This is one of those things that people "know" but don't actually care enough to take action on. "The five senses" is easy to teach in school and has become a turn of phrase meaning "the things we can perceive".

Classifying senses is difficult. Some believe we have six, some believe we have many, some believe different people may have different senses. Some senses that I've read simply described one of the "five" senses being perceived in a slightly different way (the sense of pain is the sense of touch), some extra senses are simply two or more of the "five" senses put together (such as being able to sense when there's someone else in the room).

I'm not a neuroscientist, so I'll just leave it at saying "five senses" is easy to understand and explain for a complex subject that every common man needs to understand. Trying to complicate it further will garner no fruit.

I'm arguing that there are things people need to be aware of but don't necessarily need to know the intimate details of. I know how my car's engine works and I know how to find out what broke when something went wrong, but I don't know (and don't need to know) how to tear down and replace any broken part. For that I take it to my mechanic. He knows how to rebuild an engine, but doesn't know how to set up and run his website. That's where my specialty lies. This isn't ignorance, it's accepting that you can't be an expert at everything. Every bit of information you learn comes with an opportunity cost attached.

The difference between neuroscience and my engine is, people know how the engine was built because someone actually built it. In neuroscience, even the experts don't know how everything works, and it's a matter of much debate. Do you think we should teach this debate to every student in our schools, knowing that the kids aren't going to keep current with that debate as they age and will be running on misinformation the rest of their lives? Or should we teach them what they need to know then give them the tools to learn more as they gain interest in the subject?

Let's teach scientific facts in schools. To quote Wikipedia,

What constitutes a sense is a matter of some debate, leading to difficulties in defining what exactly a sense is.

After reading the wikipedia article, are you still arguing for teaching "the five senses"? Did I not satisfactorily dispel this notion?

When we learn the Bohr atomic model, teachers explain that it is not completely accurate, but a useful starter mental model. Teachers should explain that there are more than 5 senses as well.

I don't know how old you are or in what geographical location you grew up in, but in my elementary school in the Midwest US, we were taught about the five senses. It was left at that. In high school biology, we were taught that everything we learned in elementary was wrong, simplified so it could be taught to hold our attention (a difficult chore with children).

This is where my teacher told us that we had more senses. Sense of pain. Sense of balance. Sense of electricity. I accept that there are more things that can be called senses. I also accept that there may be reason to teach them. However, there are a lot of things taught in schools, and a lot of things that are not. The concept of sense is important to know, but so are a lot of things. My school taught that there may be more senses, so I guess I might be confused by the notion of any educated person not knowing other senses exist. As a simple teaching method (keeping in mind public schools are mandatory and therefor must keep the students attention), "five senses" as an example works for children, and as a turn of phrase for adults. It's up to the educated mind to continue learning, and this is where schools fail.

Teach fact. Teach how to find these facts. Only get into the detail when there is something to be gained. Anything else and you risk losing your student. Like I said originally, people "know" there are more than five senses. The phrase sticks because that's what we learn as a child.

Quick! Were you taught that protons exist? If you answered yes, you're wrong, but many people believe they do, and the real answer is complex, and protons are a "good enough" answer that the entirety of chemistry pays very little attention to anything deeper. So protons and neutrons are still taught, and getting into quarks properly quite often only happens in college-level courses.

Protons don't exist? O.o I thought they were a cluster of quarks with a positive charge O.o. Naming a set of objects as one unit isn't bad.

Were you taught we're made up of cells? If you answered yes, you're wrong, but many people believe they do, and the real answer is complex, and protons are a "good enough" answer blah blah. The reality is much more complicated, with mitochondria and nucleii, etc.

My physics-fu is lacking, but I was also taught that protons are made up of quarks. If a proton is really just a silly term for a collection of quarks then it's not lying, there's just a smaller thing when we break them apart.

I was trying (badly, I admit) to point out that letting possibly over-simplistic answers sit is not equivalent to promoting creationism. Freehunter does much better above.

"proprioception" is one name for the sense of spatial orientation.

Proprioception means you can sense the position of your limbs. That is different that what the inner ear provides. You can be blind, deaf, and paralyzed from the neck down, and you will still be able to know when the airplane is starting to descend, even though you will have lost all proprioception.

As someone who flys with pilots they will tell me "You may think the plane is descending but you don't know the plane is descending until the instruments confirm it" :-) One of the fun things they do is fly various patterns that give your inner ear signals that you are doing one thing when the plane is doing something else, its part of a ritual to always check your instruments.

Anyway the notion of extending sense is interesting, and I wonder if anyone has implanted a hall effect sensor (rather than a magnet) and had the eddy current run to the nerve nexus in a finger tip. You would not be able to pick up paper clips but you should be able to 'feel' all sorts of electro-magnetic phenomena.

Integrating with nerves is have-you-a-pet-surgeon territory, and pretty much all of this stuff is done by piercers, or insane amateurs with no respect for their own bodily integrity (see the amazing Lepht Anonym). Few doctors will touch this stuff, for liability or Hippocratic Oath reasons.

The only people I know who _have_ done it are Dr. and Mrs. Warwick, who used it to do nerve-firing-over-IP from New York to Reading.

And your inner ear is fooled because the gloop in the organ-I-can't-remember-the-name-of suffers from inertia, registering false movements (or false lack of movement). Which is why spinning around in a circle for a while makes you dizzy; your ear is registering the movement continuing, your visual cortex is seeing everything staying still, and your brain has no idea how to integrate the two. ",)

Great submission on that topic: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3144099

I think OP means the vestibular system. Proprioception requires more than balance information, and it's more the sense of knowing where your body parts are relative to each other rather than orientation wrt the external world.