We notice what is happening around us with five sense organs: the eyes, ears, nose, tongue and skin.
We see colors and shapes with our eyes, hear sounds with our ears, smell with our nose, taste with our tongue, and feel warm and cold, soft and rough with our skin.
What a sense organ picks up becomes a signal that travels to the brain, and the brain puts the signals together to know "this is an apple".
Pick a sense in the picture and the path joining that organ to the brain stands out.
Our five senses
All five senses sit together because noticing the world is never just one organ's job. You can look at a piece of fruit, smell it, take a bite, and feel the skin with your hand, and those signals meet in the brain as one experience. Memorizing each organ on its own does not help much when a scene uses more than one sense at once. With the five together, the question is which one is working first. If we had no senses at all, there would be no way to notice what is happening around us.
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The paths joining the five sense organs to the brain
Eye — See
The brain is drawn in the middle, and the eye, ear, nose, tongue, and skin sit around it. When you pick a sense with the slider, that organ looks brighter, a solid line runs to the brain, and three dots sit on the line. The other four stay faded, and their lines stay dashed. Those dots mark the path of the signal; they do not travel across the screen. Change the sense and a different path lights up, so you only need to see which route is on.
🌟 From sense organ to brain
①Our body has five sense organs: the eyes, ears, nose, tongue and skin
②The eyes see, the ears hear, the nose smells, the tongue tastes and the skin feels by touch
③What a sense organ picks up becomes a signal that goes to the brain, and the brain makes sense of it
④In the picture only the chosen organ's path is dark, which means that sense is sending its signal to the brain right now
Seeing, hearing and smelling
👀 Eyes: seeing with light
①We can see only when light from an object enters our eyes, so in total darkness we see nothing
②With our eyes we tell colors, shapes, sizes and movement
③In a dark place the pupils grow larger to let in more light
👂 Ears: hearing vibrations
①When an object vibrates, the vibration spreads through the air as sound
②When the vibration reaches our ears, we hear the sound
③We can tell birdsong, a passing car and a friend's voice apart
👃 Nose: smelling
①The smell of flowers or food mixes with the air and comes into the nose
②A tasty smell can make us feel hungry
③A burning smell or the smell of spoiled food can warn us of danger
Tasting and touching
When your nose is stuffed, even food you like can taste dull. The tongue is not broken. It only sorts a few basic tastes, sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and savory, and smell is how you tell one food from another. Flower and food smells come in through the nose, and that is often what makes you hungry. The feeling we call taste is made by the tongue and the nose together.
②Taste buds inside the small bumps on the tongue pick up tastes
③Ice cream is sweet and lemons are sour; food tastes dull with a blocked nose because smell helps taste
✋ Skin: feeling by touch
①The skin tells hot from cold
②It feels soft and rough, hard and squishy
③It also feels pain, which makes us pull our hand away from a hot pot at once
Summary
🎯 The five senses
①Eyes: seeing (light)
②Ears: hearing (sound)
③Nose: smelling
④Tongue: tasting
⑤Skin: touching (texture, temperature, pain)
💡 Remember
①All five sense organs send signals to the brain
②The brain puts the signals together and knows "Oh, it's an apple!"
③Even eating one piece of fruit uses seeing, smelling, tasting and touching together
④Some senses help each other, like the nose and the tongue
The organs that sense the outside world all live in the body. Meaning is attached to those signals in the brain, and that brain sits in the same body as the inner organs you will meet next. If you first see how a sense connects to the brain, it is easier to place what each inner organ does later. Knowing a fruit is a fruit happens on that same inside connection.
Examples and Unit Test
When you work an example, look at the feeling first, seeing, hearing, smell, taste, or touch, before you name the organ. Once the feeling is clear, the organ's name follows. Several senses can overlap in one scene, so the job is to pick only the feeling the question asks about. After you choose, you can check whether that organ's path to the brain lights up in the picture.
Example 1
The eyes, ears, nose, and tongue are each sense organs for feeling what?
1
The eyes are for seeing and the ears are for hearing.
2
The nose is for smelling and the tongue is for tasting.