All the five senses, Sight, Smell, Taste, Hear and Touch are all connected to each other. Without realising it we always experience two or more senses at once.
This diagram shows the networks within our bodies, showing how the sense are linked with each other.
Sight and smell have a strong relationship, before smelling things such as food, plants or perfume we use part of our sense memory which makes us believe we can smell the object already. The mind associates what it can see with a past memory.When we taste food it again combines smell but also touch, ‘as we masticate our food, we process surface texture properties such as the smooth surface of noodles’ (Matlin 1992 p.416). So we associate touch with taste as well as smell. We experience all the senses in order to maximise specific sensations.
The skin represents the largest sensory system we have, Matlin asks ‘Have you ever contemplated what your skin and skin senses can accomplish?’ (1992 p. 367). We don’t realise how much our skin protects us in everyday life. The skin in a protective layer for the rest of the body, however it often gets abused. When we experience pain it is more often than not on the surface of our skin. We feel the slightest change when something lands on our bodies, think about the time you have felt a hair fall onto your arm, of a drop of rain on your face.
The environment around us has many multisensory objects and events, ‘providing correlated and partially redundant information to several senses simultaneously’ (Roberts 2002 p.346) Our senses are on alert at all times, constantly taking in everything around us.
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WORKS CITED
Matlin, Margaret W. and Foley, Hugh J. (1992) Sensation and Perception Massachusetts: Allyn and Bacon
Roberts, David (2002) Signals and Perception The Fundamentals of Human Sensation Oxford: Palgrave Macmillan