#Senses August 23

We may earn money or products from the companies mentioned in this post.

The 30 Day Daily #Coach4adayChallenge prompt for today involves the human SENSES. The challenge is which of the five SENSES is your strongest. This doesn’t have to be scientifically proven just what you perceive as your strongest.

Humans have five basic senses: touch, sight, hearing, smell and taste. We all use at least one of our five senses every moment of every day. When we are resting or sleeping our SENSES are still at work.

Strongest Sense

Recently my prescription for vision changed and it really impacted my outlook on my entire day to day experiences. With a corrective prescription my vision dramatically improved and it seemed to elevate all the other SENSES. I was quite certain that improved vision actually was helping my hearing which I perceive as my strongest SENSE.

As I researched this topic I realized that our brains can really humble us on what we perceive we are doing well. We can usually differentiate the sights we see and the sounds we hear. But in some cases, the two can be intertwined. That happens with something called the McGurk Effect occurs.

Here is a quote from the article I read and below that is a video that will make you think about what SENSE is actually your best. It just might be that our SENSES are a gumbo not one individual ingredient.

“During speech perception, our brain integrates information from our ears with that from our eyes. Because this integration happens early in the perceptual process, visual cues influence what we think we are hearing. That is, what we see can actually shape what we “hear.” This visual-auditory crosstalk, which happens every time we perceive speech, becomes obvious in this video of a phenomenon called the McGurk Effect. In this case, despite the fact that you are listening to the same sound (the word “bah”), what you hear depends on which face you are looking at. The effect persists even after you learn about it, so reading about the McGurk Effect won’t spoil it for you.

What SENSE do you believe is your strongest?