Think of the fact that a deaf person cannot hear. Then, what deafness may we not all possess? What senses do we lack that we cannot see and cannot hear another world all around us? Frank Herbert
have five senses through which I perceive the state of the environment I live in. The basic purpose of the senses is to aid my survival and have an edge in the evolutionary race and for acquiring resources that are limited.
Having the capacity of stereoscopic vision helps me navigate the environment I live in. It helps me identify food sources and detect potential threats.
The senses I have are neither an outcome of the agency of a designer nor are a random construct.
Along the evolutionary path, no one said that thou should have such and such senses and put their engineering skills to work.
They are not random either in that I did not evolve to develop a sense that is capable of detecting minute changes in gravity along the road as I drive from home to work. There was a reason that it did not happen.
My senses evolved to be sensitive to the carriers of information that are prevalent in the environment I live in.
My eyes have receptors that are sensitive to electromagnetic radiation, and particularly to the wavelengths that dominate Earth’s environment, courtesy of the Sun.
So, why five? Why not one, two, three or why not six or seven? Why not a sensing capability for detecting changes in gravity?
In asking this question, a simple fact that I forget is that the entire human population does not have five senses. Around me, there are citizens who may be deaf, or could be blind, or may not have the sense of smell (remember when having COVID-19 robbed us of the sense of smell and taste). In such cases, an entire dimension of their perception for sensing the the environment is missing.
Even if we have five senses, the range or biology of senses can differ from person to person. Some citizens have the vision but lack the biology to differentiate among colors (color blindness). The range of sound waves different people can hear varies from person to person. Some have a sharper perception for taste and smell (e.g., sommeliers) than others.
For each of us, therefore, the perception of the environment and the world around us differs.
Coming down to my single self, the capacity and range of my senses has been changing as I age. When young, I could not stand the taste of certain things, which is no longer the case. The reason, I have been told, is that my younger self had lots more taste receptors and the explosion of senses I perceived when eating was just overwhelming.
As I get older, slowly I might also lose some capacity related to sense of smell. The thought makes me wonder if the pleasure of wine I perceive now would stay the same.
For that matter, what experience a sommelier gets out of wine is much more different than what I do.
Going beyond the variations that exist within the citizens of the human race, collectively we have missed some carriers of information that exist in the environment we live in.
Take the example of Earth’s magnetic fields. The Earth’s environment is permeated with a magnetic field that can function as a carrier of information. Some birds use that for navigation. We are oblivious to this possibility.
If we had receptors that were able to perceive Earth’s magnetic field, I wonder what capabilities we might have developed. Would we have developed ‘magnetic music’ to wow our sense of magnetic field? Would we have acquired capacity to create wonderful ‘magnetic paintings?’
So, why five?
Having less than five senses when the competition is well adept at using five is easy to argue against — it would be a terrible handicap in the evolutionary race. By now, we would have been extinct.
Having more than five senses would have been beneficial, but natural selection and evolution did not go for developing senses for magnetic or gravitational field. Why?
One reason could be that even though there are carriers of information about the state of the environment beyond what we are sensitive to, the signals are too weak (and will require too much effort) to be discerned and useful.
Another possibility is that incoming information from any more senses than we already possess would have overwhelmed the capacity of the brain.
As such, a small three-pound organ that is brain utilizes about 20% of energy we consume. Neurons, the cells in the brain, communicate through electrical and chemical signals. This process, especially at synapses (the junctions between neurons), requires a lot of energy to maintain and transmit signals. To keep my biological functions going, the brain is constantly working. Like muscles do, however, it has no capacity to store energy, and therefore, has to constantly generate and utilize energy.
I could have developed additional sensory mechanisms but doing so would have overwhelmed the energy requirements of the brain and any added advantage might have negated by additional requirements for energy.
So, here I am. Content with five senses that give me adequate survival advantage. And as a bonus, allow me the pleasure of drinking the glass of red wine that is nestled in my hands.
I may be missing some pleasure that the capacity for sensing magnetic fields might have brought, but I have no way of knowing what those pleasures might have been. What I do not know, I cannot not miss. Can I?
Ciao, and thanks for reading.
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