The writer says that we take our skin for granted. This is true for all our sense organs. Try to think of what you will miss if you lose, a. the ability to smell things.
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HUMAN beings tend to take their five basic senses pretty much for granted. Unless something goes wrong with one of these senses, the ordinary person continues seeing and touching, smelling odors, tasting tastes and hearing sounds without giving a second thought to the diligent, no‐nonsense faculties that keep him so well‐informed about the complex world around him.
Happily, scientists have not shared this general indifference. Indeed, information about the senses has been of first interest to scholars from Aristotle on, touching, as such information does, on primary philosophical problems concerning the nature of reality and the perennial question of how we know what we know and whether we really know it. For the past 100 years or so, research on the senses of humans and animals has led to a mass of information extraordinary in amount and kind.
One of the most striking observations has been one of the most recent—the very strong possibility that some human beings may be able to see with their fingertips. The first word of this strange phenomenon came from a Russian scientist early last year. He reported the case of a 22‐year‐old girl who could detect color by her sense of touch and read the text of a newspaper by running her fingers over the print.
Our own scientists received the news with skepticism. But such first impressions soon turned to wonder with the revelation that an American psychologist, Dr. Richard P. Youtz of Barnard College, had tested an American woman who can identify colors by touch alone. Meanwhile, the Russians claim to have turned up two more cases of fingertip seeing, and have had their leading scientists doublecheck the earlier findings. There seem to be strong indications that certain human beings may indeed possess this “sixth” sense.
SUCH a discovery directs fresh attention to what science knows about the senses. How strong are they ? What are their limits? Can a sense be trained beyond its “natural” limits? Do we have other hidden senses? Indeed, to start at the beginning, what is a sense?
A sense may be defined as a mechanism in the body which allows a human or an animal to receive special infor mation about the world and transmit it along nerve pathways to the brain. Each sense has its own specialized cells for picking up its own particular type of information — sounds, tastes, sights and so forth. And each sense has its own area in the brain where the infor mation it garners is monitored.
The data picked up and processed for us by the senses are either of a physical or chemical nature. Ears and eyes, for example, are stimulated physically, by sound or light waves. Taste and smell are produced by chemical contact with taste buds or olfactory centers.