Of the five senses, a majority would miss sight the most.
The sense of smell has been regarded as the least important of the five senses in western culture since at least the writings of Plato [1].
By far the most important organs of sense are our eyes. We perceive up to 80 per cent of all impressions by means of our sight . And if other senses such as taste or smell stop working, it's the eyes that best protect us from danger.
The sense of smell is closely linked with memory, probably more so than any of our other senses. Those with full olfactory function may be able to think of smells that evoke particular memories; the scent of an orchard in blossom conjuring up recollections of a childhood picnic, for example.
About 75% of participants said that they are most scared of losing their sense of vision. About 15% of participants claimed to be most scared of losing their sense of hearing, and 10% their sense of touch.
Biologically this speaks to its primary importance of touch in life, over and above the other senses. In fact, it is the one sense that you cannot live without. When you think about it, that's the one thing every person on this planet has in common: some degree of tactile sensation.
Writing in Palliative Care Perspectives, his guide to palliative care for physicians, he said: “First hunger and then thirst are lost. Speech is lost next, followed by vision. "The last senses to go are usually hearing and touch.”
Sight - Sorry, eyeballs, even though most people consider you the most important sense, you're not high on the list of memory retrieval. Sound - We all love music and we use sound to communicate, but it's actually the worst sense for recalling memories.
The top sense was sight, followed by hearing, smell, taste and then touch. Sight and hearing allow us to sense things from a distance and so were deemed critical for survival, whereas taste and touch require contact. Smell fell somewhere in the middle.
Smells have a stronger link to memory and emotion than any of the other senses. You might have noticed that the smell of grass and rubber cleats can bring back the memory of childhood soccer games in starker detail than watching a home movie of one of those games.
Sight. The third sense is sight (also known as vision), and is created by your brain and a pair of sensory organs—your eyes. Vision is often thought of as the strongest of the senses. That's because humans tend to rely more on sight, rather than hearing or smell, for information about their environment.
One of the reasons that human olfaction is considered the least important of the senses is that smell is associated with weak “post-perceptual processing,” which refers to the ability to imagine a smell when you're no longer smelling it, or to break smell down into units that would allow for you to, say, combine ...
There is a seemingly easy answer to this question: It is because vision is our most important and most complex sense.
But our sense of hearing is remarkably unreliable, say sound psychologists. And since hearing is one out of just five senses we use to perceive the world, that's a little concerning. Or one out of seven if you count proprioception and vestibular sensation — and hey, why not?
The sense of touch protects our body by signalling potential danger and requiring us to make a prompt response.
Your sense of smell enriches your experience of the world around you. Different scents can change your mood, transport you back to a distant memory, and may even help you bond with loved ones. Your ability to smell also plays a key role in your health.
There are also the three "hidden sensory systems," which include the vestibular, proprioception, and interoception systems. These are internal experiences and impact how we experience our bodies.
Hearing is much faster, with a time resolution of just three milliseconds, but touch can only manage 50 milliseconds. Smell and taste are the slowest and can take more than a second to react to a new sensation. Read more: Is sense of humour quantifiable?
Hearing is widely thought to be the last sense to go in the dying process.
Because the olfactory bulb and cortex are so close physically to the hippocampus and amygdala (huge factors in memory retention), smell is considered the strongest and quickest memory inducer.
Elephant has worst shortest memory and dolphin has longest memory in the Animal kingdom.
But scientists think that, as we die, our senses begin to check out. Our sense of smell and taste go, touch and sight disappear. For years, scientists believed hearing was the final sense to go — our last connection to this Earth the voices of our loved ones.
Interoception is the sensory system that helps us assess internal feelings. And increasingly, it's being recognized as the 8th sense along with sight, sound, smell, taste, touch, balance and movement in space (vestibular sense) and body position and sensations in the muscles and joints (proprioceptive sense) .
9. Proprioception. This sense gives you the ability to tell where your body parts are, relative to other body parts.