More than 5 senses?

[GrandMasterK]

I have no idea if this is the right place, so my bad.

 

I've been working on a story for the last couple of months based on similar world like this with one difference, the ability to use magic. I've been doing research and trying the best I can to have a reason for the magic to work. So it's not tradition magic, I want their to be a science behind it. Well one of the things im going over now is having more then 5 senses and I was hoping for a bit of help. Not only would like help on comming up with new senses, but help on defining if the ability can be considered a sense or not.

 

 

Sensing Motion - And I mean in a way that you can still tell someone is moving around you even if you've lost all of your 5 other senses.

 

Sensing Emotions - Being able to tell if someone is sad or happy without judging their body language and facial expressions.

 

Reading Mind - With this im not sure if you it should be related to sensing emotions or if the two can be respectively seperated. By reading mind I mean, knowing what their thinking and be able to see thier memories.

 

Sensing Life Force - This is where it would respectively cross more over to science fiction. The ability to feel the energy in someones body, the same energy that allows them to use what they call "magic". This would involve being able to detect individual presences, and how much energy they have. Being able to compare to people and sense which one has more energy. Comming up with an excuse or science behind this energy is something I haven't done yet.

 

Seeing the universe - That analogy of being on one side of the earth and seeing what's going on on the other side. Not sure if you could consider that a sense but it seems like it should be considered something different then the way you see with your eyes.

 

Seeing the universe without time - Oracle like power, being able to see not only everything, but everything that ever happened and ever will happen.

 

That's all I got right now, not sure if telepathy should be considered a sense, or if it should be thrown in with mind reading.

 

Thanks for any help or thoughts!

[ecoli]

I have this idea how magic could have science behind it. Just in the explaination behind it, not the application or use of it. I'd tell you what I mean, but I'm afraid you'll steal my idea!!

 

No, I'm not really... it's just late, and I want to go to bed now, so I don't have time to explain it. Tommorow, if possible.

[GrandMasterK]

look forward to hearin from yah.

[Amod]

Seeing the universe - That analogy of being on one side of the earth and seeing what's going on on the other side. Not sure if you could consider that a sense but it seems like it should be considered something different then the way you see with your eyes.

 

Seeing the universe without time - Oracle like power' date=' being able to see not only everything, but everything that ever happened and ever will happen.

 

[/quote']Your answer to this problem is covered by my invention/discovery

under this forum see;the UNIVERSAL BRAIN DISCOVERED.If you are interested to know how it works or interested to help in anyway to enable it to be computerised or mechanised,send me a private message or email me;amodyele@yahoo.com for more information.

[Mokele]

You could just use the Star Trek Technobabble method and just make up stuff that sounds good.

 

Personally, I find it better, when I write, *not* to explain how such things work. First, such explanations are often awkward to work in, especially if complex. Second, how many people on earth know the physics behind a microwave? They just push the button and it works. Same for senses and our physical capabilities. People can figure things out and use them (possibly even very well) without understanding what actually happens. Third, it opens the doors for nit-picking. The way I see it, attempting a real and plausible explanation breaks the suspension of disbelief. The moment the explanation starts, for a subset of your audience, they begin to look at things logically and that can 'break the spell' of the book/story.

 

In fact, in the story that I'm currently working on, one character litterally says "Well, we don't really know how they work, so we just shrug and call it magic."

 

Mokele

[GrandMasterK]

I've givin it quite a long time of thought and decided to have a how behind everything, whether I reveal it or not. Some stuff will be revealed, other stuff will be there to figure out if you want to. It gives people who like the story something to fall in love with other then the massive universe of characters.

 

I don't like to explain things in stories, I like them to just come up in conversations and end up being revealed. My magic users know the how for most of their abilities, just not the why. There is a why, the audience will never know and the characters never truely understand. They sit around and realize things and pick believes themselves just like we do. They have no clue why they can do these things and other people can't, but they know how they can and how other people can't.

 

My biggest problem is this one energy/force allows them to do a large number of different things. For example your casual element powers. Using this energy and force to create fire and being able to use the same thing to create ice while still being limited to how much of it you can use before you become weak. Even more annoying, there's spells and symbols. Like one of the characters uses his finger to burn a symbol into a door and the door becomes virtually impossible to get through. It all has to be tied to the same energy/force. Any ideas or thoughts would be great.

 

They aren't really creating anything, they're just taking that energy and manipulating it using techniques they've been trained to use and they can do a whole bunch of things. They're like Jedis and hogwart students thrown together. There's another aspect to this energy to. It allows them to become stronger and push themselves harder then normal people. One character has a special bench press in his basement and he's doing many reps of 1500lbs. Another speed bursts twice to knock guns out of peoples hands, after the second burst he's deleriously tired though. Not only do they have strong leg muscles so they can jump twice to three times as high as a normal person, they can use their energy to push out under their feet and launch them into the air. There's a difference between strength gained from this energy, and the energy for an instant to do something, like flip a car over, run really fast, or jump really high into the air.

 

Amod im going to go check out your thread now. None of you guys have any other ideas on senses?

[Amod]

Amod im going to go check out your thread now. None of you guys have any other ideas on senses?

GrandMasterK examined it well.Because others are running away from the truth instead of facing it squarely.I am working tirelessly to achieve computerising or mehanising this invention to change the world by making it possible to have knowledge of the past,present and the future in perfection.

[ecoli]

look forward to hearin from yah.

 

Sorry, I kind of forgot about this thread

 

Anyway, here's my idea. the basic premise is based off of the multiverse theory. In the multiverse, each universe is experianceing a different "option" to the way our own universe could be funtioning. So basically, my wizards/magic-users have the ability to "see" what's happening in other universes and use their powers/mind/whatever, to mirror whats happening in other universe in our own. So let's say that ou wizard wanted to tavel to the supermarket, he would just find a univervese identical to our own, except that he is already at the supermarket, he just "copies" that univserse to our own. The more different the universe is from our own, the more power is required to mirror, so a premise of the book could be that an evil wizard is trying to make the universe under his control, etc...

[GrandMasterK]

That's a neat concept, messes with my head though. Seems like when you take it all in, to go into the past or future by going to a different universe makes his cause sort of irrelevant. I'm thinking about the infinite number of universes that spring the instant he leaves his own, one to cover every possible outcome for every instant, then to consider all the universes at a supre similar point in time that he doesn't even exist in. Kind of makes you wonder, what is he saving, what is he not saving and is there a difference? If there is does it matter? What does matter?

 

Room for thought perhaps.

[mischa]

Hello,

 

I can see that this post is five years old, so here's hoping you are still out there. I also gather that you were composing some science fiction - guess it has probably been on the shelves for some time now, but I am quite interested in one of the proposed extra senses you wanted to endow your characters with.

 

Specifically, the one that interests me is the ability to sense emotions without seeing someone's body language. This may be more "science truth" than science fiction. Some years ago there was a New Scientist article explaining that our traditional view of having only 5 senses was bunkum; the article cited 21 senses (i.e. 16 new ones) that have recently been discovered by scientists. If I can find the link to that article, I will forward to you. The 16 new senses listed did not include anything related to emotions, but did include one or more related to motion sensing.

 

I have been thinking about the way we sense emotions for some time, primarily because the traditional view (body language and / or hearing someone's tone of voice) just doesn't add up. I am sensitive to other people's emotions to the point that if strong enough, I start feeling what they feel. One could say that my mind is just trying really hard to be empathic with other individuals, but I don't buy that - after all if someone else is feeling angry, I would hardly want to feel angry myself, just to empahise with them - nor would there be any value in this. There are quite a number of people out there who respond to other people's emotions in this way; they often self-identify as highly sensitive people (HSPs), which refers to a neurological trait, whereby people are born with neurons that "amplify" all signals from their environment somewhat more than the neurons of your average joe.

 

Another thing that contradicts our traditional view of emotions is the way that those on the autistic spectrum are said to have "great difficulty reading body language" so that so called non-verbal cues are difficult or impossible for them to obtain. Again this doesn't correlate with the modern picture of autism; which also centers around hyper-sensitive neurology. If one has hyper sensitive neurons, one should be better than average at observing the fine details in any image and picking out the patterns in it. Surely this would go for body language as well.

 

In 2007, Henry Makram and co. wrote a fascinating scientific paper that posited an entirely new theory of what autism is. They cited a great deal of multi-disciplinary literature to support their theory. The part that is especially relevant to this discussion is their take on the autism/non-verbal cues conundrum: they have suggested people on the autistic spectrum may in fact be much more sensitive to the emotions of others than average - to the point that encountering emotions of any strength in others may send them into sensory overwhelm - at which point they would have to withdraw to recover. Constant withdrawal during interactions with others from early life, would result in a deficit of acquired knowledge about the meaning of emotional signals, plus a natural (protective) aversion to processing such "loud" signals.

 

So, here is the crux of the issue - what if we have another way of sensing the emotions of others, that does not involve sight, hearing, touch, taste or smell?

Amongst the scientific community, there has been a surprisingly small amount of discussion about this. I suspect the reason for this is that many scientists favour maintaining the identity of humans as separate from other animals, whereas the ability to sense other people's emotions as I have described above, is too reminiscent of what may happen in other vertebrates, or worse still (from their perspective) in insects.

 

There are two possible ways in which this "emotion recieving and emotion transmiting" sense could work, according to the small group of people that have ventured into these discussions.

 

Option 1: Chemosensory reception. In this model, we emit emotions into the air as chemicals, and have chemical receptors to receive the chemical signals created by others. This is in fact precisely what happens in insects - and we share far more with insects than it might at first appear. It is the theory that I favour. Those against this theory assume that the sensory organ receiving such chemicals would have to be the vomeronasal organ - and that there is little evidence for the existance of a functional vomeronasal organ in any humans. I think it more likely that chemical reception is more likely to occur via chemo-receptors all over the skin surface (as with the receptors for touch, for instance).

 

Option 2: Electromagnetic waves. In this model, we emit emotions via electromagnetic waves. and have the corresponding capacity to receive signals created in this way as well. While I would not discount this possibility, it is less well developed and there are far fewer parallel examples of this in other organisms. Also, the proponents of this theory thus far tend not to be scientists and also to be fans of ESP - there has been no attempt to look at this in the scientific literature proper.

 

There you have it - we may all be able to sense other people's emotions without involving our traditional 5 senses. I think a blind and deaf person should be able to sense someone's presence in the room (without the aid of any vibrations) - if I am right (that is if one is not feeling any particular emotion - one would probably just emit something described as "presence".

 

Throughout history, we have learnt much about the human body and how it works when the system or organ of interest is absent. I wonder if it will be this way too with this hypothetical sense that detects emotion. Theoretically, some people might be born unable to transmit emotional signals, or transmit them at such a low frequency that they are not picked up by others. Once again I admit personal experience has had a hand in shaping this idea: other people often seem to have trouble knowing that I'm there - giving me space to take my turn in conversations, or physical space etc. There are others that don't seem to have any trouble either detecting or remembering my presence - and I have observed that these people tend to be more sensitive to environmental signals in general.

 

I am curious to know what you and others think about this.

 

Also if you finished your book, did you give your characters this sense in the end, and what did you come up with as an explanation for the way it worked?

 

Mischa

[dragonstar57]

I have no idea if this is the right place, so my bad.

 

 

I've been working on a story for the last couple of months based on similar world like this with one difference, the ability to use magic. I've been doing research and trying the best I can to have a reason for the magic to work. So it's not tradition magic, I want their to be a science behind it. Well one of the things im going over now is having more then 5 senses and I was hoping for a bit of help. Not only would like help on comming up with new senses, but help on defining if the ability can be considered a sense or not.

 

 

 

Sensing Motion - And I mean in a way that you can still tell someone is moving around you even if you've lost all of your 5 other senses.

 

 

Sensing Emotions - Being able to tell if someone is sad or happy without judging their body language and facial expressions.

 

 

Reading Mind - With this im not sure if you it should be related to sensing emotions or if the two can be respectively seperated. By reading mind I mean, knowing what their thinking and be able to see thier memories.

 

 

Sensing Life Force - This is where it would respectively cross more over to science fiction. The ability to feel the energy in someones body, the same energy that allows them to use what they call "magic". This would involve being able to detect individual presences, and how much energy they have. Being able to compare to people and sense which one has more energy. Comming up with an excuse or science behind this energy is something I haven't done yet.

 

 

Seeing the universe - That analogy of being on one side of the earth and seeing what's going on on the other side. Not sure if you could consider that a sense but it seems like it should be considered something different then the way you see with your eyes.

 

 

Seeing the universe without time - Oracle like power, being able to see not only everything, but everything that ever happened and ever will happen.

 

 

That's all I got right now, not sure if telepathy should be considered a sense, or if it should be thrown in with mind reading.

 

 

Thanks for any help or thoughts!

you have to many powers there narrow some of them down some and i would almost suggest get rid of all of them. extrasensory powers aren't normal story powers they're far more powerful. and complicated

to have a believable story with something like this you have to limit the powers of your characters

(i know that's boring but the plot won't work if your character is god)

[lemur]

Why don't you make characters first believe that their perceptions come from supersenses and then have them gradually discover that they are just subconsciously reading body-language and expressions, etc? Then they could be faced with the problem that no one believes that their power is simply due to mindful perception and decides to elevate them to holy status and worship them or persecute them as a witch or something.

Edited January 27, 2011 by lemur