Rohan Mahtani
TOK – Sense Perception
From the statistics, we can easily see that people consider the following senses from most important to least important: sight, hearing, taste, touch, smell, and intuition (aka the sixth sense). This data in my opinion makes complete sense, and my options were similar to those, except for taste and touch being out of step.
Sight had the majority of votes in the first preference. There are many reasons for this. Firstly, sight can be used to communicate, it could be a similar ‘replacement’ for touch, as you can see texture, and helps generally to move around. In the class experiment of navigating in the classroom in a zig zag manner, with sight, and no other senses used, one could navigate the easiest. Hearing was considered 2nd preference by many. The most important thing about having hearing is the fact that one can communicate to another. The thought of even having to communicate using sign language seems very difficult. Thirdly, taste; taste is not as important to me as is touch. Taste allows you to enjoy the different varieties of food, to please oneself. Although this is very important, touch would be considered by me as more important because not only can you communicate with touch (putting someone’s hand in another and using signs), but you can also get your way around things, and not bumping into things. This again draws a parallel in the class navigation activity, as touch allowed a quicker navigation around tables, bags, and chairs. The last sense, the sixth sense, is considered least important by a majority. This is probably because no one really knows if the sixth sense even exists. Intuition is right only by chance and is not a very reliable sense, like the others.
