In this challenge try writing your next scene for all five classical senses (touch, taste, smell, hearing, and sight). Consider taking that even further and expand on the senses to cover all possible ways in which we sense the world.

Smell and Taste (two very linked senses) can be expanded into

  • Food heat or pain for hot and spicey
  • Relative mouth temperature
  • sweet
  • sour
  • salty
  • bitter
  • umami

Sight can include

  • light/brightness
  • shadow
  • movement
  • distance / depth perception
  • shape
  • colour
  • texture
  • assumption – what the mind fills in as a shortcut

Touch covers a spectrum which includes

  • Texture
  • Sharpness
  • Pain
  • Surface awareness – foot-based awareness of slope, stability, etc of floor or ground
  • Air movement
  • Resistance
  • Local body temperature estimation relative to body temperature (hot/cold by touch)
  • Relative Ambient Temperature – hot or cold air

Sound is pretty much just detection of air vibration and gives you

  • Direction
  • Distance
  • Pitch
  • Duration
  • Volume
  • Harmonic ratios (yes we can pick those out – we call it music)
  • Echo-based environment awareness (a skill that humans can hone)
  • Ears also give us balance and gravity awareness

A non-sense sense

All of our senses and our memory of a space are combined to create a mental map that is used for our spacial awareness.