Five senses, people have said since Aristotle: sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch. But how are they counted?
The question
Do we really have five senses?
What you do Make the division finer, from three families to thirty-three senses. The body stays the same; only the classification changes.
Without JavaScript, here are the animation’s data.
| Number | Division | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 3 | three broad families: chemical, mechanical, light | 1 |
| 5 | Aristotle’s list | 2 |
| 10 | at least ten commonly accepted senses | 3 |
| 21 | more probably twenty-one | 3 |
| 33 | up to thirty-three, for the finest-grained counts | 3 |
| Sense | What it picks up | Source |
|---|---|---|
| proprioception | knowing where your limbs are without looking at them | 4 |
| interoception | the inside of the body: hunger, thirst, the need to breathe | 5 |
Beyond five, the boxes carry no names: they only show how many senses are counted under each division.
The takeaway Three, five, ten, twenty-one, thirty-three: none of these numbers is wrong. It depends on how we divide up our sensory systems.
Photo credits 5
- The eye in section: engraving from Henry Fox Hewes, Anatomy, Physiology and Hygiene for High Schools, 1900. Henry Fox Hewes, Public domain, source
- The auricle of the ear, outer surface: plate 904 of Gray’s Anatomy, drawn by Henry Vandyke Carter. Henry Vandyke Carter, Public domain, source
- The nasal cavity in section, with the nerves of smell: engraving from Jerome Walker, Anatomy, Physiology and Hygiene, 1900. Jerome Walker, Public domain, source
- The upper surface of the tongue and its papillae: engraving by Henry Vandyke Carter for Gray’s Anatomy, 1860. Henry Vandyke Carter, Public domain, source
- The palm of the hand: engraving from Gray’s Anatomy, 1897 edition. Henry Gray and Henry Vandyke Carter, Public domain, source
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Sources 5
Arney, Kat, “Myth: You have five senses”, The Naked Scientists, 14 March 2017, programme text, passage on the “reductionist” approach.
And if you want to get really reductionist about it all, you could argue that humans have just three senses, based on the kind of input coming into the nervous system - mechanical senses that measure physical changes (which would include touch, hearing and proprioception), light detection, and chemical sensing, which takes in taste, smell and all the sensory inputs that come from chemical signals within the body.
Open access open the source · checked on 27 October 2026
Aristote, De l’âme, livre II, chap. 6-11, et livre III, chap. 1, book III, chapter 1 (424 b 22), first sentence; English translation by J. A. Smith (the MIT page does not show Bekker numbers).
That there is no sixth sense in addition to the five enumerated-sight,hearing, smell, taste, touch-may be established by the following considerations:
Public domain open the source · checked on 27 October 2026
Howes, David, Sensorium: Contextualizing the Senses and Cognition in History and Across Cultures, Cambridge University Press, “Elements in Histories of Emotions and the Senses” series, 2024, excerpt published by the publisher (pp. 1-8), section 1, p. 3.
Sensory scientists will object that the list does not stop at six, that thanks to advances in neurobiology we now know that there are at least ten senses, but more likely twenty-one, and radical estimates put the number as high as thirty-three (Durie 2005).
Open access open the source · checked on 27 October 2026
Betts, J. Gordon et al., Anatomy and Physiology, OpenStax, Rice University, section 14.1, subsections “Structural Receptor Types” and “Sensory Modalities”.
Finally, a proprioceptor is a receptor located near a moving part of the body, such as a muscle, that interprets the positions of the tissues as they move. […] General senses often contribute to the sense of touch, as described above, or to proprioception (body position) and kinesthesia (body movement), or to a visceral sense (sense associated with the internal organs), which is most important to autonomic functions.
Open access open the source · checked on 27 October 2026
National Institutes of Health (NCCIH and participating institutes), “Notice of Special Interest (NOSI): Promoting Research on Interoception and Its Impact on Health and Disease”, NOT-AT-21-002, 22 January 2021, section “Terminology for Interoception Research”.
Interoception includes the processes by which an organism senses, interprets, integrates, and regulates internal signals.
Open access open the source · checked on 27 October 2026