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How Many Senses Do You Really Have?

  • October 05, 2006
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WARNING!

This is an older article that may not reflect Dr. Mercola’s current view on this topic. Use our search engine to find Dr. Mercola’s latest position on any health topic.

Most children are taught that the human body has five senses: sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell. But many neurologists identify nine or more senses, and some list as many as 21.

The sense of touch is actually several "somatic" senses, including perception of pressure, heat, and pain, and there are also a variety of interoceptive senses, which analyze information that originates from within the body.

Interoceptive senses include balance (the sense of the body's alignment), the organic sense (the sense of internal condition, such as hunger or thirst), and proprioception (the brain's knowledge of relative positions of body parts).

Proprioception is the sense that is actually tested by walk-the-line or finger-to-nose sobriety tests.

Loss of proprioception, a rare disorder, can cause lack of coordination, and eventual complete lack of awareness of the body. It causes a disembodied feeling, as if the mind and body had separated.

 
Dr. Mercola's Comments:

According to this article, you have many more senses, even beyond the spiritual, than you ever imagined. And many of them are your body's own internal sensing mechanisms, its way of keeping track of everything that's right or wrong with itself.

This lends support to one of the most important of all the health principles:

Listen To Your Body

Your body is an amazing mechanism, and if you pay attention to it, it will tell you precisely what it requires to stay healthy. It will also typically warn you when you encounter items that are not in your long-term best interest.

The primary challenge is to be sensitive enough to recognize these signals. Most of us have long ago lost this sensitivity and essentially ignore this important feedback that can help guide us.

Andrew Taylor Still, the founder of osteopathy, believed that the primary role of the physician was to facilitate your body's inherent ability to heal itself, and that a physician could best promote health by ensuring that the musculoskeletal system was in as perfect alignment as possible and obstructions to blood and lymph flow were minimized or eliminated.

Chiropractic medicine was founded as a health care profession in 1895 by Daniel David Palmer, based on the premise that the body had an innate healing ability and this healing ability could be compromised if there were nerve impingements obstructing the flow of nerve impulses.

Others, such as Dr. Weston A. Price, looked at diet, and how much healthier a body was when it was given the foods it had naturally evolved to eat -- foods that keep the body healthy enough to heal itself.

These great healers, and others who have followed in their footsteps, have slowly been bringing about a revolution in health care. I have dedicated my life to helping to bring it even further along. When it finally arrives, I believe that sickness, as we know it today, will be a rarity. People will pay attention to what their body's senses are telling them, and will know how to let their bodies heal themselves.

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