Unit 2: Teamwork Assignment, Team A
Romy Brannen,
Amy Eoff-Stanley,
Kourtney Trehern,
Amanda Basher,
Nathan Palmer,
Debra Lee
General Psychology - 2027
May 15, 2010

Our Five Senses, Vision, Smell, Hearing, Taste, and Touch

The following paper is an explanation of our five senses. How they work and why do we have them. Would a person be able to function if one or more senses were lost? All these questions are answered in following document.
Our entire sensory system consists of numerous amounts of different sensors. The main senses are vision, smell, hearing, taste, and touch. Those senses are important. They play a role in our everyday life. Losing one of these senses could be crucial. Let us start with vision.
The sense of touch gives us information from our surroundings. A network of nerve endings and touch receptors controls it. One of the main receptors is mechanoreceptors that allow our bodies to feel pressure, vibrations, and textures. Next is thermo receptors, it helps us to feel when something is hot or cold. Next are pain receptors, they detect pain. And last is proprioceptors, they help us to dress and feed ourselves. If one of those senses would be lost, for instance our sense of pain, we would not be able to feel if we got hurt, like burning our hand on a stove or even break a bone. With our sense of touch, we are able to feel when something is wrong and when something is okay. (Sense of touch: 2010, www.hometrainingtools.com/article). One of our major senses is sound perception, the sense of hearing. We sense sound with our ears. Vibrations detected in the ear change to electrical signals, and then transmitted by nerves to the brain. There, those signals are processed and recorded. Characteristics of sound include pitch and loudness. You may be wondering how the ear works. The way the ear works is as follows; sound waves vibrate the eardrum, just inside your ear. That sends waves through a fluid inside a narrow tube called the cochlea. That in turn vibrates tiny hairs which are tuned to the different pitches of the sound. Information from the vibration of the hairs stimulates nerves that send the signals to the brain for