Close your eyes – Well, finish reading this sentence, then close your eyes – and touch your
finger to your nose. Now tap your nose.
Now make a circle with that finger and your thumb.
That was easy,
right? Let’s make it a little more complicated. This time, close your eyes and
clap your hands. (Ignore any friends or family who may be directing concerned
expressions your way.) Still not difficult, was it?
But, why were you able to do that? Your eyes were closed,
so you couldn’t see. You couldn’t hear your hand moving. You weren’t touching
your hand. You weren’t smelling your hand, and you certainly weren’t tasting
your hand, or so I hope.
In short, you were able to touch two moving objects
together without using any of the standard five senses.
This is because your kindergarten teacher lied to you. Humans
actually have a lot more than five senses. We have upwards of fourteen, depending
on how you count them. A few of those are equilibrioception, your sense of up
and down; chronoception, your wonderfully complex sense that reconstructs the
passage of time; thermoception, the sense of temperature that snakes have downto an art; and nociception, the less pleasant but still highly useful sense of
pain.
And that’s only a few of your external senses. You also
have a basketful of internal senses, like the ones that keep your lungs from
splitting and your bladder from bursting.
The one you were just using is called proprioception. Basically,
this is the sense that tells you where all your body parts are in relation to
each other. Without it, we’d end up jamming our forks up our noses every time
we tried to take a bite of something.
I’d still type at the same speed, though…
