Welcome to Super Senses!
Our sense organs link us with the outside world.
They take in information and send it to the brain. Here it's deciphered and turned into something meaningful.
We communicate through our sense organs - touching, seeing, hearing, tasting and smelling.
http://www.youramazingbrain.org/supersenses/default.htm#
Fun site, Dr. M. I enjoyed this link among many others. Lots of interesting interactive activities at the Amazing Brain sight. In one activity, I voted for the most important sense. I chose touch, then got to see the results of other survey respondents. Most people voted for sight. That doesn't surprise me, as that was my initial thought too, but then I decided touch was slightly more important to me.
Why do you think most people choose sight? Do you think there are gender differences with touch? I think the survey allows you to look at the results by age group and gender. What do you think?
I wonder if Helen Keller would have traded sight or hearing for touch?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Keller
Possibly the reason most people chose site is it is the most obvious answer. We rely heavily on visual cues in our daily activities, and our perceptions seem to tell us that sight is the richest source of information. However, a world without a sense of touch would seem even more disconnected than one without sight - like being a ghost - unable to connect to any of the things you see.
I know it is said that men are more visual. I'm pretty visual, so I'm not sure if that's exactly true, at least for me. But perhaps more women than men would choose sight over touch. But if a man or woman chose sight over touch and then went a month without the ability to feel anything, they might change their mind!
And thus, I highly doubt Helen Keller would have traded her sense of touch. She lived a rich and full existence as evidenced by her wondrously perceptive communications to the world.
I did some of the optical illusion things on this site. I found the answer to the how many legs one to be very interesting. It said that it is a 2D image but out brain tries to turn it into a 3D image automatically even though the image stays flat on the retina of the eye. This really makes me wonder how many things in the world I would see differently using only the retinal image and not what the brain tries to make it.
This site was alot of fun for me. My kids and husband tried out the optical illusions with me and had interesting results with the stroop effect (reading color names in different colors). My husband is dyslexic and could not get through the entire list. My assumtion was his brain works so hard to read it's a much more difficult job to overide the urge to read the word and focus on the color of the text. Lots of interesting stuff and way fun too!
The site talking about pheremones and smell was really interesting. I would like to see more research on this because I have heard that women are attracted to men's sweat and I've heard that men like a peppermint smell. I always wondered what part of the smell triggered these emotions toward people. I can see that certain smells that are good to people make them in a happy mood. Maybe this plays a part in why certain smells trigger specific feelings and emotions?
The part of the website that discussed sense of smell and pheremones particularly intrigued me. I myself own a type of perfume that is based on the wearer's own set of hormones. On myself it smells flowery, while on my friends skin it smells like Dove soap. These are dramatic differences, and it's interesting to apply the perfume to new people and see how their own hormones react to the solution and compare, given that is it same solution on each of us.
I found this whole website to be very interesting. Something that shocked me was an optical illusion in which you stare at a blue dot on a face for 30 seconds and then look at a white wall. I saw every detail on the face and it was pretty amazing. This happened because of the negative after image. This happens when the cells in the eye that detect light become fatigued, so the opposite is shown when you look at something else.