Taste, small, touch hearing and vision, the traditional five senses are not enough! Reserving for the sixth sense its traditional meaning (which may in part be associated with phenomena discussed in ‘The Width of Now’ ) there are clearly two more senses, the sense of acceleration and the sense of gravitation. The fact that some, but not all of the information gathered by these ‘senses’ comes from in the semicircular canals in no way implies that they have any relationship to hearing. However, more than for senses other than touch, these sensors appear to be distributed. Balance information comes from gravitational sensing, vision and an organ of feeling associated with the big toe. The information obtained by sensing of acceleration is crucial to the development of the body map and it seems likely that it is a highly distributed sense, closely associated with the concept of muscle memory. It may also underlie another sense, the sensing of direction, which is highly developed in some animals, but not spectacularly well developed in most humans.
Nine senses