OFF THE RECORD

Scientists Discovered 7 Superhuman Senses That You Are Not Aware Of

You use more than five senses in a day. If you are sharp at things, then you are able to use up to 12 senses.

Human senses are more than just hear, sight, touch, smell and taste.

Nobody has taught you that at school; let me teach you now.

1. Ovulation Sense

Man knows when a woman is ovulating and he just senses that and becomes more attracted towards her.

Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin, used already worn T-shirts to determine that men may be able to smell when women are at their most fertile, regardless of the perfumes and cosmetics they may wear.

Devendra Singh, a psychology professor at the University of Texas in Austin, asked women to wear one T-shirt at night during the most fertile phase of their menstrual cycle (13-15 days after their previous period), then wear another T-shirt during the infertile phase of their cycle (days 21 to 22).

After use, Singh presented the T-shirts to a group of men and asked them to rate the smell of the worn garments. Out of the 21 pairs of T-shirts, the men could detect a more “pleasant” or “sexy” T-shirt in 15 pairs of them. That breaks down to 15 of the 42 shirts were considered pleasing, vs. the rest that were considered not pleasing, or not detectable.

Singh concedes, there are a lot of factors that contribute to the attractiveness of a woman to a man. Visual factors perhaps play the greatest part, considering humans are what Singh considers to be “visual animals.” But scent, he suggests, may be equally alluring.

2. Thermoception

“Can you feel something without touching it?”

Yes.

You don’t have to enter the flames in a fireplace to realize that there’s a substantial amount of heat in there.

The same applies to going out on a sunny day. The sun comes out (you know we aren’t touching it), we feel the heat without any physical contact.

We could also feel the sadness of a person in great pain. Our inner being feels very uncomfortable when we hear a person moaning in distress when we can’t do anything about it.

3. Lying Perception

We can tell when a smile is real or fake, and we can also sometimes tell when someone is lying, but it’s a ‘muscle’ we need to work on.

A number of expert human lie detectors have been identified over the last twenty years, none of these experts or “truth wizards” could be described as “naturals.” Most of them developed their lie detection abilities in response to a personal or professional need.

4. Blindsight

Blind people adapt to their blindness and able to know their surroundings. This is known as blindsight.

Blindsight is the ability to respond to visual information without consciously seeing it. Psychologists study blindsight to learn more about how the brain processes visual information. Conscious vision depends on the primary visual cortex; however, people have demonstrated blindsight when this area of their brain is damaged.

This suggests that another area (or areas) of the brain controls unconscious visual perception. Patients who have no conscious awareness of seeing objects have detected them in their path and moved around them. Such patients have also responded to color, emotion expressed by human faces, and motion (for example, supplying correct answers when asked to guess where an object is moving).

Blindsight suggests that sometimes acting on information does not require conscious awareness of that information.

5. Sense of Danger in Ovulation

Every month, women have to go through a range of emotional ups and downs due to the maintenance cycle of their portable baby factories. But it turns out that the menstruation cycle has an added function — it switches on a superhuman ability to sense snakes. And gay dudes.

As much as we would love to end the entry right there, we realize that it probably needs some explanation. In one study, researchers showed a bunch of women pictures of snakes hiding in a garden, both in color and black and white, in what was basically a terrifying Where’s Waldo? What they found was that those women who were in the most fertile period of the month were also the quickest at spotting the hidden snakes.

It probably doesn’t have anything to do with fertile women being able to detect the most phallic animals. The theory is that evolution has given women who are ready to reproduce an added cognitive boost when it comes to detecting danger.

6. Tetrachromats

Researchers suspect that some people see more than the rest. Living among us are people with four cones, who might experience a range of colors invisible to the rest. It’s possible these so-called Tetrachromats see a hundred million colors, with each familiar hue fracturing into a hundred more subtle shades for which there are no names, no paint swatches. And because perceiving color is a personal experience, they would have no way of knowing they see far beyond what we consider the limits of human vision.

Over the course of two decades, Newcastle University neuroscientist Gabriele Jordan and her colleagues have been searching for people endowed with this super-vision. Two years ago, Jordan finally found one. A doctor living in northern England, referred to only as cDa29 in the literature, is the first tetrachromat known to science. She is almost surely not the last.

7. Equilibrioception

Sense of balance or equilibrioception is one of the physiological senses related to balance. It helps prevent humans and animals from falling over when standing or moving. Balance is the result of a number of body systems working together: the eyes (visual system), ears (vestibular system) and the body’s sense of where it is in space (proprioception) ideally need to be intact.

8. Sense of “Fats”

The scientists think there’s a key connection between our sense of smell and the regions of the brain that regulate metabolism, particularly the hypothalamus – we’re more sensitive to smells when we’re hungry, for example. How exactly these systems link to each other still isn’t clear though.

“People with eating disorders sometimes have a hard time controlling how much food they are eating and they have a lot of cravings,” says Riera.

“We think olfactory neurons are very important for controlling pleasure of food and if we have a way to modulate this pathway, we might be able to block cravings in these people and help them with managing their food intake.”

9. Nociception

Potentially damaging mechanical, thermal, and chemical stimuli are detected by nerve endings called nociceptors, which are found in the skin, on internal surfaces such as the periosteum, joint surfaces, and in some internal organs. The concentration of nociceptors varies throughout the body; they are found in greater numbers in the skin than in deep internal surfaces.

10. Proprioception

Proprioception from Latin proprius, meaning “one’s own”, “individual”, and capiocapere, to take or grasp, is the sense of the relative position of one’s own parts of the body and strength of effort being employed in movement.

In humans, it is provided by proprioceptors in skeletal striated muscles and tendons and the fibrous capsules in joints. It is distinguished from exteroception, by which one perceives the outside world, and interoception, by which one perceives pain, hunger, etc., and the movement of internal organs.

11. Magnetoception

Same as birds, we can also detect direction but with less intensity. We can sense magnetic field.

According to Joe Kirschvink, the geophysicist at the California Institute of Technology who is currently testing humans for a magnetic sense, “it’s part of our evolutionary history. Magnetoreception  may be the primal sense.” Read more about it HERE.

12. Sense of Time

According to Ahrens and Sahani, we humans have learned to expect our sensory inputs to change at a particular average rate. They said that comparing the change we see to this average value helps us judge how much time has passed, and refines our internal timekeeping.

Dr Maneesh Sahani said in a 2011 press release about his study:

“There are many proposals for how an internal clock might work, but no one has found a single part of the brain that keeps track of time. It may be that there is no such place, that our perception of time is distributed across the brain and makes use of whatever information is available.”

Click to comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

To Top