Fight!! - Which sense is the best sense

[EVERLAST]

Well it ain't taste. We have a bunch of trolls who come on here with really bad takes on their bad taste.
Like Oil fans and nuck fans ....I mean come on all that = is NG.

[Dion]

[Puppet Guy]

How 'bout sense of humour?

[Pizza]

Originally Posted by coaster

I remember hearing about a teacher posing this question to his class. "If you were only allowed to have 1 sense for the rest of your life, which is the best to have?" It came down to a choice between sight and hearing. The teacher cited a few studies that claimed that long term, hearing was more beneficial to our well being than sight. One of his students didn't go along with this at all, claiming sight was most important, and said he could prove it. "How" asked the teacher. His response "You can't hear tits"

if anything, the student made the best case for the sense, touch

[Cali Panthers Fan]

Equilibrium.

Can't do anything if you don't have a sense of balance in a gravity environment. Vertigo is utterly debilitating.

[Sliver]

Originally Posted by Cali Panthers Fan

Equilibrium.

Can't do anything if you don't have a sense of balance in a gravity environment. Vertigo is utterly debilitating.

Oh man, don't get me going on gravity. I fataing hate it. Always pulling me down. Sometimes I'll get stuck fixating on how the earth is trying to pull me down 24/7 and it drives me crazy.

[GGG]

Originally Posted by Cali Panthers Fan

Equilibrium.

Can't do anything if you don't have a sense of balance in a gravity environment. Vertigo is utterly debilitating.

Is vertigo a loss of a sense or is it a sense not working propely?

A person who requires glasses to see losing their glasses is likely more helpless then a blind person who has built adaptations.

So if you lost equilibrium would vision compensate over time? Would your muscles be able to adjust the force being used based on keeping your vision stable?

My other question is are we counting 5 senses or 9 or even more.

So if we go with nine you “split” touch into

Pain
Balance
Proprioception
Temperature
Touch

It’s clear without proprioception and equilibrium you can’t move and would be the most disabled. So in terms of the classic 5 senses Touch is clearly the most important because every bit of movement is predicated on touch.

But if we split into 9 I think it becomes interesting.

Taste - Adds enjoyment but no longer required to detect nutrition and poison so definitely the least essential for functioning

Smell - Same as taste but more diverse so bigger impact to quality of life but same to function.

Temperature - Mostly can be replaced with pain / vision but you’d probably burn yourself a lot to build up those senses and would be late to realize you injured yourself

Hearing - best replaced of the remaining by technology

Touch - taction I think can be replaced with vision for most part with a high reduction in quality of life but not debilitating

There is a line here I think to where things become debilitating

Equilibrium - I think vision and proprioception may be able to compensate for a lack of equilibrium at least enough to get around in a wheel chair

Vision - Seems like it should be most important as it’s our primary source of input for our consciousness mind however I think the systems that feed our subconscious systems are more important.

Pain - This is significantly Life shortening because you will be unable to know when pushing your body beyond basic limits. You could be an insane runner until you blew up your heart.

Proprioception - if your body doesn’t know where each part of your body is without visually looking at it I don’t believe you could get out of bed. I see no way to compensate for it not being there.

So essentially a lack Proprioception completely debilitates you while a lack of pain likely significantly shortens your life so they are 1 and 2. Then you have the vision and equilibrium. The other 5 I think you can manage.

[photon]

For equilibrium there is some degree of compensation. In my case I'm sure I had some nerve damage as it took me over a week to be able to stand up and get out of the hospital. A month+ to be able to walk around my house without a walker. More than a year before I felt somewhat close to normal and could do normal tasks. I still don't feel the same as I used to 5 years later, I still get momentary instances of spinning or disorientation and am a lot more vulnerable to things that trigger dizziness like rides.

In physio they said it was a lot of the brain relearning the feedbacks from and between the vestibular and vision systems, I had a whole set of exercises designed to help reestablish that.

If you lost the info from the inner ear to the brain completely then yeah I bet you would eventually learn to be able to survive, maybe even walk. At first I could only walk without a walker if my eyes were open.

The other weird thing I had is my ears had to re-learn pitch. After I got out of the hospital I noticed all music sounded terrible. Then I noticed it only sounded terrible if I listened to it with BOTH ears.. either ear sounded fine. After some testing I figured out that my left and right ears were about a semi-tone out of pitch with each other. A C in one ear sounded like a C#. It took weeks to reduce that to somewhat near normal.

I can enjoy most music but some instruments like a piano sound out of tune to me even if they are in tune because there's a lot of component tones and I still think there's a small difference between my ears.

Loss of proprioception might be similar in that is there even a way to lose it entirely without, say, being paralyzed? Impairment would result in a similar relearning process so your brain learns the new feedback patterns.

[D as in David]

Proprioception - I like how CP increases my vocabulary.

Problem is, I like to see how boobs move. If couldn't see them, would I be able to sense their movement?

[TheIronMaiden]

Originally Posted by troutman

Vision seems the most important.

Not being able to see what I eat would be very unappetizing.

[OGmudbone]

Reminds me of this movie..

https://youtu.be/hUQ0aPlaKKU

[Looch City]

Originally Posted by Cali Panthers Fan

Equilibrium.

Can't do anything if you don't have a sense of balance in a gravity environment. Vertigo is utterly debilitating.

And without it, you can’t even gun kata.

[GoinAllTheWay]

Pretty sure I've read we take in 80% of the world around us through sight so to me, that's the most important. Lets be honest, losing any of them would suck but no more watching games, playing games, driving, golf, fising etc..... Much larger loss of independence too.

[CorsiHockeyLeague]

I'm shocked that anyone thinks it's something other than touch.

[woob]

I mean, they'd all take their toll on your happiness eventually if you lost one. Some would just bum you the F out faster than others. I'd likely happily give up my sense of smell/taste to ensure I never lose any others, but if you went from knowing taste to not knowing it, that would grind away at your happiness over time. I can't imagine sitting down to eat the most amazing 5 course dinner and all you get is the visual, texture, temperature, but none of the smell and taste of the experience. Sure it's "less" than not being able to see your meal, but given how much we interact with food daily, it would suck none the less. At that point you might as well get your food through a tube.

Buuut, would it suck less and have less long term impact than losing your vision?

[81MC]

It’s vision, not up for debate.

[D as in David]

Having no sense of irony would suck.

[Charcot]

Empathy

[blender]

Originally Posted by CorsiHockeyLeague

I'm shocked that anyone thinks it's something other than touch.

Have to agree. It would be almost impossible to do anything.

[#-3]

Well the obvious answer is touch, it's the most fundamental of the senses. before you get to photos bumping into stuff and creating a reaction or VOCs triggering nerves, you have the simple process of reacting to something you bump into.

I'm liking the suggestion of proprioception a subtle combination of touch, hearing, and sight. Automatically understanding the size of any physical body under your control and reacting to sub-prescriptible changes in all of the sensory signals you normally receive, allowing one to virtually feel when a body is not providing direct sensory signals.

But my first thought was intuition. Probably the highest order sense, the ability to weigh all of the information available, compare it to experience and make relevant assumptions about the future. Given the unnoticeable delays in all of our other sense, pretty much every reaction we have is based on intuiting the near future. It is definitely the edge we have over gold fish, without that they would eat us alive.