Monthly Archives: October 2004

Your Sense of Balance The following is excerpted from Black Belt Magazine's article, "The Real Sixth Sense." Balance is controlled by a combination of three senses; the vestibular [system], vision, and proprioception. The sense of up and down is provided by the vestibular system located within the inner ear. It consists of three semicircular hollow [...]

Your Sense of Hearing Ears are for hearing and balance. Both involve complex translations of vibrations into impulses, so the brain can understand them as sound and pressure changes. The following is excerpted from A Primer on Hearing. How sensitive is hearing? Extraordinarily so. The ear can detect a sound wave so small it moves [...]

Your Sense of Touch Our sense of touch may be our most pervasive as it infiltrates every inch of the body, inside and out. The following is excerpted from A Primer on Touch. What does touch do for us? What does it not do might be the easier question, for the sense of touch pervades [...]

Your Sense of Taste The following is excerpted from A Primer on Taste. Tastebuds alone can detect only sweet, sour, salty, and bitter. "If you lick a pink ice cream cone," says Donald Leopold, an otolaryngologist at Hopkins's Bayview Medical Center, "your tongue tells you it's cold and sweet and smooth, but your sense of [...]

Your Sense of Smell The following is excerpted from A Primer on Smell. Smell "gives us information about place, about where we are," says Randall Reed, a well-known Hopkins neuroscientist whose specialty is the sense of smell. And smell tells us about people. "Whether we realize it or not, we collect a lot of information [...]