The Five Senses

Science 8°
 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 you taste
something and it can either taste really good or
Taste 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
More information on
mouth. This means that you were very sensitive to the sense of taste
foods when you were younger. As you grow, the
those taste buds disappear leaving the majority on http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma
your tongue. As you get even older, you will most .ultranet/BiologyPages/T/Taste.
likely eat foods that you would’ve never touched html
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.
  From the moment you wake up to the time you go to sleep,

Sight
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
Click below for a rays as it can. Just behind the pupil is the lens which focuses
Diagram of the eye the image through the retina. The retina is filled with
approximately 150 million light-sensitive cells called rods and
http://www.kidshealth.org/kid cones. Rods identify shapes and work best in dim light. Cones
/body/eye_SW.html 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.
 You smell odors through your nose which is

almost like a huge cave built to smell, moisten, and
Smell 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
Click below to visit the big place the air passes through on it’s way to
a worksheet that can the lungs. After it passes through the nasal cavity,
help you work on the air goes through a think layer of mucous to
Good and Bad Smells the olfactory bulb. The smells are then recognized
because each smell molecule fits into a nerve cell
http://www.k12.hi.us/~dechong/g like a lock and key. The cells then send signals
oodbad.htm 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 The nerve endings can help you determine
information on what your body if something is hot or cold or even if
contacts. They do this by carrying something is hurting you. Your body has
the information to the spinal cord, about twenty different types of nerve
which sends the message to the endings that send the messages to the
brain. brain. Pain receptors are the most
important for your safety because they can
protect you by warning your brain that your
body is hurt!
  Some areas are more sensitive

Touch than others because they have

more nerve endings. Have you
Fun Facts: ever bitten your tongue and
wondered why it hurt SO bad?
*You have more pain nerve
This happens because the sides
endings than any other type.
of the tongue are very sensitive
to pain, but not so sensitive to
*The least sensitive part of your body is the hot or cold. That is why it is so
middle of your back. easy to burn your mouth! Try
*The most sensitive areas of your body are and stay away from HOT foods!
your Your fingertips are extremely
hands, lips, face, neck, tongue, fingertips sensitive also. Individuals that
and are blind read using Braille by
feet. 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
receptors in each of your http://www.k12.hi.us/~dechong/hotandcold.htm
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.
  Many people have trouble hearing
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:

*Babies can get earaches because of milk

backing up, which causes bacteria to grow
and may cause hearing problems later in life.
http://www.arches.uga.edu/~ *When you go up to high elevations, the
andrea1/sound.htm change in pressure causes your ears to pop.
*Children have more sensitive ears than
adults. They can recognize a wider variety of
noises.
Click above to learn *Dolphins have the best sense of hearing
more about you 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.