• partial_accumen
    link
    510 hours ago

    Your teacher was full of shit, but we do have more than 5 senses. You know the taste, touch, smell, hearing, sight. There are two more everyone has:

    Vestibular - sense of balance and movement in space (like falling).

    Proprioception - you can sense where your arms and legs are relative to your body without looking or touch.

    My sister was/is blind and the only superhuman power she had was being fucking annoying.

    There’s blind and there blind. Besides actual damage to the eye itself, most definitions of blind are loss of connection of the optic nerve to the visual cortex (the part of your brain which takes nerve pulses and translates them into vision). However recent science has found that even if there is a break/damage to the visual cortex, there are certain visual things that blind person can “see”. The optic nerve makes a couple of stops along the way from the eye to the visual cortex, specifically the Amygdala in the brain. Many that are “visual cortex” blind can still know where someone’s face is and even determine what mood they are in from their facial expression. They can also sometimes dodge object thrown at them. Both of these are Amygdala actions. Its not like they actually SEE the face or SEE the object being thrown, but they “know” if someone is upset or happy without that person even saying anything if their facial expression tells the story. Here’s the science if you’re interested in more.

    Since reading these studies I’ve always been curious to talk to a blind person to have them describe their experience with this.