Here goes: a query well outside my comfort zone. Be gentle with me...
Do other animals distinguish between different senses?
My cat seems to use its whiskers, eyes, and ears in unison; and so I wondered if she is in any way distinguishing between the sources of sense-data she is receiving and processing. For example, does she favour sight over smell, or vice versa?
I then wondered if animals, other than humans, do have a general "sense" and whether the five (or so) senses usually posited for humans is actually a human conceit.
(Feel free to tell me to keep to law!)
Do humans distinguish between senses? As synaestheisia demonstrates, senses are more closely connected than might appear at first glance. We distinguish between the senses because they have separate sensory organs. However, the brain does not process their output in such an isolated fashion.
I think that that is especially true when we don't have the time to think and analyse. If you're trying to escape from a dangerous situation you just use your senses, you don't think about which sense to favour. We can think about it when we have the luxury of some time and space to use our higher brain functions. This suggests to me that animals do not have the ability to distinguish between the sources of sense-data.Originally Posted by Mulder
As Jack has mentioned “the five (or so) senses” it is worth noting that we do have more than five, possibly ten depending how you want to count them (sense of balance, temperature, etc). And some animals have extra ones that we don’t (such as the ability to detect magnetic fields).
Interesting question, I have no idea how they'd ever measure that.
Although I will say that my dog definitely has a preference for taste over anything else, or she wouldn't put EVERYTHING in her dang mouth, lol.
It is an interesting question, and I wonder whether some animals use their senses in the same way even if they have similar senses to humans. Our lizards (getting proprietorial now, oh dear) seem to smell with their tongues, though they clearly have noses too ...
Taste and smell are very closely linked - much of what we think as "taste" (especially more subtle flavours) is actually smelling, our taste buds only identify fairly gross differences.
Far from science but I think the animal perceptual world is vastly different. For example my eyes and ears are the main feeders of my attention in terms of where I turn my head but for my dogs I notice the nose is equally if not more so the lead to where attention goes. Walking my dogs I note that smells stop them in their tracks and I know that the areas in their brain given over to smell far exceed our own, making the olfactory world bigger and bolder than I could imagine. It's not just that either, taking sight on it's own my primary recognition is from the face, build, height etc but I've been told that for dogs it'e the way a person moves, their individualised motion pattern. My dogs don't seem to recognise a friend standing still as eagerly as one walking towards them - the latter causing them to pull and strain, the former I know long before they do.
When I used to ride I was always aware that the horse is a prey animal rather than predator, jump first - question later. The way a horse uses eyes and ears is more sweeping and less focused, until there's a perceived threat in which case the focus snaps to absolute and other environmental factors seem to disappear, dodging the crisp packet blowing down the verge but missing the lorry coming from behind.
I'm not sure they distinguish at all between senses, I think that comes from the luxury of pleasuring an individual sense rather than the needs governing survival.
I've known of cats and dogs who were pretty much blind and still lived a more or less normal life, to the extent that you wouldn't know they were blind from their behaviour. This included a border collie (and retired sheepdog) who continued her hobby of chasing cars and nipping at their tyres long after she was completely blind.
If you look at the balance function in humans it might point to the way sense integration works in animals.
Proprioception and balance rely on a hierarchy of data which is compared and processed in the cerebellum. So:
Visual stimulus
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Vestibular stimulus from the semi-circular canals
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Cervico-spinal data
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Stretch and pressure receptors etc
If one piece of the info is missing there's sufficient redundancy to take up the slack. If one piece of the datum is sufficiently different to what the other sources are saying we feel nauseous & disorientated, the so-called proprioceptive mis-match.
So to try to answer Jack's question at any given time there may be a greater emphasis placed on one particular sense over the others but each sense is not interpreted in isolation, but as part of the aggregate of all stimuli.
I could go on about stress/response and central filtering but I'm beginning to bore even myself
Thank you - I wonder if each human society shares the same distinctions between the senses?
I wonder if any human soicety has ever just posited one sense?
As an aside, I don't know if you guys know, but most of your senses are motion detectors. Think about sight. Colour is subjective. It isn’t a real objective property of things in the world. It’s a perception, it’s in your head. Colour is a “quale”, one of the “qualia”, the way things seem. Light doesn’t actually have a colour. It has an energy, an oscillation, a frequency. What it’s got is a motion.
It's similar with sound. Imagine a super-evolved alien bat with a large number of ears, like a fly’s eye. This bat would “see” using sound, and if it was sufficiently advanced it might even see in colour. But we know that sound is pressure waves, and when we look beyond this at the air molecules, we know that sound relies on motion.
Pressure is related to sound, and to touch. You feel it in your ears on a plane, or on your chest if you dive. This pressure of air or water is not some property of the sub-atomic world. It’s a derived effect, and the Kinetic Theory of Gases, tells us that pressure is derived from motion.
In similar vein you can feel kinetic energy. If a cannonball in space travelling at 1000m/s impacted your chest you would feel it for sure. And what you're feeling, is a mass in motion.
You can also feel heat. Touch a hot stove and szzz, you feel heat all right. We talk about heat exchangers and heat flow as if there’s some magical mysterious fluid in there. And yet we know there isn’t. We know that heat is another derived effect of atomic and molecular motion.
Taste is chemical in nature, and somewhat primitive. Most of your sense of taste is in fact your sense of smell. Do you know how smell works? Look up olfaction and you’ll learn about molecular shape. But a theory from a man called Luca Turin says it’s all down to molecular vibration, because isomers smell the same. That’s motion again.
The point of all this is there’s a lot of motion out there, and most of your senses are motion detectors. But most people aren't aware of this. They're too used to thinking about the world in terms of how they experience it, rather than the scientific, empirical, ontological things that are there.
Do you mean that ripe strawberries aren't really red? Or that we can't agree on their colour? Or are you saying something else?
I think Farsight's point was that the light from a strawberry is a particular frequency which is interpreted by most of us as red.
People who are considered colour blind may see the strawberry as a mucky yellow or a pinky colour, depending on the type of colour blindness.
The frequency of this light stays the same, but our interpretation of what we call the colour can differ.
Therefore what you see as "red" may be different to what a dichromat sees. You'll both call it "red" as you have both been taught that the colour of a strawberry is red. The frequency of the light is the same, the interpretation (colour) is not.
Well, until Farsight notices this discussion and replies, I can't say what his answer is.
In the meantime, it may be worth noticing that what makes someone count as a dichromat is the lack of certain cones. By contrast, what makes someone count as colour-blind is the lack of ability to discriminate between certain colours when other cues are absent.
Some people may be considered colour-blind who are not: they may, for example, draw the line between green and blue ( think of turquoise shades) or between red and blue ( think of certain purples or crimsons) in an unusual way. But this a matter of language.
However, the plain fact is that many people who are considered colour-blind are considered colour-blind because they are colour-blind.
Fair point, I probably shouldn't have used the dichromat term there.
I agree that many people are colour blind because they are. My point was, though, that whether or not it is because it is genetic or because of brain/nerve damage or even someone's interpretation of colour, the light frequency is the same. It is just being interpreted differently for whatever reason. Therefore what we call colour is subjective.
I hope Farsight confirms what he meant also.
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