Editorial · Issue 1
Why a periodical on the senses should begin with relations, not with a list
At school we learn that there are five senses. Sight shows us shapes and colors, hearing gathers sounds, touch registers contact, taste recognizes flavors, and smell detects odors. It is a simple, memorable, and still useful classification. Yet it risks suggesting a misleading image: that of an individual looking out at the world through five separate windows.
The body also perceives its own position, movement, balance, temperature, pain, hunger, breathing, and heartbeat. Would it then be enough simply to lengthen the list? Should we speak of six, ten, twenty, or thirty senses?
The issue is less arithmetical than it seems. The number changes according to the criterion adopted. We can distinguish the senses by the receptors involved, the neural pathways they use, the objects perceived, the functions they perform, or the form they take in conscious experience. What feels unitary to us may depend on different systems; what we separate for convenience may in fact be closely integrated.
Interoception: One Sense or Many Processes?
Interoception, often presented as the sense of the body’s interior, is not necessarily a single, transparent faculty. Perceiving one’s heartbeat, breathing, visceral tension, or state of satiety requires different processes. Bodily information is also interpreted through expectations, emotions, situations, and prior knowledge. The body sends signals, but their explanation is not already written into them.
The same is true when we turn outward. What we call flavor, for example, does not come from the tongue alone: it emerges from the interaction of taste, retronasal olfaction, temperature, texture, and oral chemesthesis. The appearance of food, the sounds produced during chewing, the words used to present a product, and memories of previous experiences also contribute.
Perception, then, is not the sum of independent streams of information. It means comparing, predicting, correcting, and recognizing.
Language in Perception
Language takes part in this process. We see this especially clearly when we try to name an odor. We may experience it as familiar, connect it with a situation, decide that it is pleasant or unpleasant, and yet still fail to retrieve the corresponding word. The passage from sensation to recognition, and from recognition to naming, is not automatic.
But the senses do not belong only to laboratories. Societies establish hierarchies among what deserves to be seen, heard, or smelled. Languages distribute perceptual vocabulary differently. Literature turns fleeting sensations into shareable forms. Memory links places, people, and events to a voice, a surface, a taste, or an odor. Disgust may protect us from danger, but it can also become a moral judgment directed at other human beings.
The Method of the Periodical
La trama dei sensi begins precisely at these boundaries. It starts from scientific research but does not stop at announcing results. It seeks to reconstruct the original questions, the methods used, the strength of the evidence, and the limitations acknowledged. An experiment conducted on a small group does not carry the same weight as a body of converging studies; a correlation does not necessarily demonstrate causation; a technical possibility is not the same thing as an application already available.
These cautions do not diminish the fascination of research. They free it from the rhetoric of miraculous discovery and restore knowledge to its actual form: provisional, testable, and open to correction.
The first issue begins with an apparently elementary question: how many senses do we have? The answer will not be another list. Through interoception, olfactory language, memory, and multisensory reading, we will instead try to show that every sensation is already a relation: between organism and environment, data and expectation, experience and language.
The senses are not five windows open onto the world. They are the shifting fabric through which the world becomes experience.
From list to fabric: how many senses we have depends on what we decide to count.
