Humans have five senses

What actually happened

The five-sense list is roughly 2,400 years old and comes from Aristotle. It survives because it is memorable, not because it is complete.

Consider proprioception: close your eyes and touch your nose. You knew where your hand was without seeing it, using receptors in your muscles and joints. That is a sense, and it is not on the list. Neither is equilibrioception, your vestibular sense of balance, which has a dedicated organ in your inner ear. Nor nociception, the detection of tissue damage, which uses different receptors from touch. Nor thermoception, which distinguishes hot from cold with separate receptor types. Nor interoception, the sense of your internal state that tells you your bladder is full or your heart is racing. Ardem Patapoutian and David Julius shared the 2021 Nobel Prize for identifying the receptors behind temperature and touch, which finally gave the unlisted senses their molecular basis.