Senses

Myths Adults Believe

Five Senses

> Once I read about this old myth (I never figured it out myself), I started writing out lists of senses.

I'd say that the traditional five senses are more like classes of things than distinct things. Simplifying and lumping together is one of those tools a lot of people use to grok a really complicated universe. I wouldn't call the five senses a myth, but I'd say that confusing it with reality is confusing the map with the territory.

A few of the senses mentioned in that myths post could probably be classed as "body awareness", which is kinda sorta tactile, I suppose. Pretty much every square centimeter of the human form is covered with receptors for some sort of touch. I think touch in its various forms is probably the most powerful and least appreciated sense.

Nobody talks much about the sense of time passing. Mine is very acute. Once when I was trying to learn the guitar as a teen, I was complimented for having great rhythm. I'm pretty sure the hypersensitive time sense helped here.

> If you only speak English, I can give you another common delusion now: words don't sound like you think they do.

For a good chunk of my life, I've had this problem where someone will say one thing and I'll hear something completely different. These are often comical. Epically misheard by Chris is a running gag in my house. I have no idea what causes it, but the takeaway for me is that sometimes I can't trust my own senses.

> Get any native English speaker (I've subjected a few to this experiment), and ask them to write down words as they sound, rather than how we normally write them. Allow them to make new symbols for new sounds. Nothing matters but accuracy.

>

> Everyone fails, no exceptions.

English orthography is a mess, and I've been complaining about it for years. To see how bad it is, one need look no farther than the spelling mistakes of blind folks on the Internet. Sometimes this has terrible consequences.

I worked for a while at a company that sold virtual private servers (VPSes). We had a number of machines running Xen, and one of them had the unfortunate name "leake". To someone using a screen reader and text-to-speech, it is indistinguishable from leak or leek. They all sound the same. Once during a maintenance cycle, someone handed me an ansible playbook to review. Essentially this playbook mailed customers downtime notices, based on a machine inventory. The thing that changed from cycle to cycle was the inventory. I reviewed their changes and signed off on them. Emails went out, but people hosted on leake didn't get a notice. My colleague wrote "leak" and I did not catch it.

> It's all rather confusing.

"For now we see through a glass, darkly" as it were.