Every Day Is Special: five senses

Showing posts with label five senses. Show all posts

April 28 - National Sense of Smell Day

(Last Saturday of April)

Posted on April 28, 2018

Like other animals, we have senses for a few reasons:

To see, hear, or smell danger! That's a biggie.

To see, hear, or smell a potential meal. As in food, fruit, roots, shoots, or perhaps prey to hunt. We modern humans often look for things like carne asada tacos, chicken teriyaki, or In 'n' Out burgers rather than roots or shoots.

To see, hear, or smell a potential mate. We humans often call "a potential mate" something like "my crush," "my girlfriend," "a hot guy in my science class," or a million other variations of "hey, I'm interested."

We humans love to smell things! Like cookies warm out of the oven, freshly cut grass, star jasmine flowers, and cinnamon bread....

But we also hate to smell things. Bad, stinky, disgusting, awful smells, I mean. Like a pile of manure, or rotting fruit, or a camel's breath. Yitch!

Luckily - and unluckily - for us, our noses aren't nearly as sensitive as many other animals' noses. There's a reason we use bloodhounds to help us find missing people - dogs' noses are, on average, from 10,000 to 100,000 times better than ours!

So, that's like comparing us being able to smell a rotten apple in a small, nearby bag of apples to a dog being able to smell a single rotten apple among two million barrels of apples!!!

Here are a few real-world examples of dogs' amazing senses of smell:

A drug sniffing dog was able to detect drugs in a plastic container in the middle of gas tank full of gasoline!!

A dog is able to smell orca poop a mile away in the waters near Seattle, Washington.

A dog trained to smell cancer once smelled cancer cells in a patient that the doctors insisted was cancer free. The doctors respected the cancer-sniffing dog so much, they went ahead and operated - and discovered that the dog was right!

So - we humans are practically blind (smell-wise) compared with dogs. But we can still enjoy and use our sense of smell on this special day! What are your favorite smells?

Also on this date:

National Heroes Day in Barbados

Biological Clock Day

Anniversary of Maryland's statehood

Anniversary of the publication of Sir Isaac Newton's Principia

Astronomer Jan Hendrik Oort's birthday

Planetary geologist Eugene M. Shoemaker's birthday

Astronomer Francis Baily's birthday

Anniversary of the Biggest Sand Castle in the World

Birthday of U.S. President James Monroe

International Table Top Day

(Last Saturday in April)

Eeyore's Birthday Party

Plan ahead:

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And here are my Pinterest boards for:

June 24 – Celebration of the Senses Day

Posted on June 24, 2014

One reason that some books really capture us is that they seem to put us into another world with descriptions of sights, sounds, tastes, smells, and even feelings that we are not actually sensing.

Some of us forget to pay attention to the sensations we ARE actually sensing. Today, try not to take your senses for granted!

Do an experiment. Arrange 5 things for a friend to taste without seeing, and have him or her arrange a blind taste-test for you. Also, try a blind taste-test while holding your nose. Can you tell the difference between a chunk of peeled apple and a chunk of peeled raw potato – with your eyes closed and your nose firmly pinched closed?

Or test your smeller with your eyes closed, or feel things with your hand to see if you can identify them by touch.

Try the memory game with things you see (looking at a tray full of small objects for a full minute, and then trying to write them all down), but then with again with things you hear: Have your friend clap a rhythm, and then you copy it. Have your friend add to the rhythm, one bit at a time, and see how long a sequence of sounds you can remember accurately.

Write a description of a place, using colorful adjectives as well as carefully chosen, specific nouns and verbs. Try describing a crowded beach, an amusement park, a bakery, or a mountain meadow.

Make every meal today a riot of colors and of different textures.

Some people have synesthesia, in which their senses cross over. That means that they can hear colors and see sounds, for example. Use your imagination to decide what each of the rainbow colors would sound like.

Did you know that we have more than five senses? Wikipedia states that, in addition to sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste, we also have a sense of balance and acceleration, a kinesthetic sense of where the various parts of our body are located in relation to the rest (that's why you can touch your nose with your finger even with your eyes closed), a temperature sense, a sense of pain, and a sense of time passing.

(I think that the first four are usually bundled into the “touch” sense, but apparently they shouldn't be?)

I wonder about a sense of direction. Many people seem to feel very strongly which direction is north, and which is east, south, west—even when we are cut off from the sun and moon and other celestial clues. But do we just THINK we have a sense of direction? Has this ever been tested?

More experiments – try to eat food in an unusual way by playing with temperatures and textures. Freeze some grapes and eat them frozen. Color your orange juice brown (with green food coloring) and your lemonade orange; do they taste different? Put your favorite chunky vegetable soup through a blender, then heat and eat – does it still taste as good? Heat some crunchy granola in milk, as if it were oatmeal, and see how hot granola-and-milk stacks up against the cold-cereal version. (Be sure to stir often so that the milk doesn't scald!)