Originally posted by Bardock42
I think he means what different things that we can perceive, temperature, acceleration, etc. I assume.I'm not actually knowledgable on the subject so I don't know if it warrants being called different senses or whether it is just our brains capabilities that can compute the data we receive from our senses as such.
thats sort of what I was asking. Vision I know best, so I'll use that, but ya, it works the exact same for "touch", or maybe even better, because there are literally different types of cellular receptors for acceleration, temperature, proprioception, but they are all considered part of the somatosensory system.
In vision, there are basically 3 types of cones and 1 type of rod. Each of these types could be considered a type of visual sense. However, using that same logic, each rod or cone itself would be its own visual system.
"Visual" "auditory" etc, they are all human constructs to group like systems together. If we get even deeper into neuro-architecture, cross-modal sensory areas come into play, and suddenly it is even difficult to tease out related visual and auditory systems.
However, going by what are considered "primary" sensory processing locations in the brain, which are very localized regions of the brain that essentially process only sensory information, we have 4.