Facts about our Sense Organs and their trustworthiness...

Imagine a world without your sense organs! I am guessing that would be pretty difficult because we do need our sense organs to even do such a thing.

Just as Aristotle pointed out, our five sense organs are what helps us perfect and understand the world around us. They work together and helps us make sense of the things around. But then, sometimes, as our sense organs work together, they can misguiding or deceiving. Before going into that, let us see how our five sense organs work.

The Eyes

The window into our soul as our eyes are fondly called, is one very important sense organ. The eyes gives us the sense of sight and is made up of different parts which work together to send information to be processed or interpreted by the brain.
The different parts include; The Eyelid, our eye protectors with its awesome reflexes protecting us from taking in excess light and other foreign unwanted particles that can cause damage to our eyes. There is also The Sclera, our whitish eye coverage that houses The Cornea. The cornea is what helps to focus light coming into the eyes and together with the Retina and its light sensitive cells (cones and rods), they send an upside down image information to the brain. The brain interprets and turns the image right side up for us to understand what we are seeing. Other functional parts of the eyes also involved in making sure information gets to the brain include; The Iris, with its muscles opening and closing, controlling the amount of light going into The pupil, The lens, Vitreous, The Optic Nerve and the Lacrimal.

The Nose

Another important sense organ is the nose. Since all the sense organs are pretty important, this will be the last time I would use that word. The nose is the organ for smell. The cavity of our nose consists of several mucous membranes. These membranes all contain smell receptors that is entwined into the olfactory nerve. These receptors, although very tiny, can sense different odor molecules that comes in contact with or around your nose.
The smell receptors are stimulated when they sense any odor molecules. This causes them to send signals that is transported through the olfactory epithelium and sent to the brain so you can make sense of what you just inhaled.

The Ears

The ears, the organ responsible for hearing, is divided into three parts; the outer middle and inner ear. The sounds you hear go into the ears as sound waves and these sounds are perceived through the mechanoreceptors. The outer part of the ear is known as the pinna and works as the sound collector. The sound received by the outer ear is passed on to the middle ear which with the help of the ear drum and the Ossicles (anvil, hammer and stirrup) converts the sound waves into vibrations that the inner ear can interpret.
In the inner ear, there is the cochlea which consists of lots of tiny hair cells. The vibrations received by the cochlea causes these tiny hair cells to move and their movement is interpreted by the brain to make sense of what you just heard.

The Tongue

The tongue is one pretty cool sense organ, which is also a muscle in the human body and it is the organ responsible for tasting. The top part is covered with papillae which contains the taste buds. Immediately anything touches your tongue, the chemicals from it reaches your papillae and then it gets to your taste buds. The taste buds, about 10,000 in number, can identify sweet, bitter, umami, salty and sour tastes. Every thing we taste which has different flavors are actually a combination of these five types of tastes together with the sense of smell. This is because they contain different receptors that can relay the ‘taste message’ to the brain for interpretation.

The Skin

The skin gives us the sense of touch and consists of so many nerve endings. These nerve endings are responsible for sending signals to the brain in the form of sensations. These touch sensations are of four types; Cold, Heat, Contact, and Pain. In some parts of the body, such as the fingertips and our sexual organs, the nerve endings are more than other parts. This makes them more sensitive than other parts.

How Trustworthy?

Our Sense organs work together most times to send messages to our brain to interpret. In situations where one is not functional, another one picks up for its weakness. This is seen in heightened sense of hearing for those who are blind.
But then, there are times when these senses collide and give wrong signals to the brain. This can be seen in the McGurk Effect, it explains that sometimes when our brain tries to interpret information from both the eyes and the ears simultaneously, the eyes tend to cause a misinterpretation of the actual sounds being heard. This is known as the ‘Visual-Auditory Crosstalk’. The actual sound being made is different from the sound heard. Funny, this happens involuntarily and even though you know your brain is playing tricks at you, you just cannot control what you are hearing.
Another explanation of our senses being a little deceiving is the integration of the sense of taste and that of smell. The smell of anything consumed highly affects its taste. For example, the taste of an apple and a potato shows no difference when you consume each without perceiving them. Same goes for other foods that has the same texture when chewed.
You could also decide to block out a bitter taste by inhaling the aroma of something sweet while chatting something that tastes sour. Amazing right!?
The awesome ability of our senses to collide and make up for each other’s slackness is what is exploited and used in teaching the blind how to read (Braille), the Tadoma Speech Reading Method, for those who are both blind and deaf and even in playing Blind Baseball.
In conclusion, our senses are pretty special and despite their being misleading sometimes they are very important in our perceiving and understanding the world we live in.

References
Human Sense Organs
How the eyes work
How the nose works
The Ear
How the ear works
How the tongue works
The Skin
Making Sense of our Senses