We grow up thinking certain preconceived notions about our bodies. Probe a little deeper and you'll find not everything we were taught is true. Take our senses for example. Think you have only five?
Scientists say there are far more, but disagree on the exact number. Most of those familiar with the matter say there are between 14 and 20, depending on how you define a sense. Perhaps the simplest definition is: a sense is a channel through which your body can observe itself or the outside world.
You're familiar with the big five: vision, hearing, smell, touch, and taste. But have you ever heard of proprioception? If you close your eyes and lift a finger to your nose, you know exactly where it is, without seeing it. Proprioception is our ability to innately tell where our appendages, muscles, and other body parts are in space. You're able to place that finger on the tip of your nose in total darkness, thanks to this sense.
In a 2016 study, published in The New England Journal of Medicine, researchers discovered that those with a certain mutation in gene PIEZO2 had a poor sense of proprioception. The mutation caused weaker than normal mechanosensation in subjects, which is the ability to deliver sensations to the brain. Subjects with this mutation received weaker neuronal signals from their senses to their brains. As a result, they tended to be clumsy and less coordinated.
A good sense of equilibrioception allows humans to display incredible physical capabilities. Rio de Janeiro. Credit: Getty Images.
We don't only need to know where our body is in space, we need to keep it upright. For that we have equilibrioception, which is our sense of balance. This is accomplished with help from the vestibular system in the inner ear. As anyone who as a kid spun around and around on the front lawn knows, once your equilibrioception is thrown off you'll fall down and it'll take you a minute to get back up again.
The vestibular system also gives us the ability to feel velocity. Thanks to it, if you tilt your head left or right, your eyes are still able to focus on this page and read the words there. This is also why some people experience motion sickness. When the signals the brain is getting through sight and the vestibular system don't match, certain people feel queasy. Consider car sickness. When you're riding in a car and you're watching out the window, the scenery streaming by, your eyes send a signal to your brain indicating a rapid velocity. Your vestibular system on the other hand, indicates that your body is stationary. What's interesting is that rather than working in an isolated fashion, scientists find our senses work collaboratively, through a process called multisensory perception.
Scientists theorize that motion sickness is when signals from your eyes and the vestibular system are at odds in your brain. The Autobahn. Credit: Getty Images.
Ever thought about how you can tell whether it's hot or cold outside? This sense is known as thermoception. It turns out we detect outside temperature through thermoreceptors in our skin. This allows us to avoid things like getting burned or frostbitten and to avoid environments that are too hot or cold. Other senses include kinaesthesia, a sense of movement, and chronoception, sensing the passage of time.
If you think these are interesting there are some even more fascinating senses found outside of our species. For instance, there's electroception, which is the ability to sense electrical fields. Sharks use this to detect prey. Another is magnetoreception or the ability to detect magnetic fields. Bats use this to navigate. Stranger still, there are certain bird and insect species that sense and steer their flight by polarized light.
Even those senses we humans are familiar with aren't always so straightforward when you dig a little deeper. At least not for everyone. Consider synesthesia, a rare condition where a person experiences a blending of two senses. The most common variety is grapheme-color synesthesia, which is where each particular number or letter corresponds with a certain color or shade. A rare number of savants actually use this ability to make advancements in mathematics or music composition.
To learn more about the science behind our senses, click here:
'The pursuit of Happiness' is a famous phrase in a famous document, the United States Declaration of Independence (1776). But few know that its author was inspired by an ancient Greek philosopher, Epicurus. Thomas Jefferson considered himself an Epicurean. He probably found the phrase in John Locke, who, like Thomas Hobbes, David Hume and Adam Smith, had also been influenced by Epicurus.
Nowadays, educated English-speaking urbanites might call you an epicure if you complain to a waiter about over-salted soup, and stoical if you don't. In the popular mind, an epicure fine-tunes pleasure, consuming beautifully, while a stoic lives a life of virtue, pleasure sublimated for good. But this doesn't do justice to Epicurus, who came closest of all the ancient philosophers to understanding the challenges of modern secular life.
Epicureanism competed with Stoicism to dominate Greek and Roman culture. Born in 341 BCE, only six years after Plato's death, Epicurus came of age at a good time to achieve influence. He was 18 when Alexander the Great died at the tail end of classical Greece – identified through its collection of independent city-states – and the emergence of the dynastic rule that spread across the Persian Empire. Zeno, who founded Stoicism in Cyprus and later taught it in Athens, lived during the same period. Later, the Roman Stoic Seneca both critiqued Epicurus and quoted him favourably.
Today, these two great contesting philosophies of ancient times have been reduced to attitudes about comfort and pleasure – will you send back the soup or not? That very misunderstanding tells me that Epicurean ideas won, hands down, though bowdlerised, without the full logic of the philosophy. Epicureans were concerned with how people felt. The Stoics focused on a hierarchy of value. If the Stoics had won, stoical would now mean noble and an epicure would be trivial.
Epicureans did focus on seeking pleasure – but they did so much more. They talked as much about reducing pain – and even more about being rational. They were interested in intelligent living, an idea that has evolved in our day to mean knowledgeable consumption. But equating knowing what will make you happiest with knowing the best wine means Epicurus is misunderstood.
The rationality he wedded to democracy relied on science. We now know Epicurus mainly through a poem, De rerum natura, or 'On the Nature of Things', a 7,400 line exposition by the Roman philosopher Lucretius, who lived c250 years after Epicurus. The poem was circulated only among a small number of people of letters until it was said to be rediscovered in the 15th century, when it radically challenged Christianity.
Its principles read as astonishingly modern, down to the physics. In six books, Lucretius states that everything is made of invisible particles, space and time are infinite, nature is an endless experiment, human society began as a battle to survive, there is no afterlife, religions are cruel delusions, and the universe has no clear purpose. The world is material – with a smidgen of free will. How should we live? Rationally, by dropping illusion. False ideas largely make us unhappy. If we minimise the pain they cause, we maximise our pleasure.
Secular moderns are so Epicurean that we might not hear this thunderclap. He didn't stress perfectionism or fine discriminations in pleasure – sending back the soup. He understood what the Buddhists call samsara, the suffering of endless craving. Pleasures are poisoned when we require that they do not end. So, for example, it is natural to enjoy sex, but sex will make you unhappy if you hope to possess your lover for all time.
Epicurus also seems uncannily modern in his attitude to parenting. Children are likely to bring at least as much pain as pleasure, he noted, so you might want to skip it. Modern couples who choose to be 'child-free' fit within the largely Epicurean culture we have today. Does it make sense to tell people to pursue their happiness and then expect them to take on decades of responsibility for other humans? Well, maybe, if you seek meaning. Our idea of meaning is something like the virtue embraced by the Stoics, who claimed it would bring you happiness.
Both the Stoics and the Epicureans understood that some good things are better than others. Thus you necessarily run into choices, and the need to forgo one good to protect or gain another. When you make those choices wisely, you'll be happier. But the Stoics think you'll be acting in line with a grand plan by a just grand designer, and the Epicureans don't.
As secular moderns, we pursue short-term happiness and achieve deeper pleasure in work well done. We seek the esteem of peers. It all makes sense in the light of science, which has documented that happiness for most of us arises from social ties – not the perfect rose garden or a closet of haute couture. Epicurus would not only appreciate the science, but was a big fan of friendship.
The Stoics and Epicureans diverge when it comes to politics. Epicurus thought politics brought only frustration. The Stoics believed that you should engage in politics as virtuously as you can. Here in the US where I live, half the country refrains from voting in non-presidential years, which seems Epicurean at heart.
Yet Epicurus was a democrat. In a garden on the outskirts of Athens, he set up a school scandalously open to women and slaves – a practice that his contemporaries saw as proof of his depravity. When Jefferson advocated education for American slaves, he might have had Epicurus in mind.
I imagine Epicurus would see far more consumption than necessary in my own American life and too little self-discipline. Above all, he wanted us to take responsibility for our choices. Here he is in his Letter to Menoeceus:
For it is not drinking bouts and continuous partying and enjoying boys and women, or consuming fish and the other dainties of an extravagant table, which produce the pleasant life, but sober calculation which searches out the reasons for every choice and avoidance and drives out the opinions which are the source of the greatest turmoil for men's souls.
Do you see the 'pursuit of happiness' as a tough research project and kick yourself when you're glum? You're Epicurean. We think of the Stoics as tougher, but they provided the comfort of faith. Accept your fate, they said. Epicurus said: It's a mess. Be smarter than the rest of them. How modern can you get?
This article was originally published at Aeon and has been republished under Creative Commons. Read the original article.
