THE SENSES

MY BODY - THE SENSES

What are senses?

Think about what happens when Mum or Dad tells you that dinner is ready – you can hear them asking you to wash your hands, feel the water and soap against your skin, smell what’s cooking, see your chair at the table and taste the food on your plate. You can do all of that thanks to your senses!

Senses allow us to observe and understand the world around us. There are five main ways we can do this: through sight (with our eyes), touch (with our fingers), smell (with our nose), taste (with our tongue) and hearing (with our ears).

Top 10 facts

1. There are five senses – sight, smell, touch, taste and hearing.
2. Our senses help us to understand what’s happening around us.
3. Our senses send messages through receptor cells to our brain, using our nervous system to deliver that message.
4. There are four kinds of taste receptors on the tongue – bitter, sweet, salt and sour.
5. Some parts of the skin are more sensitive than others – this is because they have more receptor cells.
6. We taste food using both our sense of taste and smell.
7. It’s fun to experiment with your senses – for example, make a chart of what foods taste bitter, sweet, salty and sour.
8. If you cup your hand around your ear, you’ll hear more things – this is because you’re helping your ear gather more sounds.
9. Not everyone is able to use all five of their senses. If someone cannot see, they are blind; if someone cannot hear, they are deaf.
10. We can use all five of our senses at the same time without even realising it!

Did you know?

• Our tongue can have 2,000-8,000 taste buds on it!
• We need our sense of smell in order for our sense of taste to work properly – if you hold your nose shut while you eat, the taste won’t be as strong. It’s why food sometimes tastes plain when we have a cold and our nose is blocked up.
• Most of our ear is in our head – not the bit we can see!
• The part of our ear that we can see helps gather sound waves into our middle and inner ear. If you cup your hard around your ear, you can hear more – why not give it a try?
• Our ears have around 24,000 sensory cells.
• The smallest bone in our bodies is in our ears – it’s called the stirrup.
• The iris and retina inside your eye don’t look like anyone else’s, just like…
• …your fingerprints – nobody else has fingerprints like yours!
• The skin is the largest organ we have – it covers our whole body!
• If someone is not able to see, they are known as blind. They can learn a special way to read books by touching pages to read words made from little bumps in the page – this is called Braille.
• If someone is not able to hear, they are known as deaf. Sign language is a way of talking by using your hands, and this way deaf people can understand what you’re saying.

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Words to know:

Auditory nerve – the nerve in our ear that carries signals to our brain to interpret sound

Brain – the centre of the nervous system; our brain interprets the messages it receives from our senses, and figures out how to act based on that information (for instance, it tells our hand to move away quickly if we touch something that’s too hot)

Cones – receptor cells in our eyes that let us see different colours

Nerve impulses – how messages are sent to our brain to interpret and act on

Nervous system – a network that transmits signals all over our body through special cells called neurons

Olfactory system – the system for our sense of smell

Receptor cells – these respond to stimuli and sends nerve impulses to the brain

Rods – receptor cells in our eyes that interpret black and white, and help us see at night

Sense organs – groups of receptor cells

Stimulus – something that causes a response – for instance, if you touch something that’s too hot, you will immediately move your hand away; the plural of stimulus is stimuli

Taste buds – receptor cells for taste located all over our tongue