Four Senses Research Paper

To experience the surrounding world, the human body uses biological systems, senses, to interpret external stimuli and form a coherent, tangible view. The senses consist of seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, and tasting, where seeing and hearing are the most crucial. The perception of the world is the brain’s ability to analyze the incoming sensation messages and relay them back; sensation is both the initial messages sent by the nerves and the complete resulting picture created by the brain. The complete picture that humans experience is made up by both the senses and brain but are not experienced directly. Instead, the stimuli created by the senses are translated into electrical impulses, called transduction, that then move to the brain …show more content…
Taste works to increase our hunger for foods that provide energy, while removing hunger for foods that can harm. The tongue can detect six tastes: sweet salty, sour, bitter, piquancy, and umami. These tastes are picked up by taste buds that are able to sense chemicals. In the presence of the chemicals, the taste buds send a neural impulse to the brain. Taste buds are constantly replaced; however, this slows down with age, making a person’s tastes evolve. The tongue also feels the texture of the food shaping the taste. Taste goes hand in hand with smell. Chemicals that enter the body through the nostrils cause the sense of smell. The nostrils contain olfactory receptor cells that contain receptor proteins. The neural messages are sent by the olfactory nerve to the brain when the receptors are stimulated. Each receptor is specialized to a specific smell using a lock and key model. The lock and key model means that a receptor needs a specifically shaped substrate to work. The final sense is touch that are made up of many different receptors. Touch helps with social interactions as well as safety measures. Skin is the major organ used for touch. It holds many nerve endings that send electrical impulses to the brain to create feeling. The nerves receptors respond to pressure, hot, cold, and pain. Pressure has its own receptors, and other sensations are made up of combinations of the four different receptors. The skin provides information for touch, temperature, and proprioception. Proprioception is the knowledge of the movement and position of the body. Special neurons send messages about the movement of the muscles. Balance and the tracking of body movement is created by the vestibular system, fluid in the ears. The fluid is in sac that connect with the cochlea where the movement sends signals to keep the body up right. The feeling of pain is used to