If You Had To Lose One Sense?, Which would it be? Options

[vicrawr]

I'd have to choose hearing. I dunno why.

[Tigersong]

No sense of touch = no sex. Think about it.

He's right. But also, you wouldn't be able to feel pain. That's good in some ways but think of it like this. You'd never feel too cold or too hot again. You could run around outside naked in winter and have a good time. You could also get frost bite and not feel it. Conversely, you could be burning your hand and not know it.

I picked hearing. My hearing isn't the best in the world either, due to some medical reasons. And as of late, I've been wearing ear plugs when I get home from school, so as not to hear the dog crying. I don't miss hearing that much. It's rather interesting. I couldn't go without taste or sight and touch isn't as important, but I think I could stand to be deaf.

Actually, pain is a *different* sense than touch. Believe me, I've spent all week studying Neuroanatomy. THe 5 "traditional" senses are very limited. We have proprioreception (sense of position of the limbs and extremities), sense of uprightness (ie. knowing which way is up and down, and yes, this is a sense modulated by your brain), sense of balance, fine discriminative touch, vibration sense, crude touch, pain, temperature -- and all these senses are modulated by different nerve fibers ascending in the spinal chord in different ways. While most of these last senses are generally just combined into the lump of "sense of touch," neurologically, that's very incorrect.

I was going to say I'd loose my nociorecptive (pain) sense, but then I remembered that disease where people don't have pain, and die very young because they aren't able to determine whether or not they're in pain, whether it be from sitting with their hand on a hot grill for minutes on end and only becoming aware of it when they smell the burning flesh, or cutting themselves repeatedly and not releasing they're bleeding to death because they don't feel any pain. I can remember the statistic, but most don't live past adolescence.

So... probably my sense of taste, or smell. Really probably the least critical. I would hate to loose my hearing, because then I could never hear music again... which would be just... awful. /me sympathesize with what Beethoven must have gone through.