, like nip your arm until it hurts, and notice how the hurt is not a switch, it's degrees of pain and everyone has different tolerances. There's a line somewhere between touch and pain, see if you can find it . Perhaps temperature follows the same guidelines, tolerances of when something hot hurts us or starts to harm the skin - ice is damn painful on the hands before very long too, people who wish away their pain should be very careful about what they wish for.

I really think that the touch sensors are the nerve endings in your dermis (the lower layer of the skin) and its those that detect temperature, pain and pressure. Its all part of the same mechanism.

Edit: I should have refreshed the page before posting, Van

For me personally, "touch" means signals sent by the nerves in the skin. Sight means signals sent by the optic nerve. Hearing means signals sent by nerves in the ear ... taste = nerves in the mouth etc. It's all just a selection of nerves, it's just our brain interprets the signals differently. Since the same nerves send the sense of heat/touch/pain, I'd argue they're the same sense, which we call touch.

If your optic nerve can send "pain signals" then I'd argue getting stabbed in the eye is merely an unpleasant form of sight.

I refer to my statement about your guts on a marble slab - if someone comes at your eye with a ciggie, you would feel the heat on your eyeball, so your kinda touching with your eye - I wonder if Hannibal Lector is right, you can detect smell through touch, I suppose it's all wiring, and everyone is wired differently (for the same ends), so who's to say that some people can't hear temperature, recognise the tiny influxes of sound waves with their eyes.

There was a documentary on not long ago about a little guy who is completely blind, but can run around like a normal kid, using freakin sonar!. He makes this clicky sound with his tongue and scoots about the place on rollarblade like a bat!. I suppose once one sense is gone, the other 5 have more room to breath and adapt. Either that or he's a liar and is not really blind . I'd love to see his mom help him to the park, then help him on with his skates, then have him tear about the place, Andy and Lou style.

OK I see what you mean about heat being touch.

I just remembered an interesting experiment...

If you close your eyes and push in on them, you see dots of light - this is because the nerves are sensing the pressure but the brain is interpreting them as an image!

Kind of like when you open up an image in Notepad (ie. force it to interpret it as a text file).

You know, I feel qualified to post in this thread, since I'm taking an AP Psychology class which goes in depth about senses and perception.

[little off topic]
Your senses take in 11,000,000 bits of information a second.

40 bits of that 11,000,000 is consciencously taken in.

You probably don't releaze the feeling of the pressure from your foot pressing against your shoe, or your nose in your line of sight, now protruding over your keyboard/moniter, whatever.

[/little off topic]

So the reason you feel such as the touch sense, is due to your neurotransmitters, which have negative and positive charges that go run throughout it. You also have sensors that extend out, called dendrites.

Now like previously said, senses is how our brain gets out and takes in the world as we perceive it. You don't see with your eyes, you have lobes in the back of your head as light enters through your iris which is a colored muscle that regulates the amount of light you take in that creates an image for you to see.

For us nearsighted people, light converges before our retina, which is why we cannot see 100%. For far sighted people light converges after the retina.

More terms for how we sense, is through transduction.

Examples of how to block out senses, is like closing your eyes and plugging your nose, and eating a pear then an onion. You shouldn't be able to tell the difference through tasting.

Well I hope that my post has had some amount of worth, and that it isn't a waste of time to read.

EDIT:
OH OH OH. PLus about the whole idea of memory being a sense, that's what schema's are for. Look it up, but if you are too lazy to, a schema is our memory of something.

Think of cars, what you remember is your schema of a car, for example.


Okay I'm done here.

Drew

Sense of balance?

No, that's equilibrium, isn't it?

EDIT:

Hey wait a second, what about common sense?

I mean, Thomas Paine wrote a book about it.

Ha ha Brits.

you might like to read this;

http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=678

Hmmm, that was a good read Bizar Guy, it's a really interesting interpretation. I think that your description of foresight could be considered a sense, but maybe not memory.

I've had minor experiences with foresight, IE : I have seen people in my mind doing something, and one minute later doing it in real life. Same with sentenes, occasionally I'll be watching TV or something, and the characters will say word for word or close to what I thought they would say.

Now another interesting thing to bring up would be Deja Vu. Similar perhaps to memory, though the experience has never occurred before. It always sends a tingle up my spine when it happens.

Time is meaningless. Time is a concept coined by us to explain the passing of events at different points in the universe. It doesn't need a sense, since it is an abstract concept, rather than a solid explainable idea.

For instance, sound cna be explained and detailed quite easily, as it's actually a word which refers to something of meaning. Time has no exact meaning.

We probably can sense time via some part of our body besides our memory (since there are many features of our body and brain we don't yet understand) but since the nature of time is very vague, we cannot possibly look [for] or understand a 'sense organ' as such which can do this.

EDIT:


Memory cannot really be a sense: it does nothing of its own. It perceives time by sorting out information from other senses, and isn't a sense in itself.


Interestingly, most of out internal organs lack nerve endings (as in, nerve endings to transmit 'touch' information as such) of their own - that includes your brain. If someone were to touch your brain, you wouldn't be able to feel it

It may seem like I'm trying to join in an intelligent discussion here when infact I'm not, I'm simply asking but if there was nothing in the universe atall, would time still pass? I mean there will be nothing there to judge whether time is passing, nothing moving, nothing concious of itself - nothing...

[snip]

well, since there would be nothing to measure it, it would be impossible to tell... the real question is, if there was nothing in the universe, would we care if time was still ticking?


humans are pretty darn smart.

if you're being shown a bunch of calm relaxing images in an experiment, (or at least something that you are the tiniest bit suspicious is an experiment) you will be at least partly suspecting that something is going to happen...

it would be nice to see the source for this experiment, because there could have been multiple things that set them off..

1) if the slides were being operated by a human, i can really see there being a possibility he hesitated before placing the violent image, the tiny lull (however minuscule) would warn their sub-conscious.

this article has a little bit of stuff about the sub-conscious (though the horse is the one interpreting our sub-conscious )
http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=384

But does time even tick now? I mean, time is simply an invention of our own to sort events and actions into a chronological order. Who says that any part of the universe depends on, or even includes time?

well, the truth is we don't really understand time 100%. We know somethings about it (I.E. our memory tells us that we've done stuff before) and we know that our consciousness is limited to one point in "time" (the thing that distinguishes one memory in our brain from another).

now here's another great question. why do gravitational forces exist?

Or even.... do they exist? They could be a mis-interpretation of another effect of the universe beyond our understanding...

yes they exist. try jumping.

gravitational forces is just the name for them, we have no idea what causes them... (so it already IS an effect beyond our understanding.)

but i digress, i don't want to thread hi-jack

I know! .......a little theory.

gravity is the universe "bulging", don't know what else to call it. For instance picture a tennis ball laying in the middle of a peace of cloth that's fastened to some static object on all four corners with it's center hanging free. The tennis ball would "bulge" the cloth down some, around itself. lay a bowling ball on the cloth, and (if it holds) the cloth would sink significantly deeper, making a deeper, wider "bulge".

Now picture planet earth in the cloth of universe......hmmm come to think of it, didn't Einstein talk about just this?

Gravity is just objects rolling (abstractly, mind you) down the "slope" of the "bulge" created by the heavier objects.


....i invented gravity. Everyone who use it need to pay me a small fee of 1€ each day.

i rather enjoyed reading this post. it took a while but i liked it. i dont think indi should have said that this was a "nonsense" post, because i bet it has some truth. but, i also agree with others that you wouldnt call memory a sense. even though humans have a "sense" of time, it isnt really a sense. its actually a "perseption" of time. this is created by our brain/memory, but it isnt actually an input(as such the definition of a sense). really, time perseption is just calculations that our brain does BASED on the input that we take from our senses.

for example, in the day time, we can guess the time by the location of the sun in the sky. but have you ever tried to guess the time at night? its a lot harder because what seemed like an hour could have only been 20 minutes! our senses really help us determine the time.

and, about precongnative memory: i dont think that humans can have the memory before it happens, but rather relate their experiences to things that have already happened. that is why some people will tense up when they are shown a bunch of happy pictures. they know something strange is going on because the world isnt always happy. they know this from past experiences.

well, there's what i thought about when i read this post

Time isn't a sense, or something that requires its own sense to understand. It's A) a concept in our minds and B) a scientific process like an object moving from point A to point B. We sense it with all our senses, as they change.

And btw, precognition is pure science fiction. Entertaining but fictional. Deja vu is your memory glitching suddenly and making you feel like you've remembered something current before, nothing else; if you think about it, it only makes sense that something as complex as your memory would make mistakes now and then. Our conscious mind is, of course, ideally going to understand such happenings for errors, instead of reading into them and assuming one can see the future

No atleast not me i have two 750 gigabyte seagate barracuda's in my brain with a 200 gigabyte hitachi and Intel Core2Duo. Jokes

But seriously um Memory a sense hmm i always thought of time as a 4th dimension but memory as a sense i kind of disagree well thats my view... if there is a sudden scientific break through on memory being a sense then it still wouldn't change my life ... but good logic i guess and philosophy ... believe in what you want to.

That's the whole idea behind The Matrix.

Steven Hawking wrote an article (did a lecture) which touches on the subject. (Funny how a memory works, I read this article years ago)

Steven Hawking said:


http://www.hawking.org.uk/lectures/life.html

Just to back to the heat thing, Thermoreceptors are part of the 'sense' of touch. They detect the temperature of things touching the skin (yes, including gases in the air).

I remember an interesting documentary some time ago about people who's senses were 'wired up wrong' (their term, not mine). There was a guy who would actually taste words, i.e. each word or sound he heard would make his brain think he was tasting something. Some words were pleasant tasting and some made him feel sick. His normal sense of taste still worked as he used normal food for comparison (e.g. the word 'frank' tasted like strawberries).
Another interviewee could see numbers in the air. It really helped them with mathematical problems as they saw lines of numbers constantly around them and could move backwards and forwards through number sets very quickly just by looking around. Odd.

Van B, I saw the documentary about the blind kid who used sonar too. He had actually had his eyes removed when he was 2 years old due to tumors. He wasn't alone either, there were other blind people who had similar talents although he was probably the best self taught one.

I've heard of that mixed up senses thing too. If I could taste words, I would never tell anyone what they tasted like to me. They would tease me by saying words that tasted like dog crap or something

However, in private, I would just walk around saying, taco, taco, taco, taco. As that's my favorite food, lol.

Yeah, I saw a similar program, but with a bloke who could 'see' numbers as shapes - this made him bloody good at maths (since he combined the shapes to create a new number)

Bizar Guy, about your timeline section, I too have a similar theory, but it involves people operating on seperate time streams, and different "redundant" timelines being made via changing the "plan" of the timeline. Maybe I'll post it sometime...

Why would you split up different types of memory into different senses? By that logic, Short-Sight and Long-Sight are two senses as well, and what about your natural Night Vision?

Putting that aside though, by no means do the senses have to identify specific dimensions, and lastly, the topic of time being the 4th dimension although popular, is still under debate.

Isn't that just the use of rods inside the eye instead of cones? (or possibly the other way round)

Isn't it just your pupils widening??

Rods are for black and white, cones are for colour I think.