Beyond the Sixth Sense

Sight, touch, taste, hearing, smell, and that "ability to see dead people thanks to that 1999 movie starring Bruce Willis and Haley Joel Osment" - these are the senses we are most familiar with. It's interesting to note that after all of these years in existence mankind can only come up with five senses that are found in textbooks. After all, we all have a sense of humor, a sense of reason, a sense of romance, and so on. Some of us make no sense at all.

Why do we only acknowledge five? The short answer is because sight, touch, taste, hearing, and smell have three qualities. First, they can be measured by scientists. Yes, each of those sense have some unit of measurement. Second, they are repeatable - scientists can reliably give a stimulus for the sense and get a response. Third, they require no effort on your part; they just happen automatically. If a sense has those three qualities then it becomes an official sense. This why your sense of humor didn't make the cut: there isn't a unit of measure for it, not all jokes are funny, and if a joke requires too much thinking then it probably wasn't funny anyway.

Is this fair? We've all had that sense of foreboding, that sense that we shouldn't go somewhere or open a door. We've all had a sense of connecting with someone inexplicably. None of these senses require effort; they just happen. Reproducing that sense scientifically is nigh impossible (so far) and coming up with a unit of measure seems just as impossible - however, we all still have this sense. This sense does exist and it isn't acknowledged because science can't wrap its hands around it. Science has more homework to do.