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
Arun Kumar
Arun Kumar+ AI
I 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 strive towards having 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. But now that I have the capacity for vision, it also allows me to enjoy the beauty of a rainbow after the rain that has cooled down a sweltering summer day of August. As the enjoyment vision can bring comes at no added price, I gladly accept that gift.
The senses I have are neither an outcome of the agency of a designer nor are random.
Along the evolutionary path, no one said that thou should have such and such senses and put engineering skills to work.
They are not random either in that I did not evolve to develop a sense that is influenced by minute changes in gravity along the road as I drive from home to work. There was a reason for it.
My senses evolved to be sensitive to the carriers of information that dominate 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?
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 of the environment goes 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 (sommelier anyone) than others.
As for each of us the perception of the environment and the world around us differs, we do not even know what we miss. Sure, we can read and hear about other’s experiences, but that is no substitute.
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 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 be the same.
For that matter, what experience a sommelier gets out of wine is much more different than what I do.
Discarding 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 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 to be discerned and useful.
Another possibility is that incoming information from any more senses than we already have 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.
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. 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.
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 (which is not free and has to be competed for).
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 do not miss (with the exception of my eventual death).
Ciao, and thanks for reading.
