physorg.com — "In addition to the familiar five senses...scientists know of a sixth sense called proprioception. It's the sense of where your body is in space that allows you to touch your nose even with your eyes closed. Proprioception (PRO-pree-oh-ception) also informs balance and how to put one foot in front of the other to walk without looking at your feet."
Apr 4, 2006 View in Crawl 4
nothingtobedoneApr 4, 2006
I think you misunderstand. there are nerves in your body that directly sense its position (i.e the angles of your joints). If someone sneaks into your room while you are sleeping and moves your arms from being at your sides to being spread away from your body, when you wake up, you will still know what position your arms are in (even though you didnt willfully move them, feel someone touching them, or watch them move) because you can directly sense your body's pose.
quinnkApr 4, 2006
It wouldn't actually be their senses telling them the limb is there. Sensation is the pure intake of external stimuli. Before we become conscious of a sensation, it's fed through various parts of the brain, and can be thought of as interpreted so that it becomes a "perception". There is a large divide between the two, which can be illustrated through a variety of simple tests that you would find in the average introductory psychology text.As alluded to by stomicron, phantom limb sensation is not true sensation at all, but rather is perception, which does not begin with a sensory organ, but with a part of the brain further down the perceptive chain.
syd4111Apr 5, 2006
Everybody knows the 5 senses. Everytime scientists try to add another one (or add another to a commonly held set of things) it's always some unintuitive thing like this. As usual, it's kind of a knock-off of senses we already know about. Everybody know's that the only acceptable sixth sense will be either parapsychological, the ability to see the future, telekinesis, or the ability to see dead people. I'm pushing for that last one.
syd4111Apr 5, 2006
Isn't this called being a douche bag?
06metzpApr 7, 2006
Proprioception is also a song by the band Tourniquet from their 1997 album "Crawl to China"Maybe this is the reason I already knew what proprioception was (looked it up one time because I was curious) but the article just didn't seem terribly interesting to me. no digg. cool song, though.::edit:: "Proprioception" isn't recognized by digg's spellchecker. I just found that interesting. ::/edit::