Emotion And Our Senses

Our 5 Senses Seem To Operate Independently Of Each Other, But In Reality, They Work Together And Collaborate Closely.

- Abhijeet Satani

We have five distinct modes of perceiving the world with our five senses. These are, namely, sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell. Sometimes one sense slyly influences the other sense, even if we believe the other to be the dominant sense. For example, when visual information clashes with auditory information, we may hear something different than the original sound due to sensory crosstalk. If one sense is non-functional or lacking, the other senses will double up their work to make up for it. Blind people can train their hearing to work overtime. People who are blind and deaf use their sense of touch to understand and interpret speech. Some people have a rare condition known as synesthesia in which the senses clash instead of cooperate and this results in a kaleidoscope world wherein everything is confusing; chicken tastes like triangles and musical symphony smells like baked bread or spoken words are like bright colors.

For collaboration to occur, our senses meet in the brain to give an accurate representation of the world. We are able to observe and identify the emotions of other people based on multiple auditory, visual, and even olfactory cues. Systems of smell, like other perceptual systems, associate with memory and emotion centers so as to allow the cues to trigger and recall memories and feelings (Konnikova, 2012). However, it is evident that the entanglement of these senses often results in the provision of great inspiration for art and inventions, or simply illusions.