Most of us take our senses for granted. We don’t give them much thought, other than how they make our lives more – or less – pleasurable. And that’s a shame. Because there’s a whole lot going on behind the proverbial curtain of our “normal” functioning. If we look past the surface and really start to explore just what happens in the course of taking in a sunset, a favorite song, or a whiff of sour milk, and really think about how our senses work, we can actually learn a thing or two about how we work.

Humans love to categorize. We love to break big ideas into smaller pieces that make sense to us. So let’s start there. We typically think of ourselves as having five senses – sight, hearing, smell, touch, taste. But that’s just part of the story. We also have:

proprioception (sense of where your body is in relation to its environment),

chronoception (the sense of the passage of time),
nociception (sense of pain),
sense of itching,
equilibrioception or vestibular sense (sense of balance),
magnetoreception (sense of direction based on the earth’s magnetic fields),
chemoreception (which detects chemicals by smell, taste and other means),
a sense of blood oxygen levels which tells your body when and how deeply it needs to breathe,
thermoreception (sense of hot and cold),
the sense of fullness that tells you when you need to stop eating,
senses of tension, pressure, hunger, thirst,

and more.