This Will Make You Smarter (2012) - Plot & Excerpts
Smith Director, Institute of Philosophy, School of Advanced Study, University of London; writer and presenter, BBC World Service series The Mysteries of the Brain For far too long, we have labored under a faulty conception of the senses. Ask anyone you know how many senses we have and they will probably say five—unless they start talking to you about a sixth sense. But why pick five? What of the sense of balance provided by the vestibular system, telling you whether you are going up or down in a lift, forward or backward on a train, or side to side on a boat? What about proprioception that gives you a firm sense of where your limbs are when you close your eyes? What about feeling pain, or heat and cold? Are these just part of touch, like feeling velvet or silk? And why think of sensory experiences like seeing, hearing, tasting, touching, and smelling as being produced by a single sense? Contemporary neuroscientists have postulated two visual systems—one responsible for how things look to us, the other for controlling action—that operate independently of each other.
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