The Five Senses

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The Five Senses
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What are the five senses?

• What does a chocolate chip cookie taste like?
• What does an ocean look like?
• What does a skunk smell like?
• What does a stuffed animal feel like?
• What does a bell sound like?

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What are the five senses?

• Taste
• Sight
• Smell
• Touch
• Hearing

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Taste

• Have you ever wondered why sometimes you taste
  something and it can either taste really good or
  really bad? Your tongue and the roof of your
  mouth are covered with thousands of tiny taste
  buds. When you eat something, the saliva in your
  mouth helps break the food down. This provides
  your taste buds with a message to your brain
  telling you what flavors you are tasting. Taste
  buds are the largest part in helping you
  understand which foods you enjoy. Your taste buds
  can recognize four basic kinds of tastes sweet,
  salty, sour, and bitter. The salty/sweet taste
  buds are located near the front of your tongue
  the sour taste buds line the sides of your
  tongue and the bitter taste buds are found at
  the very back of your tongue.

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Taste
Fun Facts We have almost 10,000 taste buds in
our mouths. Insects have the most highly
developed sense of taste. Fish can taste with
their fins and tail as well as their mouth. In
general, girls have more taste buds than
boys. Taste is the weakest of the five senses.

• Everyone has a different taste. In fact, your
  taste buds will even change as you get older.
  When you were a little baby, you had taste buds
  not only on your tongue but also on the sides and
  roof of your mouth. This means that you were very
  sensitive to foods when you were younger. As you
  grow, the those taste buds disappear leaving the
  majority on your tongue. As you get even older,
  you will most likely eat foods that you wouldve
  never touched when you were a kid!
• What if you couldnt taste anything? Certain
  things including medications, smoking, not
  getting enough of the right vitamins, injury to
  the head, brain tumors, chemical exposure, and
  the effects of radiation can cause taste
  disorders.

More information on the sense of
taste http//users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/Bi
ologyPages/T/Taste.html
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Sight

• From the moment you wake up to the time you go to
  sleep, your eyes are like a video camera.
  Everything you look at is sent to your brain for
  processing and storage. Sight is the most complex
  of the five senses.
• Pick an object in the room around you. Do you
  know how you can see it? You are actually seeing
  beams of light bouncing off the object and into
  your eyes. The light rays enter the eye through
  the cornea, which is a thick, transparent
  protective layer on the surface of your eye. The
  light then passes through the pupil (the dark
  circle in the center of your eye) and into the
  lens. If there is too much light, your pupil will
  shrink to limit the number of light rays that
  enter. Also if there is very little light
  available, the pupil will enlarge to let in as
  many light rays as it can. Just behind the pupil
  is the lens which focuses the image through the
  retina. The retina is filled with approximately
  150 million light-sensitive cells called rods and
  cones. Rods identify shapes and work best in dim
  light. Cones on the other hand, identify color
  and work best in bright light. When these cells
  send the image to the brain, the image is upside
  down! The brain has the job of turning the image
  right side up and then to tell you what you are
  looking at.

Click below for a Diagram of the
eye http//www.kidshealth.org/kid/body/eye_SW.htm
l
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Sight
Fun Facts

• Most people blink every 2-10 seconds.
• Every time you blink, you shut your eyes for .3
  seconds, which means your eyes are closed at
  least 30 minutes a day just from blinking.
• If you only had one eye, everything would appear
  two-dimensional.
• Owls can see a mouse moving over 150 feet away
  with light no brighter than a candle.
• The reason cats and dogs eyes glow at night is
  because of silver mirrors in the back of their
  eyes called the tapetum. This makes it easier for
  them to see at night.
• An ostrich has eyes that are two inches across.
  Each eye weights more than the brain.
• A newborn baby sees the world upside down
  because it takes some time for the babys brain
  to learn to turn the picture right-side up.
• One in every twelve males are color blind.

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Smell
The nose knows! Click below to see a diagram of
the nose. http//kidshealth.org/kid/body/nose_noS
W_p2.html

• What makes a smell is something that is too small
  to see with your eyeball alone. Its even too
  small to be seen with a microscope! What you
  smell are tiny things called order particles.
  Millions of them are floating around waiting to
  be sniffed by your nose!

Fun Facts Dogs have 1 million small cells per
nostril and their small cells are 100 times
larger than humans! People who cannot smells
have a condition called Anosmia. If your nose is
at its best, you can tell the difference between
4,000-10,000 smells! As you get older, your
sense of smell gets worse. Children are more
likely to have better sense of smell than their
parents or grandparents.
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Smell

• You smell odors through your nose which is almost
  like a huge cave built to smell, moisten, and
  filter the air you breathe. As you breathe in,
  the air enters through your nostrils which
  contain tiny little hairs that filter all kinds
  of things trying to enter your nose, even BUGS!
  These little hairs are called cilia and you can
  pretend that they sweep all the dirt out of the
  nasal cavity, which is the big place the air
  passes through on its way to the lungs. After it
  passes through the nasal cavity, the air goes
  through a think layer of mucous to the olfactory
  bulb. The smells are then recognized because each
  smell molecule fits into a nerve cell like a lock
  and key. The cells then send signals along the
  olfactory nerve to the brain. Once they hit the
  brain, they are either read as those sweet
  smelling flowers or that stinky skunk.
• Soon your smell will connect with your memory.
  For example, the smell of popcorn may remind you
  of the movies or the smell of flowers may remind
  you of a favorite garden.

Click below to visit a worksheet that can help
you work on Good and Bad Smells
http//www.k12.hi.us/dechong/goodbad.htm
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Touch
http//freda.auyeung.net/5senses/touch.htm Click
above to take a look at the touch sense.

• The other four senses are located to a specific
  body part, but the sense of touch is found all
  over. This happens because touch originates in
  the bottom layer of your skin called the dermis.
  The dermis consists of many tiny nerve endings
  which provides information on what your body
  contacts. They do this by carrying the
  information to the spinal cord, which sends the
  message to the brain.

The nerve endings can help you determine if
something is hot or cold or even if something is
hurting you. Your body has about twenty different
types of nerve endings that send the messages to
the brain. Pain receptors are the most important
for your safety because they can protect you by
warning your brain that your body is hurt!
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Touch

• Some areas are more sensitive than others because
  they have more nerve endings. Have you ever
  bitten your tongue and wondered why it hurt SO
  bad? This happens because the sides of the tongue
  are very sensitive to pain, but not so sensitive
  to hot or cold. That is why it is so easy to
  burn your mouth! Try and stay away from HOT
  foods! Your fingertips are extremely sensitive
  also. Individuals that are blind read using
  Braille by feeling the patterns of raised dots on
  their paper.

Fun Facts You have more pain nerve endings
than any other type.
The least sensitive part of your body is the
middle of your back.
The most sensitive areas of your body are
your hands, lips, face, neck, tongue, fingertips
and feet.
Shivering is a way your body has of trying to
get warmer. There are about 100 touch receptors
in each of your fingertips.
http//www.k12.hi.us/dechong/hotandcold.htm Clic
k above to do a worksheet on HOT AND COLD
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Hearing
Click below to visit the ear! http//freda.auyeung
.net/5senses/hear.htm

• Your ears serve as two very important purposes.
  Your ears help you to hear sounds as well as to
  help your balance.
• When an object makes a noise, it sends vibrations
  into the air. They are then funneled into the ear
  canal. As the vibrations move inward, they hit
  your eardrum and cause that to vibrate as well.
  Once all of the vibrations go through to the
  nerve endings they hit the cilia. The cilia
  change the vibrations into messages that are sent
  to the brain through the auditory nerve. The
  auditory nerve carries the messages from 25,000
  receptors in your ear to your brain. Your brain
  then makes sense of the messages and tells you
  what sounds you are hearing.

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Hearing

• Many people have trouble hearing or cannot hear
  at all. These individuals have to highly rely on
  their other senses in order to function in the
  world around them.

Fun Facts Babies can get earaches because of
milk backing up, which causes bacteria to grow
and may cause hearing problems later in life.
When you go up to high elevations, the change
in pressure causes your ears to pop. Children
have more sensitive ears than adults. They can
recognize a wider variety of noises. Dolphins
have the best sense of hearing among animals.
They are able to hear 14 times better than
humans. Animals hear more sounds than
humans. An earache is caused by too much fluid
putting pressure on your eardrums.
http//www.arches.uga.edu/andrea1/sound.htm
Click above to learn more about you hearing.
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Closing

• More Fun Facts
• Many scientists say we actually have nine senses
  sight, sound, taste, touch, smell, pain,
  balance, thirst, and hunger.
• Hearing, sight, taste, touch, and smell are
  known as our external senses.
• Pain, balance, thirst, and hunger are considered
  as our internal senses.

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Closing

• Our five senses are extremely vital to our
  wellbeing. We may be able to live without one or
  two, but we would have to adapt in order to use
  our other senses in a different manner.