Proprioception

Close your eyes. Now, touch your nose.

That’s pretty easy to do, right? Our bodies have an innate ability to find various parts of themselves, with no need to see where anything is. This ability is called proprioception, and it’s sometimes thought of as another sense, just like hearing, seeing, or taste.

You’re thinking: wait a sec, isn’t that just what we think of as a sense of feel? I remember that senses were neatly divided up into five categories when I first learned about how we experience the world directly. Everything, it seemed, could fit into one of these groups.

Rock-solid certainty about numbers was big during the 80s. My personal perception—the message I received from school over 13 years of public education and somewhat more than four years of college—was that science had an awful lot figured out. It seemed as though we hairless apes had solved most of the mysteries of the way things worked, and we enjoyed touting our brilliance by proudly knowing some key numbers, like t…