Five Senses
What Are the Senses?
When you wake up in the morning do you feel the warmth of your bed,
switch off the alarm, look at the sunlight, listen to sounds in the house and sniff for
breakfast.
All these actions involve your senses. People and animals have five senses: sight,
hearing, smell, touch and taste. They use their senses to receive messages give useful
information such as whether there is danger at hand, if food is available or even if other
people or animals are friendly.
Your Five Senses
Your senses are very important to you. You depend on them every day.
They tell you where you are and what is going on around you.
Try to imagine for a minute that you were suddenly unable to use your senses. Imagine, for
instance, that you are in a cave and your only source of light is a candle. Without
warning, a gust of wind blows out the flame.
This might not be a very pleasant thought, but it helps to show how you depend on your
senses. They are always at work. Your eyes let you read this page. Your nose brings the
scent of dinner cooking. Your hand feels the softness as you stroke a puppy. Your ears
tell you that a storm is approaching.
Your senses also help to keep you from harm. They warn you if you touch something that
will burn you. They keep you from looking at a light that is too bright, and they tell you
if a car is coming up behind you. Each of your senses collects information and sends it as
a message to your brain. The brain is like the control center for your body. It sorts out
the messages sent by your senses and acts on them.
Our senses are the physical means by which all living things see, hear, smell, taste,
and touch. Each sense collects information about the world and detects changes within the
body. Both people and animals get all of their knowledge from their senses, and that is
why our senses are so important.
All senses depend on the working nervous system. Our sense organs start to work when
something stimulates special nerve cells called receptors in a sense organ. We have five
main sense organs. They are the eyes, nose, ears, tongue, and skin. Once stimulated, the
receptors send nerve impulses along sensory nerves to the brain. Your brain then tells you
what the stimulus is. For example, your sound receptors would be bombarded by billions of
sound waves. When these signals reach the part of the brain called the cerebral cortex, we
become conscious of the sounds.
Secret Messengers
Your eyes, ears, tongue, nose, fingers and skin are at work all the
time, picking up information from the world around you. Even as you sleep, they send sense
signals to your brain.
The brain’s wrinkly outer layer is called the cortex. Messages from your tongue, eyes,
ears, nose and skin pass along nerves to special areas of the cortex, each concerned with
a particular sense.
A message travels from your eyes to your brain. The brain then sends signals to the rest
of your body and your mouth starts to water and you feel hungry.
Your brain will grow until you are about 20 years old. The nerve cells will then begin to
die and will not be replaced. Even so, plenty of cells will be left.
You may have heard someone say, “Write about your feelings.” While that is good
advice, it may not be an easy task for every individual. A less threatening place to start
might be with the senses: sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. Using the senses is an
excellent strategy for descriptive writing. Try writing assignments on the following
pages.
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