The 11 Senses According to Sanjay Gupta
Flying blind is a bad idea. Indeed, if you can help it, trying to manage life without the full benefit of any of your 11 senses is a bad idea. Why I am I talking about 11 senses, when most of us were only taught about 5 in kindergarten? Sanjay Gupta explains in Keep Sharp: Build a Better Brain at Any Age:
You can likely name all five senses: sight (ophthalmoception), smell (olfacoception), taste (gustaoception), touch (tactioception), and hearing (audioception). But there are others with the “cept” ending, which is Latin for take or receive. The other six senses are also processed in the brain and give us more data about the outside world:
Proprioception: A sense of where your body parts are and what they’re doing.
Equilibrioception: A sense of balance, otherwise known as your internal GPS. This tells you if you’re sitting, standing, or lying down. It’s located in the inner ear (which is why problems in your inner ear can cause vertigo).
Nociception: A sense of pain.
Thermo(re)ception: A sense of temperature.
Chronoception: A sense of the passage of time.
Interoception: A sense of your internal needs, like hunger, thirst, needing to use the bathroom.
In addition, I have heard that in Buddhist tradition, the awareness of what is in one’s own mind is counted as a sense. The emotional side of that is not entirely separate from the internal senses in Sanjay Gupta’s list, since people are often aware of their emotions through noticing associated bodily sensations. Closely noticing those bodily sensations is not only a way to be more sensitive to your own emotions, but is also a way to distance yourself enough from the driving force of your emotions to make those emotions easier to manage and deal with skillfully: getting the information and oomph from your emotions without being controlled by them.
On the more physical side, being aware of your own internal state is valuable for many reasons. Most obviously, noticing your internal state can warn you of problems. Less obviously, noticing your internal state can give you a time series to match up to things such as diet and exercise time series to see what makes you feel good and what makes you feel crummy an hour or so after eating or exercising.
At a more philosophical level, to the extent you can stand to notice what is going on in all of your senses, and do so, the more complete the range of your experience as a human being. There is a beauty in that.
For annotated links to other posts on diet and health, see: