Humans are commonly said to have five senses: touch, taste, sight, smell, and hearing. This is such a common paradigm that any time someone seems to have an ability outside those five senses, it’s called a sixth sense. You always seem to be able to guess correctly in games of chance? Sixth sense. You always seem to know which way is north? Sixth sense. Your mom can hear you talking back to her under your breath even though you’re in a different country? Sixth sense.
There are two reasons this isn’t a very good model of human senses. First: everyone knows the real sixth sense is the ability to see dead people. Second: humans have a few more than five senses. Some of these other senses include balance, temperature, itch, pain, and more. Even touch is more nuanced than “I feel stuff when I touch it”.

My favorite sense is proprioception. Proprioception is, put very simply, the ability to sense the position of your body in space (inner space, not outer space, unless you do happen to find yourself in outer space). While reading this you know where your legs and hands are, and how they are positioned, without looking at them. You can (maybe) type on a computer without having to look at your hands while you do it. You usually can’t see your own face, but you know what expression you’re making (you can verify this yourself: think of the last time you were numbed up at the dentist and someone took a picture of you “smiling” as you inadvertently drooled all over yourself). The list goes on and on, and all of it is possible because of proprioception.

The reason it’s my favorite is because it’s one of the most underappreciated senses we have, but also one of the most important. In his book “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat” Oliver Sacks describes a woman who lost her sense of proprioception: she couldn’t walk without looking at her legs and deliberately moving them properly. Her arms would randomly drift around if she wasn’t looking at them, and she had to always look at her hands and fingers to be able to use things. She couldn’t tell what expression her face was making if she wasn’t looking in a mirror (probably leading to some of the most interesting RBF ever).
These may seem more annoying than devastating, but when it comes down to it, any task that you can do without explicitly looking at where your limbs are (cooking, running, shopping, driving, eating, etc.) becomes infinitely harder without proprioception.

Proprioception is more complex than I’ve described it, but hopefully you get a sense of how important it is. Daily life would be nearly unrecognizable without it, yet we take it for granted every day. I’m not saying you should ALWAYS be thinking about how great proprioception is, I’m just saying the next time you find yourself in outer space and you still know where your limbs are, take a moment to be grateful.

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