Our Five Human Senses

Jourjine Pascual

Kaplan University – HS120

Our Five Human Senses

Unit 8 Assignment

September 2011

Our senses are the physical means by which all living things see, hear, smell, taste, and touch. Our sense organs (nose, eyes, ears, tongue, and skin) are taking in information and sending it to the brain for processing. If we didn't have them, we would not be able to smell, see, hear, taste, or touch anything. Each sense collects information about the world and detects changes within the body. Both people and animals get all of their knowledge from their senses, and that is why our senses are so important. All senses depend on the working nervous system. Our sense organs start to work when something stimulates special nerve cells called receptors in a sense organ. Once stimulated, the receptors send nerve impulses along sensory nerves to the brain. Your brain then tells you what the stimulus (sense) is.

Our sense of smell deals with smelling particular odors. You smell these 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. These little hairs are called cilia that 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 passing through the nasal cavity, the air passes through a thick layer of mucous to the olfactory bulb. There the smells are recognized because each smell molecule fits into a nerve cell like a lock and key. Then the cells send signals along your olfactory nerve to the brain. At the brain, they are interpreted as those sweet smelling flowers or that moldy cheese. Our sense of smell is connected really well to our memory.

Aside from memory, everything you look at is then sent to your brain for processing and storage much like a video cassette. What you are actually seeing...