What if we haven’t unlocked the true potential of our senses because we simply don't pay enough attention to them? 

Writer and filmmaker Jackie Higgins explores human senses by comparing them to their animal counterparts in her book Sentient: How Animals Illuminate the Wonder of Our Human Senses. Spoiler alert: Human senses are far more powerful than we give them credit for, and there’s a lot more than just five. 

Jackie and Greg discuss how culture impacts the way we perceive the world, examples of animals that have similar senses to ours, and certain case studies that show how humans could refine their senses to be much more powerful than previously thought.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

On the two types of touch

19:34: I split touch into two types of touch, two big headings of touch. One of them is the discriminative touch. This idea that you take a walnut and roll it around in your hand. And you can feel its roughness, and you can feel the corrugations, and you can feel the size of it, and you can feel the curves. And if you perhaps put it in your pocket, you can feel your fingers being stretched, the skin being stretched by it. Different senses for discriminative touch will be involved in that. But, there is another sense of touch called affective or emotional touch. And I was expecting touch to be quite a pedestrian story. I thought I knew a lot about touch, and I was completely blown away by how little we know about touch.

Culture's influence on perception

04:02: If your language and culture imbue a certain way to perceive the world, that's as important as the senses in our bodies firing and sending information to our brain.

Do we take our senses for granted until we lose them?

40:54: Our brain is scooting off in other directions. We're rarely present in the sensory information that the world is giving us at that moment in time...And that was part of the message of the book, which is when you take time, time out. I think if we take time out and focus on these senses, they'll surprise you.

The relationship between our brain and smell perception

10:21: Neuroscientists looking at smell would say that the brain is the place where we may have far fewer receptors, a little bit like the shrimp tail; it's a kind of echo of that. But studies have been done on how good we are at fine-dividing sense, recognizing sense, and following sense. Some scientists at your university had some students stand on their knees following a string dipped in chocolate to see how good they were at being dogs, so they were remarkably good. And we have fewer senses, but yes, our brain—there are very many areas in our brain that are dedicated to figuring out and creating smell perceptions.

• The Darkness Manifesto: On Light Pollution, Night Ecology, and the Ancient Rhythms that Sustain Life by Johan Eklöf
• Selig Hecht
• Helen Keller
• Eşref Armağan
• Joseph Kirschvink
• What Is It Like to Be a Bat

• Author’s Profile on Pan Macmillian
• Jackie Higgins Website
• Jackie Higgins on X

• Sentient: How Animals Illuminate the Wonder of Our Human Senses
• Article on Interalia Magazine