Download The Five Senses

The Five Senses
What are the five senses?
 What does a chocolate chip cookie taste like?
 What does an ocean look like?
 What does a skunk smell like?
 What does a stuffed animal feel like?
 What does a bell sound like?
What are the five senses?
 Taste
 Sight
 Smell
 Touch
 Hearing
 Have you ever wondered why sometimes
Taste
you taste something and it can either
taste really good or really bad? Your
tongue and the roof of your mouth are
covered with thousands of tiny taste
buds. When you eat something, the
saliva in your mouth helps break the food
down. This provides your taste buds with
a message to your brain telling you what
flavors you are tasting. Taste buds are
the largest part in helping you
understand which foods you enjoy. Your
taste buds can recognize four basic kinds
of tastes: sweet, salty, sour, and bitter.
The salty/sweet taste buds are located
near the front of your tongue; the sour
taste buds line the sides of your tongue;
and the bitter taste buds are found at the
very back of your tongue.
Fun Facts:
Taste
*We have almost 10,000 taste buds in our mouths.
*Insects have the most highly developed sense of taste.
*Fish can taste with their fins and tail as well as their mouth.
*In general, girls have more taste buds than boys.
*Taste is the weakest of the five senses.


Everyone has a different taste. In fact, your taste buds
will even change as you get older. When you were a
little baby, you had taste buds not only on your tongue
but also on the sides and roof of your mouth. This
means that you were very sensitive to foods when you
were younger. As you grow, the those taste buds
disappear leaving the majority on your tongue. As you
get even older, you will most likely eat foods that you
would’ve never touched when you were a kid!
What if you couldn’t taste anything? Certain things
including medications, smoking, not getting enough of
the right vitamins, injury to the head, brain tumors,
chemical exposure, and the effects of radiation can
cause taste disorders.
More information on
the sense of taste
http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma
.ultranet/BiologyPages/T/Taste.
html

Sight

Click below for a
Diagram of the eye
http://www.kidshealth.org/kid
/body/eye_SW.html
From the moment you wake up to the time you go to
sleep, your eyes are like a video camera. Everything
you look at is sent to your brain for processing and
storage. Sight is the most complex of the five senses.
Pick an object in the room around you. Do you know
how you can see it? You are actually seeing beams of
light bouncing off the object and into your eyes. The
light rays enter the eye through the cornea, which is a
thick, transparent protective layer on the surface of
your eye. The light then passes through the pupil (the
dark circle in the center of your eye) and into the lens.
If there is too much light, your pupil will shrink to limit
the number of light rays that enter. Also if there is very
little light available, the pupil will enlarge to let in as
many light rays as it can. Just behind the pupil is the
lens which focuses the image through the retina. The
retina is filled with approximately 150 million lightsensitive cells called rods and cones. Rods identify
shapes and work best in dim light. Cones on the other
hand, identify color and work best in bright light. When
these cells send the image to the brain, the image is
upside down! The brain has the job of turning the
image right side up and then to tell you what you are
looking at.
Sight
Fun Facts:
*Most people blink every 2-10 seconds.
*Every time you blink, you shut your eyes for .3 seconds, which means your
eyes are closed at least 30 minutes a day just from blinking.
*If you only had one eye, everything would appear two-dimensional.
*Owls can see a mouse moving over 150 feet away with light no brighter than a
candle.
*The reason cat’s and dog’s eyes glow at night is because of silver mirrors in
the back of their eyes called the tapetum. This makes it easier for them to
see at night.
*An ostrich has eyes that are two inches across. Each eye weights more than
the brain.
*A newborn baby sees the world upside down because it takes some time for
the baby’s brain to learn to turn the picture right-side up.
*One in every twelve males are color blind.
Smell
The nose knows! Click below to see a
diagram of the nose.
http://kidshealth.org/kid/body/nose_noSW_p2.html

What makes a smell is
something that is too small to
see with your eyeball alone. It’s
even too small to be seen with
a microscope! What you smell
are tiny things called order
particles. Millions of them are
floating around waiting to be
sniffed by your nose!
Fun Facts:
*Dogs have 1 million small cells per nostril and
their small cells are 100 times larger than humans!
*People who cannot smells have a condition called
Anosmia.
*If your nose is at its best, you can tell the
difference between 4,000-10,000 smells!
*As you get older, your sense of smell gets worse.
Children are more likely to have better sense of
smell than their parents or grandparents.
Smell

Click below to visit
a worksheet that can
help you work on
Good and Bad Smells
http://www.k12.hi.us/~dechong/g
oodbad.htm

You smell odors through your nose which is almost
like a huge cave built to smell, moisten, and filter
the air you breathe. As you breathe in, the air
enters through your nostrils which contain tiny little
hairs that filter all kinds of things trying to enter
your nose, even BUGS! These little hairs are called
cilia and you can pretend that they sweep all the
dirt out of the nasal cavity, which is the big place
the air passes through on it’s way to the lungs.
After it passes through the nasal cavity, the air
goes through a think layer of mucous to the
olfactory bulb. The smells are then recognized
because each smell molecule fits into a nerve cell
like a lock and key. The cells then send signals
along the olfactory nerve to the brain. Once they hit
the brain, they are either read as those sweet
smelling flowers or that stinky skunk.
Soon your smell will connect with your memory. For
example, the smell of popcorn may remind you of
the movies or the smell of flowers may remind you
of a favorite garden.
Touch
http://freda.auyeung.net/5senses/touch.htm
Click above to take a look at the touch sense.

The other four senses are
located to a specific body part,
but the sense of touch is found
all over. This happens because
touch originates in the bottom
layer of your skin called the
dermis. The dermis consists of
many tiny nerve endings which
provides information on what
your body contacts. They do
this by carrying the information
to the spinal cord, which sends
the message to the brain.
The nerve endings can help you determine
if something is hot or cold or even if
something is hurting you. Your body has
about twenty different types of nerve
endings that send the messages to the
brain. Pain receptors are the most
important for your safety because they can
protect you by warning your brain that your
body is hurt!

Touch
Fun Facts:
*You have more pain nerve
endings than any other type.
*The least sensitive part of your body is the
middle of your back.
*The most sensitive areas of your body are your
hands, lips, face, neck, tongue, fingertips and
feet.
Some areas are more sensitive than
others because they have more
nerve endings. Have you ever bitten
your tongue and wondered why it
hurt SO bad? This happens because
the sides of the tongue are very
sensitive to pain, but not so sensitive
to hot or cold. That is why it is so
easy to burn your mouth! Try and
stay away from HOT foods! Your
fingertips are extremely sensitive
also. Individuals that are blind read
using Braille by feeling the patterns
of raised dots on their paper.
*Shivering is a way your body
has of trying to get warmer.
*There are about 100 touch
http://www.k12.hi.us/~dechong/hotandcold.htm
receptors in each of your
fingertips.
Click above to do a worksheet on HOT AND COLD
Hearing
Click below to visit the ear!
http://freda.auyeung.net/5senses/hear.htm
 Your ears serve as two very important purposes. Your ears
help you to hear sounds as well as to help your balance.
 When an object makes a noise, it sends vibrations into the
air. They are then funneled into the ear canal. As the
vibrations move inward, they hit your eardrum and cause
that to vibrate as well. Once all of the vibrations go through
to the nerve endings they hit the cilia. The cilia change the
vibrations into messages that are sent to the brain through
the auditory nerve. The auditory nerve carries the
messages from 25,000 receptors in your ear to your brain.
Your brain then makes sense of the messages and tells
you what sounds you are hearing.
Hearing

Many people have trouble
hearing or cannot hear at all.
These individuals have to highly
rely on their other senses in
order to function in the world
around them.
Fun Facts:
http://www.arches.uga.edu/~
andrea1/sound.htm
Click above to learn
more about you hearing.
*Babies can get earaches because of milk backing
up, which causes bacteria to grow and may cause
hearing problems later in life.
*When you go up to high elevations, the change in
pressure causes your ears to pop.
*Children have more sensitive ears than adults.
They can recognize a wider variety of noises.
*Dolphins have the best sense of hearing among
animals. They are able to hear 14 times better than
humans.
*Animals hear more sounds than humans.
*An earache is caused by too much fluid putting
pressure on your eardrums.
Closing
More Fun Facts:
*Many scientists say we actually have nine senses – sight,
sound, taste, touch, smell, pain, balance, thirst, and
hunger.
*Hearing, sight, taste, touch, and smell are known as our
external senses.
*Pain, balance, thirst, and hunger are considered as our
internal senses.
Closing
 Our five senses are extremely vital to our
wellbeing. We may be able to live
without one or two, but we would have to
adapt in order to use our other senses in
a different manner.