Taste, like smell, is another sense based on a chemical analysis of material carried from the thing we taste to the taste sensors, small entities found primarily on the tongue. In general, the taste material is comprised of food that has been placed in the mouth, physically broken into smaller components through chewing with the teeth and partially dissolved in saliva. The taste sensors are termed taste buds and are on the order of 10 microns in diameter. The tongue holds approximately 90% of the 10,000 or so taste buds found within the mouth of a normal human.

The sense of taste is rather comparable to the sense of smell and, in fact, the two work in concert. More specifically, the sense of smell has a strong influence on the sense of taste. How something smells is reflected in how it tastes. While the sense of smell can help in the recognition of things at a distance, when coupled with the sense of taste the goal would seem to be the determination of whether something should actually be ingested. Things that our digestive system is going to find impossible to handle, such as decaying material, can generally be detected sufficiently in advance to avoid actually swallowing them. While they may leave a bad taste in our mouths, we at least have the opportunity to dispel them from our mouths and avoid becoming ill, or worse.

An extremely important sense for humans, especially for their mobility, is the detection of balance. It derives from sensory input from the inner ear, from the eyes and perhaps other senses as well. As a composite of these various sensory inputs, it provides to the brain an indicator of orientation of the body. Based on this input, the brain can discern whether the body is positioned upright or is perhaps in a prone position, or somewhere in between. This sense is extremely important to the human sensori-motor experience that establishes the metaphorical basis of our understanding of the world around us. We prefer an up market and we don’t like to feel down.

Other human senses that are sometimes identified reflect in fact the disconnection that can occur between certain aspects of our cognitive functions and our sensori-motor system. Specifically, when we encounter certain mental states, we seek causality for those states outside of our sensori-motor system. One such aspect of this is termed extra-sensory perception. Some people will insist that they have a facility for anticipating the occurrence of physical events, sometimes referred to as pre-cognition. Others claim the ability to cause movement of disconnected objects, termed telekinesis. Such events, while seeming to lack physical cause, fit within the foundations of religious systems that we will begin to consider in the next chapter.

Throughout the course of its evolutionary progression, Homo sapiens has continually benefited from a capability for its constituent members to act in concert. The search for sustenance for the mind and body is a significant impetus for such collective action. While this capability exists within other social species, it is more limited in size and scope. One can speculate that the reason for this limitation is due to the mechanisms through which members of the species interact with one another. As the members of any species become more dispersed, physically, the means of interaction become problematic at best. The basic facility that enables humans to thrive in the face of physical diaspora is the multi-faceted means of communication that the species has evolved.

Humans communicate with others of their kind through all of the sensory channels that we’ve considered above. In their most basic forms, these various channels are used in low bandwidth modes; that is, they convey information at a much lower rate than the respective channels are actually capable of handling. For example, communication via sight consists primarily of signaling and observation of actions or events, until more sophisticated mechanisms like, say, hand gestures, are instituted using the sight input/output channel.

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