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What Are The Five Senses

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All vertebrates possess five senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch through which they can experience and make sense of world. Without our senses, we wouldn't have any idea what was going on around us and the human body would be functionally useless. Each of the senses therefore provides important functions and serves an intended purpose. The sense of smell is a chemical sense. It is called chemical sense as it detects the chemicals in the environment and it works on larger distances. The sense of smell is a primal sense for humans as well as animals. From an evolutionary standpoint, it is one of the most ancient of senses. Smell (or Olfaction) allows vertebrates and other organisms with olfactory receptors to identify food, mates, predators, and provides both sensual pleasure (the odor of flowers and perfume) as well as warnings of danger (e.g., spoiled food, chemical dangers). For both humans and animals, it is one of the important means by which our environment communicates with us (John & Leffingwell, 1994)
Smells are the perception of chemicals in the air or in our food. The …show more content…

An odorant acts on more than one receptor, but does so to varying degrees. Similarly, a single receptor interacts with more than one different odorant, though also to varying degrees. Therefore, each odorant has its own pattern of activity, which is set up in the sensory neurons. This pattern of activity is then sent to the olfactory bulb, where other neurons are activated to form a spatial map of the odor. Neural activity created by this stimulation passes to the primary olfactory cortex at the back of the underside, or orbital, part of the frontal lobe. Olfactory information then passes to adjacent parts of the orbital cortex, where the combination of odor and taste information helps create the perception of flavor. (Brain facts

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