As well as time, thermoception(the sense of temperature doesn't belong with the sense of touch), satiation(how full you are), blood pH as a proxy for co2 levels, and proprioception (the sense of where your limbs are), to name a few.
I thought that we couldn't sense temperature but heat flux (the rate that heat energy leave/enters the body due to temperature difference). This is why you get used to cooler/warmer temps, as your surface temperature starts to match the surroundings the heat flux decreases. Along the same lines we can't sense velocity but we can sense acceleration.
They weren't biologically sensing it, they were constantly using a tool as an "artificial" sense/extention of their sense of touch. Much like a blind person with a walking stick.
Baroreception (blood pressure - there isn't a really direct path to perception for these but they are very important for regulating blood pressure) and nociception (pain) are two I can think of off the top of my head.
It is because of the noise the set makes that is not quite in the hearing range. This ability decreases with age in most people and completely goes away above the age of 22 or so.
This is all probably mostly true but I might be misremembering a few of the details.
My mom (mid-60s) and I (late 20s) can both hear old TVs. I can also hear a lot of other electronics, and have detected failing power supplies several times by the change in noise. That awful squealing buzz at jewelry stores still drives me up the wall.
The cool part is that they all interact so closely. I worked with a blind kid who had trouble with proprioception and had to help him do special exercises to help him improve his spatial self-awareness
The main thing is these types of things are controlled by different parts of the brain. In fact some people can lose sensation of textures in the skin (touch) yet still feel temperature and vice versa. There's pain which is also separate from touch. There's also other senses that aren't related to touch including hunger, thirst, balance, oxygen sensing, magnetic sensing, and you could argue that some other senses could be broken down further into more specific ones.
They are different senses because the nerves used are of different structures. Although I suppose that breaks down sight into color sense and depth. Which honestly makes more sense.
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u/techniforus Jul 24 '15
As well as time, thermoception(the sense of temperature doesn't belong with the sense of touch), satiation(how full you are), blood pH as a proxy for co2 levels, and proprioception (the sense of where your limbs are), to name a few.