ANDRZEJ KRAUZEHaving devoted one issue per year to each of the five basic senses—taste, touch, smell, sight, and hearing—herein you have the something “extra” I promised in my September 2015 editorial: an issue that examines senses beyond those basic five. But how many “extra” senses are there, really?
Tongues, fingers, noses, eyes, and ears are obvious gatherers of sensory information. But other sensory systems are more subtle. Our first feature describes the current state of research on a sense that offers few external clues about how it functions. Proprioception, often referred to as the sixth sense, allows us to process where our limbs are in space and in relation to each other so we can coordinate their movements. “While we have learned a lot in recent years about the peripheral signals responsible for the senses of limb position and movement, the picture continues to evolve. . . . Yet we still know relatively little about the central processing of the incoming information,” write researchers Uwe Proske and Simon Gandevia. They explain their long-term ...
